writer
screenwriter
film / philosopher at large
writer
screenwriter
film / philosopher at large
METAFILMS
Philosopher Football (2019)
That’s Choreography, Baby! (2019)
An’ The Arse Saw The Angel (2020)
Spaceman From Alabama (2021)
Chinema Parodeeznuts (2024)
What is a metafilm?
Put simply, a metafilm might be best understood as a mash-up of two or more moving images to produce a third, often taking the sound, but sometimes the imagery, from one work and splicing it with another not unlike canon-pairing. Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010) would be the most infamous example of a metafilm, having been pieced together from hundreds of other films, although I would be inclined to refer to The Clock instead as an ontograph: a series, usually a list, of disconnected sounds and/or images held together by a mutual idea: in Marclay’s case, time.
How do metafilms differ from ontographs, then?
Metafilms, on the one hand, take their inspiration from my understanding of Shaun Wilson’s notion of metamodernism (in the lead up to Trevor), in that metamodernism junctures an experience in between objective and subjective values by creating a third ‘unjective’ state of both and neither simultaneously. Metafilms also take some influence from the notion of metamemes, which are memes made about memes (made about memes). Ontographs, on the other hand, tend to repeat the same thematic by proliferating the same difference over and over again not unlike semantic satiation, and as if one were to look at the same painting, but from different points of view: the painting never really changes, only the perspective of it does.
What am I doing here?
Chances are you probably stumbled across this website, or this webpage, in particular, and the word metameme tickled your fancy; chances are slim that you actually found one of the QR codes on the back of a bootleg DVD masquerading as Chinema Parodeeznuts (2024), which contains five metafilms of my own creation. In the case of the latter, there are only 5 copies in existence a la Matthew Barney’s infamous Cremaster Cycle (1994-2002), one of which you may or may not now be in possession of.
Why the secrecy?
It’s mostly a bit of fun, but, alas, due to the unusual nature of films made out of other films, their copyright is questionable at best, so they can only really be artistically appropriated and privately viewed as such.
What if I really want to see them?
Look, they’re not the most intellectual of films, but if you really, really, really want to watch them, you’re more than welcome to drop me a message and arrange some sort of private screening, at your own expense, and preferably in a gallery open to the general public.