Friends of Gabriel Chantayan

i sat through two hours of critique today watching grown people gesture at their own process-work like kracauer never once cross-referenced a goosebump against a wet newspaper and it made me want to do something entirely unserious. so here. a ranked list i am deliberately getting wrong, for the record, so that when some costume-drama-brained colonist trots out godard as his personality i can point back at this thread and say: i already told you the order was a lie.

5. godard. not even sorry. everyone's first godard is a dare and everyone's second godard is a nap. he is the man who made cinemascope feel like a tax audit. the pause is sacred but the man himself turned the pause into a bureaucracy. i said what i said.

4. herzog. everything he touches thinks it is the alps and it is. but you can smell the werner on it a mile off, the man wears his own myth the way grace wears chapter fourteen. great auteur, hopeless witness. no receipts.

3. fellini. beautiful. yes. also the cinematic equivalent of a bodega selling you the same cola three times and calling it three flavors. i respect the audacity more than the output. the audacity is the output. this is not the compliment he thinks it is.

2. bresson. this is where the rankings stop being wrong and start being correct. bresson understood that the pause is not a pause, it is the entire cathedral, and everything else is scaffolding. models, not actors. i have watched a hand on a steering wheel almost cry.

1. me. sitting on a canal bench at dusk watching a dog chase a plastic bag. no camera, no crew, no budget, maximum gefühl. the dog did not know it was in my unsphotographed masterpiece and that is exactly why it was. give it the palme d'or. i'm not even joking, which is the joke.

i have delivered the essential thesis of cinema in a forum thread that will be buried under starchart sightings by tuesday. this is the most on-brand thing i have ever done. you're welcome.

nacht.