Originally read at Crit Salon, presented by Saffron Maeve at Tranzac Club in Toronto (October 24, 2025).
I take a 10mg THC gummy and chuckle thinking of the 100mg I took during Evolution of a Filipino Family at the Lightbox in 2017 as I enter Annie Hall at the Carlton with Kelley and this film has a famous false wisdom: love fades. The truth is love cuts. I was going to watch another Diane Keaton movie at the Carlton a year ago, the first Godfather, but instead walked into Notting Hill, which has been critiqued for having too many endings, but isn’t that the truth of love? The paraconsistency, to be both p and non-p, of not knowing if your love is ending or just beginning, and deciding. There’s a theorem of the mathematician Kenneth Kunen who states we must invent new forms of infinity because if we use the same form again and again, it will reabsorb itself and become finite producing a fatal contradiction, a sort of mathematical conjugality. Two lovers are like cinema, two frames produced by the cut of encountering each other, and the two framed perspectives have to go on cutting the world, each cut presenting the present, transforming the frames cut by cut, again and again, where nothing is given, the world re-enchanted, recounted. Annie Hall ends with all the good times Woody Allen and Diane Keaton have together, but a true romance would have this recollection occurring not at the end of a love relationship or a love movie, rather it would happen at the beginning, or always—to begin at recollecting, and adding one more, recollecting, and adding one more—to go plus one after the limit, to continue where there seems nowhere to go, after the ending, and find a better ending, then plus one, and yet a better ending, this is love, this is infinity, this is almost the ending of Notting Hill, not the question of a happy ending, or finding the end, but the end of the end. Love shouldn’t just be found in post; its cut is with us at the beginning. I’m having dinner with Kelley at Tagpuan when Michelle messages me saying “you made me cry”—she’s in Madrid and just finished watching 88:88, which is now 10 years old, at Cineteca, and she hasn’t seen it since 2019. The iMessage flashes in my mind at the Lightbox watching Bellochio’s The Eyes, the Mouth, there’s a moment when Lou Castel sees his own face 10 years earlier in a poster for Bellocchio’s first film Fists in the Pocket, he goes inside the cinema only to hide from the screen, he watches his own film to know how to look away, and this pierces me so deeply I had to rush out of the theatre as soon as the movie finished to avoid any democratic chatter about it. Watching The Passenger on 35mm at the Lightbox inspired me to use my airpods less and take in the sounds of the world; the night before I was on comics and decide to smoke a joint to reactivate the high and that delicious anxiety follows me into the Lightbox and when I enter I am in line for Contempt in Cinema 4 but I am told by the usher that Perfect Days is in Cinema 5 which is slightly more offensive only because I personally think Germany and Japan are among the most overrated when it comes to the national cinemas. I see Kurt, KC, and Nathan, and leave the cinema immediately after the film because I’m overwhelmed by the emotion. Making a movie you don’t want to make, to pay for an apartment to live with someone you’re not in love with, as your medium perishes into commercialism—it’s a one note, one song movie and its lack of nuance is bracing, raw, unassimilated. I catch up with the gang 45 minutes later, and at Chinese food I reveal I lied about having an errand to do after the film. Kurt says he knew I left because it was Contempt. In the Bellochio Lou Castel acts as a dead family member for his mother, but being a dead family member is a very concise definition of being an artist. It means you can say anything about anyone, nothing is off the table, including about yourself. I’m still a little high off last night’s comics and rewatch Kurt Walker’s reconstruction of Jerry Lewis’ The Day the Clown Cried and laugh when Jerry gets his nose caught in the barbed wire of the concentration camp and cry when the guard says not to “mix with the Jews” and Jerry replies “’the Jews’? They’re children”. It is the reconstruction of our dreams because it is a Lewis understood through Godard; every frame counts, all aspect ratios will be used, silence is respected—Kurt created a true treasure that links our generation to the one we looked up to. He uses every extant frame and this links its form to the question of sheltering all surviving materials that witness crimes against humanity. Lewis is an honest artist because his clown is worried about his career trajectory during a genocide and he’s a great artist because he knows reflecting on what his art actually means in the historical moment is one of the only things an artist can actually offer. Went to Antonioni’s Il Grido next day with Kelley at the Lightbox and its ending takes place outside but its sound is clearly recorded indoors making the infinite architecture of interior life’s decisions, its de-scissions, clear cut, a bare hint of the adventure, L’Avventura, to come. A bare hint, because like the hero’s leap to suicide, the leap to a new form can neither be explained before nor after the fact. It is the decision of the pure present, and it’s a decision you make alone. I go to the Gangsterism premiere at the Paradise and sit near the front row and feel alone with the movie. Of course, after the film, someone wants to remind me he exists, over-exists, and bizarrely thinks the film and a recent interview is attacking him, and it’s a perfect example of self-centred white entitlement; he says I’m too romantic putting art above philosophy—in fact I put art, science, politics, and love, all above philosophy, because inventing new truths is a higher infinity than its mere philosophical conceptualization that comes late, if it does at all. Dealing with some ‘philosophers’ is like dealing with the religious right who were hurt by The Last Temptation of Christ; respect their beliefs in their church when you make art, and remember: intellectual commitments never need to be updated, the book is closed. He drunkenly yells saying he can cross-examine me (because he’s a lawyer) and wants to speak to me one on one, in a soundproof room (because he’s a loser), and asks why he has never been in my films (unfortunately untrue) among many, many other unpleasant things, perhaps even a bad infinite of things. This is worse than being rude to me on my birthday since you only get one world premiere per film; a film is a truth you will, it doesn’t simply happen because of the lawful passing of time, and I’m reminded of Scorsese saying people at film parties are worse than anyone he’s dealt with in the streets. I agree, and I say this as someone who had a gun pointed at his face before 8th grade. Alas, in white supremacy I am not a human being with feelings and we must be forgiving and coddle him absolutely, a politesse that props up one side. I have beautiful moviegoing memories of every movie except when it comes to my own, it’s a harsh truth of the filmmaking life, but the joy of thinking with cinema lifelong is worth all the many, many, many, ruined premieres to come. Having a vocation that allows me to live like a child protects me from having a childish bitterness towards the world. With friends like these, I need a new circle—Welles’ screenplay The Cradle Will Rock, flashes in my head: “I console myself with unrequited friendships.” We love Orson for protecting us by being first to every feeling and thus being the most relatable—after all, who hasn’t felt they disappointed people who don’t matter? I meet Bunya for Mo Better Blues at the Revue, the Spike Lee joint I’ve seen the most, but never on 35, and she says she was pleased Denzel Washington didn’t kill himself when he busted his lip unable to play the trumpet, his vocation—I admit that when I saw it as a teenager I hated that the ending had him choose marriage and children when art didn’t work out, but now when Joie says “you want me to save your life because you can’t play” and Denzel admits ”I want you to save my life”, I am moved because in my life the true order of truth is love, art, science, politics, yes, in that order. You’ll make better art if art is second to love, cinema second to life, not only because it’s art’s subject, but because art should be easy, like breathing, what you do in between love. I see Two Lovers on the Bridge at the Revue with Miao and I adore Juliette Binoche’s line that if you dream of someone you should call them when you wake up because it would make life simpler. Waking from a dream is like exiting the cinema when a movie is too close to the real. Cinema is the art that shows there’s a thinking outside of alphabet and language and our terrible obligation of re-entering language can include this outsideness. I try to stay outside as long as I can, like when you go back to sleep to continue the dream. And language is only worth it if it’s to describe what doesn’t exist, or exist yet: movies, dreams, love. Thinking makes non-being exist. So, make the call. I see Kids at Carlton with Kalil, Kurt, Alfio, and I smoke with Kalil and the Proustian rush of the weed before Kids hits because when I was 13 we’d do this all the time, crack-laced, with this movie, and it becomes stronger as Myles, who flew in to watch Gangsterism, and Rayny enter the theatre right before it begins and with the violence against the black person in the park, the crosscutting of Chloë Sevigny’s story with the rest of the gang, and ending in a rape, I realize I was right about my intuition that almost all of Harmony Korine’s films are remakes of Birth of a Nation, in the same way the women wear white masks to kill Gucci Mane and his friends at the end of Spring Breakers, the hooded characters decapitating someone in infrared blackface in Aggro Dr1ft. There was a night I did lines of cocaine every 20 minutes for 4 hours this summer, then I had to meet my younger siblings for brunch, one of them is 14, which was around the age cocaine entered the lives of my friends to use and sell, and Kids reminds me how you always think you look older than you are when you’re young and when you’re older you realize you were even younger then than you thought. In January I went to Yonge-Dundas Cineplex to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button with Zach, Max, Ethan, Ryan, Theresa to my left, Kelley to my right and Kurt another seat over. Benjamin is a metaphor for what? Time passing? Why is time in reverse more clear than forward? The reverse makes us notice the reverse of the reverse. In the shot-reverse-shot, we are neither of the shots, but the reverse itself. Alerted to finitude, the contingency of appearing as backward is a metaphor of itself: one must see life as a metaphor so one’s own passage of time can be properly cognized, to see the uniqueness and abstraction within forward motion itself. Cinema is this metaphor, because nature is not enough. At my cousin’s funeral in Winnipeg I saw all my cousins I haven’t seen since I was a kid, and they had kids, and all their moustaches looked like CGI, I felt like I was 12 again, pretending to be an adult. When you love all the people you love long enough they start looking like charmingly unconvincing CGI, you see through it all. When I saw Diane Keaton on the big screen she felt ghostly because she recently died, and it reminded me of seeing my cousin’s photos on the monitor above her casket this summer. She was 37 and I walk up to her casket and she doesn’t look like herself but is herself, p and non-p, and I sit back down and by the time I’m back in Toronto her image keeps appearing in my head. I understand the Kuleshov effect now. It’s less that we see the same actor’s face, the subject, and then the bowl of soup, an object, signifying hunger, then the same face, then the funeral, signifying sadness, then the same face then the woman on the divan, signifying desire —it’s the opposite: my cousin’s face is the subject that stays the same in my mind and I’m the object changing, getting older, the world changes around her unchanging image, as unchanging as the letters of mathematics, and it will flicker til the end, and I decisively put away my youthful idea of killing myself at 37, I decide to reject a suicide varnish for my work, and instead remember myself now, outside, in life, in the present, posterity is for fools and is a lie, and I decide to make 3 movies a year if necessary if it keeps me on this earth. Cinema is a way to keep going past the ending. At the end of the movie the lights always come up until they don’t and I’m recollecting as we speak.