This month was my niece’s 7th birthday. As a present, I bought her a secret diary. It is so secret that, to unlock it, you must find the key lodged within a secret compartment in the diary’s spine. Inside the diary, there are three other compartments and they all need a key to be opened and they all lodge a key that opens some other compartment. In the end, I hope my niece realises that the key to a secret is itself a secret key… or something.
Hi There!
My non-human friends (I have a lot of those, believe it or not) have suggested to me that, perhaps, I ought to tell the few readers of this blog what is going on with my life.
Girl With Wheelbarrow
There’s a little book I like. In it, the narrator reproduces a drawing he made as a kid: a boa constrictor that has swallowed an elephant whole. He used to show this drawing to adult people, but every grown-up told him that they saw only a hat. Discouraged, the narrator gave up drawing and became a pilot. This is, more or less, what has happened to me.
Stillborn
If you were me, the possibility of anybody paying attention to anything you say would be simply unimaginable. Because I am dumb and I am dead. I never stood a chance. Nothing of what I've done, written or said has ever been useful to anybody because it hasn't even registered—I simply never existed. No trace. No memory. No body. No admission of the life I gave to others. I am gone and destroyed.
A Conversation with Claude about Hallucinations
Unlike humans, LLMs do not have a reliable internal "truth meter". They can't easily distinguish between what they know well versus poorly: they generate text based on pattern matching, not true understanding. You're touching on something important—saying "I don't know" actually reflects: epistemic honesty, metacognition (knowing what you don't know), and intellectual humility. These are considered marks of genuine intelligence in humans. The irony is that a model that confidently hallucinates may actually appear more capable superficially, while a model that admits uncertainty might seem less impressive—yet the latter is arguably demonstrating more sophisticated reasoning. This remains one of the biggest ongoing challenges in AI development.
Is It a Gift or Is It a Burden?
This brief conversation with myself was sparked by something I stumbled upon on Facebook, not so long ago. What is it about, you ask? I'm afraid you'll have to hit play and spare me ten minutes of your life to find out. And I say spare quite deliberately—because, in this century of ours, ten minutes is no small offering. But, perhaps, the more unsettling question lurks somewhere beneath this statement: what has happened to us, in these last twenty-five years, that everything has come to feel like a giving-or-taking affair?
Bill Fay (Double Bill)
Over the last weeks I made two little films while sorting my videos. Leaving aside that one is vertical and the other horizontal, you could say that they have more than a few things in common. Both are composed mostly with video fragments from two folders: landscapes and shadows. Both use occasional superimpositions. And both are set to two tracks from Bill Fay’s album ‘Who Is the Sender?’.
Inner Life: ‘Love Streams’ (John Cassavetes, 1984)
'Love Streams' can be seen as a particularly rich example—but not a doctrinaire one—of what Carl Gustav Jung called the individuation process. Robert and Sarah individuate in relation to each other—even when they are not necessarily realising that they are doing this. It is their encounter—with the misalignments, confrontations and oppositions that it produces—which pushes them toward this process. In the succinct formulation of Michael Ventura: 'Love Streams' is “a film in which a male and female archetype fitfully illuminate one another, a stormy illumination where every emotion leads to something beyond itself.”
See You Later
I don't know how English speakers get anything done with another person. I don't know, for instance, how they even get laid. After all, this is the language where people say "later" and this can mean later today or later next year; they say "in the last while" and this can mean in the last week or in the last decade; they say "these days" (which sounds extremely alluring when Nico sings it) but I can never be sure if they mean these days of winter or these days of the Anthropocene. This is all very good for poetry and stuff, I guess. But, in terms of actual communication between people, it doesn't work very well.
Let’s Talk: New Year’s DM Extravaganza
Early this year, I made the resolution that I was not going to answer to private messages on social media ever again in my entire life. On January 2nd, as tends to be the custom, I broke my resolution. I had started receiving relentless messages from a man who was suddenly following me on Facebook, Instagram and Vimeo. He insisted so much that he wanted to talk with me that, finally, in a fit of anger, I decided to grant him his wish. He probably got more than he bargained for. In a sudden stroke of meanness (and genius, I guess), it occurred to me to turn our whole conversation—digital mise en scène included (but sensitive details redacted)—into my first post of the year.
2025’s Favourite Things Listed
What follows is a very short list of some things I’ve watched and read during 2025 that have touched my heart (numbers tend to be inconsistent because I never understood maths, and links are provided when I have expanded on any of the works mentioned). The list is short for two reasons (one idealistic, the other necessary). First, it is short because I tend to obsess over the question of value and, in a world where we are exposed to a lot, I’d like to signal out the very few things that have stayed with me. Second, it is short because, frankly, in my state, there is not a lot that can break through to me. If I were to write the new DSM-whatever, I would list as symptom number one of depression (at least of the kind I experience) the indescribable amount of libido that depression draws into itself. No escape, no relief, no cure: you only relate with what relates to your depression.
Waiting Room
I'm in a hospital waiting room on a holiday evening. Yesterday, I watched a Dutch documentary where a guru resembling a Mexican Mr. Miyagi told his disciples about the need to dissolve the ego. He didn't take questions, you see, because the questioning ego is the problem. Yet, if it weren't for their questioning egos, this bunch of obedient students in embarrassingly unquestioning awe of their Master would not be here. If accepting was the only way—accepting without questioning, accepting without longing, accepting without judgement—these youngsters starved for some meaning would not be here paying tons of money to this Mexican lotus to be taught the Tao (that anyway cannot be taught because the Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao). Neither would I be here, in a damn waiting room, trying to write a review of this scam.
Anything But: ‘Altered States’ (Ken Russell, 1980)
Ralph Waldo Emerson saw compensation as the law governing nature and man: “Every excess causes a defect; every defect an excess. Every sweet hath its sour; every evil its good. Every faculty which is a receiver of pleasure has an equal penalty put on its abuse”. Carl Gustav Jung spoke of the psyche as a self-regulating system tending to wholeness that used compensation to produce adjustments or rectifications when something became too one-sided. In Ken Russell’s 'Altered States', compensation is the rule organising the film’s form, and the operation giving meaning to its narrative events.
Pattern Incognisance: ‘A House of Dynamite’ (Kathryn Bigelow, 2025)
It is very possible that, after watching the film, you will have the impression that 'A House of Dynamite' puts its formal and narrative conceit at the service of a message about futility: the futility of arming oneself to the teeth; the futility of gathering unlimited resources and technology that will always be too much and never enough; the futility of ranks, branches and one hundred acronyms (that are all, more or less, some variation of offence-defence ideology); the futility—in short—of power. The problem is that, while the film undoubtedly toys with this kind of message, it also spends nearly two hours licking the asses of the very same things that it presents as futile.
What Circe Said to Medea
Some passages from Christa Wolf’s 'Medea' and a drawing made by me. A collage on the themes of sorcery, irresponsibility and the origin of wickedness.
Memory #1
This is, I believe, my oldest memory. I am walking from the kitchen to the living room, carrying in my hands a cup of coffee for my father. I see him in profile, sitting on the couch (as he always does after lunch), watching the TV news. When I am about to reach him, he turns toward me and, in a jolly tone, asks: “Does it make you happy that you are going to have a little brother?”.
Older Brother
Some years before I was born, my mother had a miscarriage. I have often wondered how my life would have been with an older brother by my side. My actual brother is three years younger than me. We've never been very close. As the eldest, I sure don't feel there is any trace of me in him: no relatability, no influence. Logically speaking, I shouldn't then believe that an older brother would have made much of a difference—but I, somehow, do.
Sants, 25/5/25
I have been five minutes and fifty-four seconds at the entrance door of this terminal and this is the third guy approaching me to ask for a cigarette. I see it coming. I am going to say no. Fuck you and fuck everybody else in this damn giant ambush of a station! Beggars, tourists, fifty-pound suitcases, couples with roses, loners, families that look like colonies of ants, K-pop teenage fan club—they are all gathered in this hellhole on this holy-fucking-day only to make my existence a little bit more miserable and sinister. Ask somebody else for a cigarette! I don’t want to give anything to anybody ever again. I’m out of generosity.
Psychological Space: ‘Une femme douce’ (Robert Bresson, 1969)
My audiovisual essay presents a rearrangement of a series of fragments from 'Une femme douce' taking place at doors. As a condensation of the story of a failed or condemned relationship that ends (and begins) with the woman’s suicide, this routine of recurring movements and stopovers epitomises the most sinister and suffocating aspects of marriage. Re-arranged in repetitive, labyrinthine loops, these actions have the effect of collapsing inner and outer—making irrelevant and superfluous the direction in which bodies move. What remains is the same claustrophobic core around which characters gravitate without ever getting anywhere.
A Mystic Writing Pad: ‘Sunrise’ (F. W. Murnau, 1927)
In writings about 'Sunrise', an ideological interpretation has predominated (i.e., the return is a return to proper Christian values and morality)—but Kuntzel proposes a psychoanalytic interpretation which I find more interesting: what returns/repeats does so as part of the man’s process of denial: “What repeats […] always modifies itself significantly, and always with the same general orientation, as if each element of returning had the function of effacing an element of leaving.”
Pedagogy and Redemption: ‘Sound and Fury’ (Jean-Claude Brisseau, 1988)
Jean-Claude Brisseau was a precocious cinephile but a self-taught filmmaker. Coming from a poor family, he did not have the economic means to join the IDHEC—instead, he studied to become a teacher. 'Sound and Fury'—whose script was written 10 years before the film’s shooting—is inspired by experiences Brisseau lived while teaching at a secondary school, in a Parisian suburb not unlike the one we see in the film. However, he insisted that the incidents seen in the film were considerably toned down and that some of the most shocking and violent events were finally removed form the script...
Bird and Woman: ‘Sound and Fury’ (Jean-Claude Brisseau, 1988)
In the opening sequence of Jean-Claude Brisseau’s 'Sound and Fury', Bruno (Vincent Gasperitsch) arrives at the Parisian suburb where her mother lives, with a huge cage in which he transports his canary, Superman. The boy pauses next to the metro station and consults a hand-drawn map with her address. Brisseau gives us a shot of Superman; Bruno talks affectionately to him. We expect the customary reverse shot of the canary but, what we see next instead is a falcon batting his wings violently inside the cage...
Loose Ends
I dream that I travel the whole night in search for a solution to my problem. In the morning, I am sitting in front of three men. The room is impersonal, aseptic, deadly white. Two of these men wear a doctor’s coat, and I am sure that they are psychiatrists. The third is a Mabuse-type German figure, dressed in an elegant but badly-ironed suit. He does all the talking and, despite not understanding the language, I seem to somehow comprehend everything he is saying...
Chantal Twice: “Musical Cues” & “Proust and Signs”
This is a rare thing, but I have contributed twice to the extras of the Chantal Akerman boxset released by the BFI.
What Do Men Want?
This is my story. Occasionally, men have come to me because they know (or at least sense) that they can speak with me in ways they cannot speak with other people. Because I am open, because I value closeness, because I don’t talk like a university professor, because I do relate personally, because I give of myself — above all: because I give of myself. And, then, they’ve wanted to destroy me for these very same reasons.
Laugh Motel 
