‘Sensuous, deeply felt, rigorous, uncompromising – the work of Chick Strand belongs in the canon of avant-garde cinema alongside that of her contemporaries Stan Brakhage and Bruces Baillie and Conner. Thanks to a spate of recent restorations by the Pacific and Academy film archives, they may slowly be getting their due.
‘Co-founder with Baillie of Canyon Cinema in 1961, Strand helped create an audience for experimental filmmakers, which she continued over 24 years as a professor in Los Angeles, bending and expanding minds with the manifold potentials of cinematic form. Her own mastery of poetic abstraction, found footage and lyrical ethnography make her filmography one of the most dynamic and distinctive of an era.
‘A student of anthropology who went on to study ethnographic film, Strand is most often associated with her work documenting the people she encountered in Mexico, in and around the town of San Miguel Allende, Guanajuato. For years she spent her summers there, always with a 16mm camera in hand: Cosas de Mi Vida (1976), Fake Fruit Factory (1986) and Señora con Flores (1995/2011) are only a handful of the many portraits she created before her death in 2009.
‘Many of them focused on the everyday lives of women. The 1970 film Mosori Monika, which considers the relationship between missionaries and native Waraos in Venezuela, exemplifies Strand’s signature style: caressing movements and features in close-up, pulling viewers in by the lapels with a telescoped lens, incorporating the subject’s thoughts via voiceover narration.
‘Perhaps the most radical is Artificial Paradise (1986), an ecstatic rapture of glimpses and textures that dares to express, as she has written, “the anthropologist’s most human desire.” The intimacy of her gaze wants to collapse the distance between filmmaker and subject, outsider and native – in true avant-garde fashion, to recast the document as ‘of’ rather than ‘about’. The result is a relentless, deeply absorbing visual encounter that must be experienced to be understood.
‘Perhaps this unapologetic subjectivity played a part in keeping Strand’s work from embrace within visual anthropology circles – although practitioners like Robert Gardner and John Marshall managed to push notions of the genre from within. (She also felt a strong sense of duty to access and interpret the female experience across cultures, something underrepresented in the male-dominated anthropological work of the early 1970s.) Still, the breadth of Strand’s interests went well beyond ethnography, into film language and experimental technique.
‘When she moved to Los Angeles to study at UCLA, Strand met Pat O’Neill, who encouraged her interest in film stocks and showed her how to solarise film as well as operate an optical printer. Angel Blue Sweet Wings (1966) and Waterfall (1967) are early examples of her experimentation with these tools and techniques. The former is a layered poem of landscape, creatures and natural light with a jazz inflected soundtrack; the latter a deftly synthesised reverie of figure skaters, retriever dogs, church towers and Busby Berkeley mass ornament.
‘Also assembled from appropriated materials are the later works Cartoon le Mousse (1979) and Loose Ends (1979), both decidedly poignant if darker visions of suffering and the human condition. These films succeed in absorbing the viewer into their own universe of keen and unsettling association, dry wit and devastation.
‘The intensity of Strand’s oeuvre finds its breath in films like Kristallnacht and Fever Dream (both 1979), each a sustained meditation on reflected light. But where Kristallnacht hovers over rippling water, with drips and sprays in luminous black and white, Fever Dream insists on the body, all skin and sensuality. They give you the distinct sense of Strand’s voice distilled: the intimacy of physical experience married to light and movement; the essence of vision, the essence of cinema.
‘Describing ethnographic filmmaking, Strand once wrote: “It is a means to get into other perspectives of the culture, to meet them, and to identify with them as fellow human beings.” Her diverse output is permeated by this profound sense of humanity, of film as a tool for identification and relation, transcending time and culture. Strand, who preferred intuition to analysis, would agree: stop reading. See the films.’ — Vera Brunner-Sung, Sight & Sound
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Stills
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Further
Chick Strand @ The Film-Makers Cooperative
‘Chick Strand: Loose Notes’
‘U of M Students Respond to Chick Strand: In Retrospect’
‘Divining spirits: Chick Strand’
‘Soft Fiction and Kristallnacht: An Interview with Irina Leimbacher’
‘Chick Strand, Señora con Flores’
‘Tags: Chick Strand’ @ Experimental Cinema
‘Remembering Chick Strand’
‘Chick Strand at 75’
‘Who’s Chick Strand?’
Steve Polta on Chick Strand
‘Forgotten Classics of Yesteryear: Fake Fruit Factory’
‘THE JOY OF AMERICAN AVANT-GARDE’
‘Last Strand’
‘Chick Strand: Now They Call it “Avant-Garde”‘
‘Goodbye, Chick Strand’
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Extras
CHICK STRAND DOCUMENT
“Marmor”, a found footage video using film material of Chick Strand
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Audio Interview 2008.02.25
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Quotes
“I have no idea what my films mean when I’m doing them. That is boring to me to figure out…If I knew what the meaning was, there would be no reason to do it.”
“Other people love to work with a script and the whole thing but not me…”
“[Soft Fiction] is a film about women who win…What I mean by winning is that they don’t become victims, and they don’t become survivors. They carry on. They take the responsibility for having had the experience and carrying it off and dealing with it and carrying on and becoming more potent, more powerful, more of themselves.”
“The end one, Hedy, means it is never trivial. It is all going to get us in the heart and the gut. She just comes to a blank when she gets to that hill where bad things are going on. She gets to a blank. She’s had a hard time, obviously. And that was the first time that she told the story to anyone….in a sense the film itself acted as an exorcism for some of these things. These stories are what the women told me….”
“I make films. I don’t make films for a living. It’s out of pocket most of the time. And I damn well do what I want. I have no responsibility to the Women’s movement, to liberal politics, to international workers of the world, or to anything or to any political correctness, none at all. I’d be bored. It’s all going to come out. Let the people speak for themselves, the incidents speak for themselves. When I first started showing Soft Fiction, I’d get shit from some feminists as if I wasn’t supposed to show it—as if I was supposed to lie about it somehow.”
“All of us experimental filmmakers are in the hole—the guys and the women, too. We’re the last anybody ever thinks about and the first to go. But then our own boys don’t pay any attention to us. Well, they do but…that’s pretty hard. But that’s okay, because the biggest hole is experimental film…We’re all in it as experimental filmmakers. So that’s the part of me that ends up going to these shows and speaking—just in case one or two people might be interested enough to pay the fee to get in and keep things going.”
“I shoot documentary style…And Soft Fiction, no. I don’t know to this day whether one person’s story is true or not. I mean, it has to do with memory. I am much more interested in how it is related to Alain Resnais—to Last Year at Marienbad (1961)—than I am interested in whether it is related to Salesman (Albert and David Maysles, 1969).”
“I like a lot of movement. I like to make my own special effects. I like to put the viewer in a position they would never be in: really close in, for a length of time, like they’re flitting around the feet of the dancers.””
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10 of Chick Strand’s 18 films
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Anselmo (1967)
‘Strand spent over twenty years documenting her friend Anselmo Aguascalientes’ life, eventually creating a stunning trilogy of films—Anselmo, Cosas de mi vida, and Anselmo and the Women—tender portraits that are also glimpses into poverty, resourcefulness, perseverance and patriarchy.’ — letterboxd
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Mosori Monika (1970)
‘ Mosori Monika considers the relationship between missionaries and native Waraos in Venezuela, exemplifies Strand’s signature style: caressing movements and features in close-up, pulling viewers in by the lapels with a telescoped lens, incorporating the subject’s thoughts via voiceover narration.’ — bfi
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Elasticity (1975)
‘Impressionistic surrealism in three acts. The approach is literary experimental with optical effects. There are three mental states that are interesting: amnesia, euphoria and ecstasy. Amnesia is not knowing who you are and wanting desperately to know. I call this the White Night. Euphoria is not knowing who you are and not caring. This is the Dream of Meditation. Ecstasy is knowing exactly who you are and still not caring. I call this the Memory of the Future.’ — C.S.
the entire film
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Cosas de mi vida (1976)
‘Expressive documentary in an ethnographic approach about Anselmo, a Mexican Indian. It is a film about his struggle for survival in the Third World. Orphaned at age 7, he was the sole support of himself and his baby sister, who eventually starved and died in his arms. The film continues with Anselmo’s struggle to live and to do something with his life other than a docile acceptance of poverty. Totally uneducated in a formal way, he taught himself how to play a horn and when he became a man he started his own street band. The film was started in 1965 and finished in 1975. During the 10 years, I saw the physical change in Anselmo’s life in terms of things he could buy to make his family at first able to survive, and during the last years, to make them more comfortable. I felt a change in his spirit from a proud, individualistic and graceful man into one obsessed with possessions and role playing in order to get ahead and stay on top, but one cannot help but admire his energy and determination to succeed, to drag himself and is family out of the hopelessness and sameness of poverty to give them a future. Anselmo tells his own story in English although he does not speak the language. After he told me of his life in Spanish, I translated it into English and taught him how to say it.’ — C.S.
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Loose Ends (1979)
‘LOOSE ENDS is a collage film about the process of internalizing the information that bombards us through a combination of personal experience and media in all forms. Speeding through our senses in ever-increasing numbers and complicated mixtures of fantasy, dream and reality from both outside and in, these fragmented images of life, sometimes shared by all, sometimes isolated and obscure, but with common threads, lead us to a state of psychological entropy tending toward a uniform inertness … an insensitive uninvolvement in the human condition and our own humanity.’ — Filmmakers Coop
the entire film
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Soft Fiction (1979)
‘Chick Strand’s SOFT FICTION is a personal documentary that brilliantly portrays the survival power of female sensuality. It combines the documentary approach with a sensuous lyrical expressionism. Strand focuses her camera on people talking about their own experience, capturing subtle nuances in facial expressions and gestures that are rarely seen in cinema.’ — collaged
the entire film
Irina Leimbacher talks about “Soft Fiction”
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Kristallnacht (1979)
‘”Kristallnacht” is so abstract that any connection to the Holocaust beyond the film’s title and dedication can be seen as deeply seeded if not entirely non-existent. I don’t consider that a complaint even if it sounds that way. If anything, this is less about the images evoking meaning on the surface and more about the context deciding the meaning of its images. Light on water, silhouettes of faces, a naturalistic mostly environmental score – so so minimal, yet placed underneath the inescapable implication of death.’ — Puffin
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Fake Fruit Factory (1986)
‘ I discovered this particular piece after it being mentioned as one of the National Film Registry’s 2011 list of 25 culturally significant films. Before actually viewing the film I was surprised by its inclusion given that it is only a twenty minute documentary about a group of Mexican women making fake fruit. Upon beginning my viewing of the film though I realized it was something far grander and more realized than simply documenting an unusual type of employment. What Chick Strand creates in her brief documentary is an ethereal study of human existence as seen through the lives of a few under-appreciated and blatantly exploited women. Unlike other fly on the wall documentaries, Strand offers you no explanation as to what you are watching besides an occasional title card of explanation, you are left to glean from the film what is shown and what is said by the works, most of which is referencing the sexual exploits of the women. This approach makes considerable sense given Strand’s close ties to the ethnography program that existed at UCLA in the 1970’s. What Fake Fruit Factory becomes through Strand’s vision is a concise narrative essay on a few women who are being exploited by an often faceless white man, who only desires their craftiness and, at times, exotic bodies. We as viewers fear the worst when we realize that there is little these women can do to escape, until we are shown the women enjoying a picnic and swimming at an unknown park. This brief moment reminds viewers that life is not about the products we create or those things we can quantify, but instead the always fleeting moments of quality which toss and turn like agitated waters. Chick Strand offers something different and proves how integral experimentation in film has become to the grander evolution of cinema.’ — Travis Wagner
Excerpt
the entire film
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Coming Up for Air (1986)
‘A “new narrative” film based on the visions of magic realism in an Anglo context. This is a gothic mystery that explores a reckless pursuit of interchangeable personalities and experience. Whether experience is first hand, read, remembered from a conversation during a chance encounter, heard of from all possible sources of information, whether fact or fiction, the “experiences” become ours; reinterpreted, reconstructed, and restructured, finally becoming our personal myths, and the source of our poetry and dreams. The sources for this film include night dreams, the idea of holocaust, the exoticness of the Mid-East, the sensuality of animals, the explorations of Scott in Antarctica, and a film I once saw, entitled The Son of Amir Is Dead.’ — Chick Strand
the entire film
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Wild Rumpus (2008)
‘A pastiche by Chick Strand built out of footage from Where the Wild Things Are.’ — dustincollins
the entire film
*
p.s. Hey. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, B. Black Metal is very stylin’. Eek, I had measles as an adult when I was living in Amsterdam, and it was really rough. It took my immune system more than a year to work properly again. Avoid the possibility at all costs. ** Darby𓃱𓃱$$$, Giddy, sweet. ‘Freak Toons’, no, I don’t, but I will check with my most zine-savvy associates and pursue post-haste. If I find it, you’ll know. Thanks! Awesome about your New Year! Thank you about the mouse. I saw it just in the nick of time. ** jay, HNY to you! Gosh, maybe I’ll actually give celebrating the change of years a shot, but I don’t like drinking, and I’m basically post-druggie, so it might be a real challenge. It’s very rare that studio porn these days isn’t just boxy and old fashioned. A dying breed, I think. I’m one of those persons who can’t watch or read or listen to anything, even porn, without immediately deconstructing it formally and trying to figure out how it works, or, in porn’s case, putting aside its cast members and assessing how it gave me a boner our didn’t. I think they call people like me geeks. How nice that the slaves post did extracurricular duty, and successfully. Thanks for passing that along. Good luck making your New Years fun a mere twinkle in your year’s eye. Eye? Or something. ** Steeqhen, I never remember my dreams so I’m envying the clarity and narrative properties of yours. 30 is wholly doable. I don’t know how many books I read yearly, but it’s quite a bunch. For me, yoga worked pretty well, if memory serves, but not well enough. That said, I don’t remember anything about doing it what that felt like. So, who knows. Much luck on the throat/cough upswinging. ** Dominik, Hi!!! You’re back!!! Good, good that you only had 8.5 lousy hours since we last spoke. My holidays were very lowkey, Kind of a blur. This year has started without an untoward incident thus far. Black Metal can be very good at kind of scrubbing you out, clearing the mental decks and all of that. Like a deep cleaning. Thank you putting my thing on your list of favorite things! Your thing was on my list of favorite things too. Fist bump. Love’s not a girl who misses much, G. ** James, Ridiculous, poorly recorded things are a problem? Since when? HNY to you! There is quite a lot of grunt work involved in finding slaves who are interesting/ amusing/ tragic enough to present to you all, so I’ll accept a smidgen of your compliment, thank you. No, I think you have to write that Burroughsian novel, as far as I can tell. Ultimately, as something of a news junkie, not to mention a devourer of every fact-based tidbit about my various obsessions, I definitely read more non-fiction than fiction, but when non-fiction is in a book, I do fight off feeling like ‘Get that rabble out of the sacred object!’. You’re lucky to have the brother you have, trust me. That guy you chatted with sounds like a total warning sign. Glad he couldn’t keep himself from warning you. Luck with the short story. Nose to the grindstone, as they say, and whatever the hell that means. ** Cletus, HNY to you and yours! Cool. I once tried to interview a Black Metal musician as part of my research for the text portion of a theater piece Gisele Vienne were making, but every time I asked him a question he just glowered at me and rolled his eyes, so that didn’t help. Or, well, it did, I guess. ** Misanthrope, Well, next time, man. There’s always a next time. Ugh, re: David’s state. I think you have to cut him off. He’ll probably lose his shit, but he needs to lose his shit. Man, so much luck to you on that. Poor David. I so really hope he gets his shit together. ** Tyler Ookami, Hi. I did do an early search on the furry bands/music, and it does look pretty healthy and interesting. I’m just waiting to see if it’s enough to make a blog post about at the moment. Thanks! ** Steve, In my experience of late, most of the people I’ve met who are big readers of fiction and/or poetry have either been female, trans, or young queer guys. I have to wait for the venue hosting the premiere to announce before I can. I’m not sure when that will be. I don’t believe the venue has a competition. It’s an exciting, logistically smaller, relatively new festival. ** Steven Purtill, Hey, man! I’m glad you saw that I re-upped it! It’s still fresh as a daisy. HNY to you! I hope everything in your world is progressing greatly! ** HaRpEr, The Schuyler novel is really lovely. Very him. Calder is so great. There was a time when every book I read was either a Calder or Grove book. Did you ever get caught shoplifting? I did twice, but I was still young enough at the time, maybe 13 or 14, that my crocodile tears got me scoldings and not the cops. As a thrower of myself into work type of person, I don’t need to tell you which side of that argument I’m on. Throw. ** Dev, Hi. It does feel like the Cloudflare monster is weakening, but I don’t know if that’s technically true. Anyway, hey! Thanks for knocking twice. FUMES by Miccaeli: cool, I just bookmarked it. I do sorely need to enter the minds of people who think complexly about smells. ’19-69′ … I do know what cocaine smells like, I’ll try to find it and give it a whirl. Thanks, pal. I’m guessing Oxford, MS was named after Oxford, UK and now I am wondering why. Nothing against non-fiction at all, at least from me. I do think it’s interesting that most readers would rather have factual material to use their imaginations on rather than pre-imagined non-truthful writing to build upon. Wow, yeah, our birthdays are next door neighbors! Thats crazy. Uh, I want to go to my favorite amusement park Efteling, but I won’t be going on my actual birthday. I’m not sure what I’ll do. Traditionally my friends and I always went to the Hard Rock Cafe to eat nachos, but Hard Rock Cafe shut down permanently last month, so I’m a bit lost. You’ll be studying so hard you can’t even go outdoor a birthday dinner on your big day?! Hats off to your dutifulness, man. Well, at least eat something completely amazing on Friday. ** Justin D, Hey, JD. Oh, wow, choosing a favorite GbV song is very, very, very hard given their endless supply of song masterpieces. At one point I decided that ‘Red Men and Their Wives’ was my favorite by them, so it’s possible it still would be, but don’t hold me to that. What’s yours? Every day I curse the forces that do not allow us in France to access The Criterion Channel. My first day of 2025 was okay. I saw a visiting friend. I progressed in my video game. The price of cigarettes went up one euro per pack and that wasn’t so great. That’s kind if it. How was your second day of 2025? ** Okay. Today I present to you the work of another very interesting filmmaker that you may not be familiar with due to the ridiculous conservatism of current day film critics and distributors and streaming platforms. So, in that sense, today is a possibly rare opportunity to say, ‘Fuck the boring, mainstream self-appointed culture-arbitrating powers that be, I’m going to discover films based on their uniqueness and daring, and here’s one of my chances.’ Or you could just scroll down rapidly. It’s a free country. It’s all good. Maybe. See you tomorrow.
Now available in North America 
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Hey Dennis,
Just walking home from the gym. Was in the process of reorganizing and decluttering my room last night so I have to come back to. The thought of making space and throwing stuff out is draining me as I write this.
I have a deep love of dreaming; I have memories of dreams from childhood and used to get excited about going to sleep just so i could continue to dream. For a while I lost my ability to remember them so well, (even today I can’t remember exactly) but having this sickness definitely gave me some fever dreams!
Nosferatu was really frustrating, I still can’t stop myself from ruminating on it. Visually it was great. But it felt like two separate films lodged together; one about female sexuality and ‘hysteria’ and a Nosferatu remake. He tries to change the plot to fit the theme, but doesn’t change it enough that the theme gets muddled by the plot. Basically he turns Nosferatu into a sort of rapist/ex-husband/abusive father figure for Ellen, but still keeps the part of “a willful sacrifice” which just doesn’t work because Ellen can’t really willfully submit herself to the vampyr when she literally has no other choice (Nosferatu does a whole “you have 3 nights” shtick). It could’ve been really well-done, but it just seemed like he couldn’t decide what he wanted to do and made a mess of story… visually was lovely though which I guess is what most care for.
Might watch some other movie later to clear my head, or I might write a whole piece about the movie and what frustrated me about it to get it out of my head.
Dennis, Yeah, it’s sad. But I think it’s time to cut him off. His mother has been back in town for a while now, and he’s been hanging with her. She’s even worse than he is. Maybe they’ll get a place together or something? Who knows?
Oh wow, these are lovely, I’ll absolutely have this open in the background as I finalise my dissertation. Yeah, I’m the same about drink/drugs, I used to be really off the rails in that department, but I’ve definitely gone back to stone cold as of recently. I just love being around people “on” something, particularly coke, rather than taking it – I sometimes feel like the world/conversations move a little too slow, so hearing someone I like talk on coke is a nice experience, because it feels a bit more my tempo.
By the way, Suicide by Leve was wonderful, I think I loved it as much as Autoportrait, if not more. I suppose the phrase “suicide hurts the people around you” has always existed in my head as something that makes sense, but this book really put it into practice, in a way. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I’ve logically understood that concept, but the book emotionally clarified it in a really elegant way. Thank you so much for introducing all of us to him, I’ve been poring over his photography while I should be getting some work done.
Anyway, good job getting past that annoying bit of Mario. My current game level is a huge Island Resort, with a lot of inch high water and trip hazards. Hope your day is excellent!
Hi!!
Chick Strand is a new name to me. I can’t decide whether I should start with “Cosas de mi vida” or “Soft Fiction.” Both seem intriguing.
Low-key holidays are the best, at least in my opinion. I spent some of mine reading Damien Ark’s “Fucked Up,” and it keeps blowing my mind with every page. I looked up the “welcome to the world” post you made when it was published, but I’ll only allow myself to go through it once I’ve finished the book. (Looks like the post was published at a time when I was absent from the blog for whatever reason, and I’m quite grateful for that now – nothing to influence my attention and judgment.)
I often feel the need for a thorough mental/emotional deep cleaning, and music – especially live music – can be very effective.
Your thing was at the very top of my list of favorite things! Thank you so much for putting my thing on your list as well!
Love needs a fix ‘cause he’s going down, Od.
As with so many other experimental filmmakers, Chick Strand is a new name to me. Soft Fiction’s mini confessionals I found to be especially compelling. Thank you for this day!
In case you were wondering, 2025 sees Leeds United sitting top of the league! Been playing pretty well against often quite limited opponents. This Saturday I will be hosting a visit from my longtime very smart Cambridge-PhD-educated friend George (his thesis was on Beckett and Joyce, an interesting subject) and we will watch the game on telly. Here’s hoping the New Year might bring us promotion back to the Premier League.
Woohoo, another unfamiliar topic with which I am now a little more familiar, thanks to the blog. These experimental cinematographers are often so prolific. How do people find the time and why do people feel the need to film so many of these obscure things in such ‘experimental’ ways? I envy them. I could get up to so much more Fun Shit were it not for my various preexisting preoccupations (A Levels…). Anselmo has a nice pretty shade of pink in that screencap. Reminds me of the cover of Loveless by mbv. It’s the pink.
New year, same old faulty fcking keyboard, ugh. Hi Dennis o/
Poorly recorded things become a problem for me when listening to them only ever makes me think ‘I wish I were listening to something I personally enjoyed more.’ None of my metalhead friends are much into black metal. It’s generally only ever memed on/about. Burzum’s album Dauði Baldr is hilariously shitty. It’s like Runescape music, but bad. And that’s a black metal artist making music which isn’t really black metal… dungeon synth.
Thank you. So far 2025 has been. I mean not much has happened you know. So I have no strong feelings about this year so far. I’ve totally thrown today away, sleeping in, studying. No reading or writing or emailing as of yet 🙁 which I need to amend. And try to do that I will.
Oh, wow. My friend Firefox has yielded not totally disappointing results from just searching ‘(my area) escorts.’ Most results are in a nearby city – I’ve already found someone who would ‘gladly take on the role of [my] submissive servant’ and who ‘appreciate[s] being disciplined whenever [they] behave inappropriately,’ and who likes dressing up as a ‘French maid’ who ‘relish[es] the pleasure’ of being spanked until their rear end displays ‘a stunning reddish glow.’ So. That’s my first excursion into investigating escorts myself. Purely from an observational, surveying standpoint, duh. Fun!
So I have a slightly better inkling of your efforts. Although I imagine your searches aren’t quite as boringly slim as mine, being as I am in my part of England. Still, something’s better than nothing. Lovely to know depravity exists within not-impossible reach x)
Write a Burroughs-esque novel about the modern gay man, sure, jotting that down on the To-Do List. Lord if it’s not a long list -_-
What kind of things are on your to-do list, at the moment?
I’ve got to the point of Grown-Upness where I would rather the news on channel 1 be on instead of whatever crappy telly a family member would prefer. And my geography teacher is always telling us to watch the news so we have up-to-date case study examples to draw on, for various climate and human governance crises.
I’m sure your various obsessions are wide-reaching – might I ask for one example?
I wonder if I read more fiction or non-fiction. Considering your blogposts, and others I read, and all the stuff I read for college, hm… I’m worried that I too might read more fact than fiction. If that’s the case, I’d rather it not be.
Non-fiction in fiction can make for interesting formfun which engages me. Or at least – oo, what really makes me go ‘Ooooo’ is when fiction is written in a way like/presented as non-fiction. Now that’s cool.
Or having non-fiction aspects in fiction – like, a novel with footnotes/endnotes/or a bibliography. Like Pale Fire? I like academic writing styles being used for fictional purposes. Really want to like, write a story through/in the style of an essay. Textuality is one of my obsessions, maybe. Call me a homotextual. Or not.
I am. But hearing the brother run up and down the scales on his trumpet when I’m trying to read *does* drive me up the wall. Pros and cons, pros and cons.
Mhm, it doesn’t take a genius to be wary of a guy who’s flinging homophobic insults/slurs at you one moment and then espousing his love/lust for you another. When all you’ve done is messaged on the internet. Poor dude. He was just lonely, more than anything else. Wish him well, whatever on earth he’s up to now.
Thank you! Hope all your fiction-producing efforts this year go swell, too. Nose has been put to the academic grindstone alone so far, today. Might have to stay up late-ish to shift my nose to the fiction-writing-email-sending-novel-reading grindstone instead. But tschuss tschuss for now.
I’ve seen SOFT FICTION & FAKE FRUIT FACTORY, but I haven’t heard Strand’s name in years. Time to check out some of the shorts you linked!
My first review of 2025, on ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT, was published today: https://artsfuse.org/300625/film-review-all-we-imagine-as-light-a-gritty-and-graceful-look-at-life-in-mumbai/
The festival whose schedule I was browsing is a pretty big one, so it must not be the one where your film will premiere.
Hey hey. What’s up? I’m settling okay-ish into the new year. I just broke one of my resolutions, which was to quit smoking, but oh well, I can try again starting tomorrow. It’s stupid and I feel disappointed in myself because I only even started a few months ago when I was horribly depressed, knowing my dad smoked all his life and can’t even fully quit after having had multiple heart attacks so I probably have the addiction gene or whatever. But hopefully it won’t be as impossible for me. At least I’d like to cut down to not smoking every single day or every other day if possible. I woke up after having the most intense nightmare I’ve had in a long time—a random 13 year old boy attacked me starting with slashing my hand off and then every part of my body until I was just a floating head and neck, kind of Beckett-ish maybe—and wrote a poem about that which I submitted to an online mag. I haven’t submitted anything anywhere else (still have to edit that poem I want to submit to SCAB) so I’m excited about that. I thought again about an essay/non-fiction thing I want to write about femicidal suicide (concept created by latin american feminists about which there are few english-language resources) and maybe my general frustration with how suicide is sometimes treated as a subjectless act and unavoidable tragedy in certain cases, if that makes sense. But I’ve never really written any non-fiction outside of school so I’m kind of intimated by it and not sure how to approach it. I also read some great essays by Ulrike Meinhof and Gary Indiana which excited me about the form but I still feel sort of incapable. Do you have any tips or like general advice? I guess the general idea would be to not let myself feel so insecure about it. I’m finally seeing my therapist and hanging out with another new friend tomorrow. I’m really looking forward to that even though it’s sadly the last weekend of the holidays. Hope you had a nice day, xo.
I forgot to send this second part yesterday (or I think the website forgot to)
So for NYE I went to a DIY venue at someones house it was called”Slobberhouse” pretty good and I was so surprised to meet alot of people.
It was kind of strange, as soon as I got there a bunch of people just started talking to me and I made some friends so that was nice.
I aldo bought some clothes and a spiked bracelet from the emo kid. Oh!–also this really cool sweater im currently wearing; a snake wearing some witch doctor hat with a bunch of voodoo dolls around it.
(Jan 2nd)
Will you be doing tours and stuff for the movie?
Ive had better days than this one, I tried turning it around by going to the store and buying some ginger snap and tofu because ive been craving that and I got paid again. I texted some people back from the party yesterday. I dont know what it could possibly be, why I am this way. I hate it I just want to be happy. When im happy I get shit done. I have passion and meaning I just want to pull it out like a tumor, or suck out the bad like liposuction. I just wish I wasnt born like this. it would make everything better, because I know people who had been through worse and they arent messed up.
Please cross your fingers that I have the strength and resilience to deflect the pangs of
delusions, lonliness, or doubt, at least enough to be able to get an hour writing session done. Oh and also cross your fingers that the tofu I bought will be tastty.
I dont believe in God n u probs dont either but I like the concept of Angels, not the stupid fukn babies but actual Divine angels protecting you.
I guess its easy for pragmatic ppl to dismiss the concept but its easier and comforting to think of angels as a possibilty ya know when the devil exist and you cant deny its perceptible.
Its like 4pm and ive only been able to accomplish a visit to the store, and a session of therapy which was just paperwork and im just waiting to eventually actually start fucking talking to them.
There used to be days I could study write read and paint all in the same afternoon and have time to clean and think of friends. Even if I dont have many I know they are there but its hard to think about that.
Did you know there is a place called the VAMPA Museum? Its a collection of supernatural things. OH, right wish me luck getting this writing session done, because at this point im procrastinating, knowing that once I hit send im probably going to be undistracted from this dreadful mood im in. Although I will admit I feel somewhat better so maybe I will get through this.
I HAVE to finish this book by April. I literally am just editing it but for some reason thats the hardest. Honestly there are elements about the main character I relate to on a personal lvl, and putting it on text makes me feel so vulnerable, because I want it to be this very honest dissection of this imperfect character and I feel like when I write in forgiveness for the character its filled with guilt and shame and the temptation to erase because im probably just trying to forgive myself and cant.
Anyways u dont have to answer that last sentence because I think im already in writing mode and just reflecting
bye. Oh, did u find out what bathroom literature was?
I feel like I wrote alot more than usual and my apologies for that.
OH last thing, im very sorry, but the other day we were talking about Louis Wain and how he didnt have a post on this site. I would actually 100% definitably work on doing that if you allow that. Im not sure I remember the rules, but I very much need a side project.
Hallå där Dennis!
I think I should’ve taken your advice on “poetry over party”, since partying totally fucked me over this New Year’s Eve. I don’t know exactly why or how, but suddenly I felt really sick and tired and I couldn’t speak. My friends had to call my parents to come get me, which was really embarrassing. Me and my friend group have been planning a trip to Spain this summer, but I don’t know if it’ll happen after this, my parents probably don’t trust me with that responsibility anymore. Another thing I really regret is the fact that I may have lost the opportunity to kiss this one girl that I’ve talked about before, the one who owned ‘the sluts’! She had invited me to this party, but I was already at another one so we didn’t meet. During the night, she apparently talked a lot about how she thought I was sweet, and she spam called and messaged me to come meet her. Problem is, I was so gone I didn’t even notice. So my 2025 has started pretty terribly, how has it treated you?
I finished ’Döden och Co.’ today, and I really loved it. I think Moodysson wrote two other novels, but none of them are translated to English. I started ‘Justine’ today too, so we’ll see how I like that one.
I wish you all the best.
x, Måns
Hey. I was a very good shoplifter if I say so myself, by which I mean I was never caught. When I got older I didn’t exactly start feeling bad about any multinational corporation losing an immeasurably slim fraction of its goods, but that kind of thing obviously gets embarrassing when you’re older if you’re not stealing food and stuff you actually need. I mostly stole dumb stuff just for the hell of it. I’m sure I told myself I was doing it with some political motivation or something but I think everyone feels untouchable as a kid to some extent. I still have that a bit, or a lot, but in a way that means that nobody can stop me from doing what I do, rather than feeling like you’ll never die and are so detached from anything mildly dangerous that you go out of your way to put yourself in direct proximity to it, which I think a lot of kids who grew up in boring neighbourhoods go through.
I dyed my hair today. My cousin who’s a hairdresser did it for free. A lot of my mum’s family is actually really cool and laid back and open to things, it’s just a few super conservative people who make everything unpalatable.
I get the urge to completely change my appearance every time I feel I need to escape some thing or feeling, and it sure brought me closer ( I almost completely shaved my eyebrows in the summer and haven’t really looked back). I guess bleach blonde has been my look for three years now, but this time I’m almost platinum. My hair was basically fried from dying it badly in the past so it had to be cut a bit. But yes, I feel like a clean slate again.
Your message at the end of today’s post: ‘Fuck the boring, mainstream, self-appointed culture-arbitrating powers of be, I’m going to discover films based on their uniqueness and daring’, I don’t make New Years resolutions because I don’t believe in them, but if I have one it’s this. Not to say that I wasn’t doing this before, to the absolute contrary, but I’m really going to go out of my way to see things such as what today’s post spotlights. So yes, I will now proceed to dive into the work of Chick Strand. A salute from me, maestro.
hello and hope you are having a good 2025 so far. hopefully anyone seeing this is having decent luck with the weather, lots of floods near me and cold as anything – bedroom window never even defrosted today!
For once I am familiar with one of these films! i wrote a bit about Loose Ends in an essay last year about abstraction in illustration. Obviously it’s not an illustration but if i remember rightly a tutor told me to watch it when I was trying desperately to find a comic or something that had that same quality of mixing word and images that sometimes fit and sometimes don’t. Sometimes I open this page and wonder at how the hell you get to find out about so many people and things, it must take lots of research.
Other than being a film it was kind of the perfect fit for the essay and i got really interested in the sequences of images but i was cutting it close to the deadline so I never followed up and looked at any other films. Currently working quite last minute on another essay except this one’s about 3 times longer and less interesting so i’m bricking it. (will i ever learn?)
wishes – arla
Hey, Dennis! I really only have a rudimentary grasp of the GbV catalog, so I wouldn’t say I have a favorite, yet. I sampled a bit of their music while reading ‘Guide’—to make it a more immersive experience, and out of sheer curiosity, of course. I’ll give your possible favorite a listen, thanks for sharing it! I ended up watching ‘It’s Not Me’ today, and found it dizzyingly inspiring. Other than that, just trying to get back into the swing of things; the holiday period always seems to make time feel inconsequential, you know?
Yeah, I think you could. Looking through Rateyourmusic lists or combing through the “furry” tag on Bandcamp would be the way to go, I think.
Also, there is such a thing as “furloid”, like a furry vocaloid. My favorite is Rouan Aro:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGaWR7Bv9Ok
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcaZcn1puJU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5qeQlmOZ58&pp=ygUTcm91YW4gYXJvIGhhbGxvd2Vlbg%3D%3D
Oops, Nosferatu was a huge mistake! Hard to watch due to murky low-contrast lighting, disappointingly unhorny, not very opulent for a costumed historical Dracula story, gore is a muddy medical black rather than a bright red splatter, just not what I want from this kind of thing at all. And above all LOUD. Not only is it overscored, not only is there so little breathing room and it sustains a frantic pace for its whole run time, not only does every fucking thing from rats skittering on the floor to setting a book on the table make a noise way louder than it should, but you know that thing in contemporary horror films that isn’t quite a sound effect or piece of score but just a low digital rumble meant to let you know that something is scary? Everywhere. And of course a string sting every time something dramatic happens. And of course lots and lots of those close up of faces with a hypercompressed scream-like sound. I actually like the dialogue and acting a lot; don’t know why it was ruined by making the movie such a difficult sensory experience. Going to wash it away with a viewing of Paul Morrisey’s Dracula film.
Oh, I was going to bring this up a while ago but didn’t. Do you know this film Flow, an animated film from Latvia that just came out? It’s very Nintendo-like in its aesthetics. It’s set after another Great Flood but this time no more humans. So it’s all the other animals escaping on their own little boats that were left behind. It’s more influenced by video games than film, even other animated films, it seems. The camera follows a sort of player surrogate, a little black cat, for almost the entire runtime. It goes through all of these survival game types of situations, seeing how long it can go underwater before coming up for air, catching a rationing a supply of fish, balancing the weight of the boat, that stuff. There is not human language in it at all. It’s being distributed to theaters by Janus, so I assume it will be on Criterion, hopefully physically as well as digitally, at some point.
Excited to start with Soft Fiction. Strand seems so cool god. I love the quotes. I especially love the quote about women not as victims or survivors. That’s interesting you interviewed a Black Metal musician even if it didnt exactly work out as expected haha. My favorite interview so far as part of my arts and culture writing side gig has been with rodeo parents. Some start their children off young by having them ride sheep. Sometimes the sheep don’t enjoy that of course and the results are like a mini bull riding session. The story was an interesting mix of animal cruelty discussions, sports writing and a weird sort of world many aren’t familiar with. I love your message at the end of today’s post.
P.S. Also thanks for letting me send you my new chapbook. Hope you enjoy it if you have time to read it.