MASHA TUPITSYN'S BULK COLLECTION

on why there is no cinema of the present

As part of the ongoing launch of AngelicismFilms, Masha Tupitsyn’s BULK COLLECTION (2022) can now be found on YouTube for the first time. The film is independent, in every sense, and belongs to no (one) set, but we present it here and support it as the perfect representative—and perhaps unique counterexample—of a thesis: there is no contemporary cinema, no contemporary cinema at all.

By being the exception to this thesis, Tupitysn’s film allows us to think the ways in which a super-severe claim like that might be true. All films in the present have virtually nothing to do with the present. This seems valid not just because all films completely evacuate the present of obvious signs of the last two years (no masks, no material politics, nothing that could be construed as cancellable, nothing that could disturb or alienate an audience, and nothing that hints at niche finality as an axis of these, or rather nothing that ever does more than hint at something like those unimaginable ends), but because contemporary cinema fails to integrate the Internet as itself a cinematic event.

By openly witnessing the last two years in a deceptively simple way—original and internet footage combined with internet voice-overs—BULK COLLECTION easily becomes the exception to the unwritten law whereby contemporary films must not deal with the present.

Here is the description of the film on Tupitsyn’s website:

Bulk Collection—a euphemism for mass surveillance—is a film-essay and audio commentary that chronicles the hegemonic condition of algorithmic monoculture. A combination of shot footage and found audio, BULK COLLECTION was filmed on a iPhone 8 over a two year period. It is a diary and time capsule of digital gentrification—a New York City of ubiquitous mega construction sites, constant demolition, and the socio-economic fallout of the COVID regime. The construction of the massive new Downtown home of Disney’s 650-million dollars headquarters at 4 Hudson Square—which Masha Tupitsyn filmed for over a year—the COVID-19 breakout in spring 2020, and the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, all coalesce into a temporal record of the cultural wreckage of a physical world that was destroyed because no one was paying attention. BULK COLLECTION concludes by receding from the digital City, as Tupitsyn makes a pilgrimage back in time to a literal and metaphorical land’s end, Provincetown, Massachusetts, one of America’s oldest towns as well Tupitsyn’s childhood haven. Set aside as the nation’s second-oldest common land in 1654, the Atlantic Ocean becomes a come-down calendar of cyclical tides and existential wonder. A natural landscape that is vast, stunningly complex, and antidotally slow.

Why did nobody else film this? Why did nobody else film this present? Why did nobody else film this film? In the year 2020, why did nobody else in New York think to wander out into the streets and do that simplest, most valuable thing? Why did nobody in New York shoot and frame what was going on, how it felt, what it looked like without commentary?

The use of audio in BULK COLLECTION is something new: by substituting voices of media and the internet for her own voice, Tupitsyn both gets the auteur’s voice out of the way (we are free to listen) and allows one to hear for the first time what internet voices (podcasts, Netflix comedies, and so on) sound like on their own—when we are not looking at a non-cinematic screen.

Insofar as the film is also partly about addictogenesis (internet addiction, porn addiction and the ways in which these can override erotogenesis), one is given a film between what plagues one and the thing itself. One is inside, but filming. Does internet cinema exist yet? There are certainly films that do something with the internet frame—Levan Gabriadze’s Unfriended (2014) for example—but are there any films that integrate the Internet as an ongoing lesson in composition and cuts?

BULK COLLECTION moves in that direction, and so, is almost entirely alone. In an age where sight itself is shut down on sight, when one is not allowed to see, to film, to know, to think, to rethink, to cut, to compose, a ‘collection’ is made. What the internet gives film is a series of new cuts: to spend a day online is to cut between a thousand different aspect ratios, technically and tonally; it is the clash of timelines (vertical vs horizontal scroll), a goodbye to reconciliation.

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Here are a few examples of contemporary films that are not contemporary.

Aftersun (2022) by Charlotte Wells: imagine how beautiful this film could have been were it actually set in 2022 or even 2023 in the afterglow of the last few years. Instead the glow of the light in it belongs firmly to the past and is faded in advance, too sad, nowhere near suicidal enough. 11-year-old Sophie takes a summer vacation to Turkey with her father Calum, but the film only briefly touches the present at the point where it looks back into the past, like a person shirking away from a traumatic wound. The present is hygienically, cinematically avoided, evacuated, kept out. The director solves the problem of getting a film made (funding, production) by sacrificing life as it is now.

El Planeta (2021) by Amalia Ulman: this ‘comedy about eviction’ is perfectly coherent, cute, appealing and winsome. There is absolutely nothing wrong here. But it is not a contemporary film in any sense. Nothing in it reflects the present, nothing in it reaches for what life feels like now. The scenes involving Holga are wonderful and there is an adorable generosity in allowing Holga, a cat, to be a greater minor star than Ulman herself, but, finally, the whole film really is intentionally minor, all the better to devote oneself ‘To the Film Industry in Crisis’.

WWW.RACHELORMONT.COM (2023) by Peter Vack: Peter Vack emptied his iPhone for AngelicismFilms so I am not about to completely knife his film before it comes out. Without doubt this film has already done something new in terms of micro celebrity publicity stunts, by appearing to exist before it exists and allowing itself to be gamed by a Substack writer, but the fact that everyone will wait to see the footage Vack is sitting on of the original Dimes Square Fascist Humiliation primal scene doesn’t necessarily mean this film, either, will have had anything to do with the present. Dean Kissick will write—again—about how it’s not art it’s persona that counts and just so long as he himself is briefly featured in the same candied picture, everyone will be happy. It will be criminal, good fun.

The Souvenir Part II (2021) by Joanna Hogg—I liked the first of these films but a remake (without the maimed sadness of Tom Burke’s heroin addict face around a dining table in Venice) just felt pointless and empty. Again, we are in the past, some distant past of England, where mothers and fathers fussing over their daughters is poignant and still important. What the present seems to mean is that these things just can’t be shot in that way anymore, and that all souvenirs to the contrary are nothing more than that: empty social ruin. But Tom Burke’s face did carry something else in the prequel.

Irma Vep (2022) by Olivier Assayas. Everyone knows the world is full of remakes and that this gets boring but the point of cinema’s avoidance of the present, now, is that it constitutes pain-avoidance and a remote symptom of collaborationist suppression. The things Tupitsyn chooses to include in BULK COLLECTION have become unshootable by other directors, who are trying to save their skins (or cats) before the end rather than realizing that the end itself will have been the most beautiful last thing to film. This retread of Irma Vep was good for about five minutes and then we missed Maggy Cheung in the same way we missed Tom Burke. Sure, Olga the cat represents everything else. Show, don’t tell. But then, what is never shown is how just these strategies are by now untold crimes of a contaminated aesthetic ideology.

Crimes Of The Future (2022) by David Cronenberg—although we are assured the film shares only its title with Cronenberg’s 1970 film and is not a remake, we are nonetheless in the same situation as before with a film about the crimes of the future that comes partly from the past and adds nothing to the real picture of what those future (present) crimes really are. The film is coherent, excellent, sexy to an extent, gnarly, watchable, and whatever other attributes viewers pretend to be able to give, but Crimes Of The Future has no relation at all with the present.

I could go on giving examples . . .

The point is that every film I have seen this year except BULK COLLECTION felt evasive. Like it really could have been any film in any year, or in some kind of absolute non-year. In El Planeta one can sense the decision to make sure the film industry is placated and available for next time. This is what gives one nightmares, this kind of decision. Aren’t we past the point of thinking that strategy as beauty is something that has worked, in this supposed future? Sure, that metric remains, but where is its deregulation? Where is the sense that everything has now been shown and told? How can cinema exist alongside the Internet and take so little notice of it, even now? Why are we pretending that the coincidence of will to power and end of the world doesn’t exist as a future crime scene that begs, instead, to be differently filmed?

At least one person made this film, BULK COLLECTION, this film that appears to be a simple memory act. One is inside the addictogenesis itself (screens), an iPhone 8. One is inside the image-based crime scene, let off the hook and not quite. BULK COLLECTION reminds us that the online is an event, the event perhaps of the present, but that it can only be seen from offline, from walking around, from filming. The sections of the film with internet screens, with internet voices over the top, at times seem disorientatingly ‘present’, as if one can can only see the frenzy by walking away, by walking, by being off it (as if this was what film was made for all along). The use of auto-generated subtitles. The flashing protest van laid over the images of the 2020 presidential debate. The gleaming, the sunshine, over the top of podcast discussions of pornography. 

The present is here as pure footage, pure internet film—not just as persona and strategy. It’s what Tupitysn might call the tell or toll of footage. It’s all there. The tolling of these years. The bulk collection.