> 6 frames
You're tuning into Cheers, a newsletter made by Tiffany Xie. This week: a movie a day.
Hello friend,
I’ve been watching a movie a day with my roommate and thinking about a piece my friend Phoebe wrote last year, titled “24 Frames: An Ekphrasis.”
It’s the last installment of her Soupbone newsletter, the newsletter that eventually turned into the Soupbone Collective. I remember reading drafts of the essay, writing comments, moving bits around. It’s strange to think that she published it a year ago already. As I get a little older, past events become both more recent and more distant. Perhaps my memory is clearer, but it also becomes easier to dissociate, to want to be weightless.
As I am now. Weightless, in a sense. No real work to do, stuck inside again. Enlarging small matters just to have something to worry about. The sudden space in my life is how I got around to watching a movie every day. Something to structure the afternoons, to punctuate the day. As a little homage to Phoebe’s essay, and to the film that inspired her essay, Abbas Kiarostami’s 24 Frames, I wanted to write a little bit about the movies I’ve watched this past week.
frame 1
You grow up around something and it feels like nothing.
She can’t leave because she has to take care of her mother but she has to leave. The thing that kept her sane was driving to a strip mall and staring at a glowing rectangular light atop a bank. She must have passed by it a thousand times before it moved her.
I’m sad that I’m missing the cicada exodus in Bloomington but my friend Margaret has sending me beautiful voice memos of their chorus. The sound tricks you into thinking that it’s summer. Maybe that’s been making me a little homesick.
frame 2
If you’re in love with them, why not spend as much time as you can with them? The same four women star in six interlocked films. Sometimes you can do a crazy thing just because it sounds wild and fun, not for any pretensions.
The doctor in the first movie is part of a conspiracy in the next, and the timid scientist is becomes a cult leader. It’s like being a child again, the possibility of reinventing yourself, of pretending, opening up again.
You can’t finish the movie because it has begun to make you fall asleep, but they didn’t make the movie for you to watch it, they made it for themselves, to have fun. Only one of the episodes is a complete story. You were never meant to finish.
frame 3
The world is going to end anyway at the hands of fools, so why not make fun of that. The gloved hand is a betrayal, a wink, a knowing acknowledgement. You’ve seen the doomsday machine. You know the end.
frame 4
Even if the world doesn’t end, it is still in the hands of fools. The world is funny because it is hopeless. No one is good and everybody wants something. How is Frances McDormand so many people at once, Fern from Nomadland and Marge Gunderson from Fargo and now Linda Litzke. She listens from a phone on the couch and starts speaking. A polite lost and found turns to blackmail.
frame 5
Three paranoid men walk through a deserted wasteland. Something like Chernobyl. Suddenly, a sitting room and a working phone. A reminder of why they came to the Zone, why they built cages around themselves. A dog follows them home.
frame 6
Schoolboys walk home in uniform on a hill. You watch them between the houses. Something bright and suburban and familiar, though you’ve never been to Japan. Housewives spreading misinformation, planting misunderstandings as if tending a garden.
Sometimes it’s necessary to recognize that unnecessary platitudes, though they make life bearable, are unnecessary. Why not fart sometimes, and eat rice with your hands, and throw tantrums to get what you want. Say what you mean and don’t wait to text someone back.
Cheers,
Tiffany
Films referenced, in order:
- Columbus, dir. Kogonada
- La Flor, dir. Mariano Llinás
- Dr. Strangelove, dir. Stanley Kubrick
- Burn After Reading, dir. Joel Coen & Ethan Coen
- Stalker, dir. Andrei Tarkovsky
- Good Morning, dir. Yasujirō Ozu