Rev Left Radio - All Too Human: Storytelling, Filmmaking, and Class Consciousness

Episode Date: March 13, 2023

Michael Workman is a talented filmmaker from Montana, and is also the Director of Features Programming at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, as well as a board member of Means TV. Michael joins Breht to discuss his films, Means TV, Soviet and American Cinema, Stanely Kubrick, how film can be used to raise class consciousness, storytelling, the lives of our fathers, and much more.  Michael's latest film, Meantime, will be streaming on Means TV and has won a bunch of awards like the Best Short Film Award at Telluride Mountainfilm, Best Short Documentary Award at BendFilm Festival and the Vimeo Staff Pick Award at Palm Springs ShortFest. Michael's website: https://michaeltworkman.com/ Join and Support Means TV here: https://means.tv/ Check out Michaels film Meantime here: https://means.tv/programs/meantime Outro music: "Fashion" by Nicholas Merz Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, I have on my friend and comrade Michael Workman to discuss his newest film released through Means TV called Meantime. He also has some other films on Meant TV as well, which we'll get to in this episode. But we talk about his work. We talk about cinematography more broadly. We touch on Soviet cinema. and American cinema, some of the influences there. We talk about the cultural malaise that we're in that seems to only vomit out reiterations, prequels and sequels,

to movies that used to be interesting to us and how there seems to be a certain general cultural malaise that is giving rise to this broader cinematic malaise, which is also, of course, connected to the incentive structures of capitalism. We talk about our fathers, mental illness, addiction, how men of that generation in particular were sort of deformed by capitalism and the way that that manifests, especially later in their lives. This conversation takes a lot of interesting detours and side roads.

We just touch on a lot of stuff and hopefully overall it's a moving and informative episode about cinema, the human condition, living under late capitalist conditions, and much more. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Michael Workman, who has a new movie, a new documentary called Meantime, released on Means TV as well as his other work on Means TV. Definitely support Means TV if you don't already. Here's my conversation with him about cinema, human storytelling, and so much more. Enjoy. I'm Michael Workman. I am a documentary filmmaker from Missoula, Montana, now currently based in the heart of tech dystopia in San Francisco. Nice. Well, welcome to the show.

It's an honor to have you on. We met through our shared contacts at Means TV, I believe, and you introduced me to one of your short films called Meantime, which we're going to discuss today in this episode, but you said you're from Missoula, Montana, eh? What's it like growing up in Montana? I really love Montana. I mean, it's changing a lot right now. Gentrification has hit it really, really hard, especially in Missoula, which has always kind of been like a college town with like lots of artists and a pretty like diverse mix of cultures, not necessarily. cultures beyond white cultures but but you know nonetheless like lots of artists and whatnot but yeah

I love Montana it's a hard place to leave but it kind of got pushed out more or less just because of rising costs of living there and film work is is not great there's a lot of westerns that are filmed in in Montana now and the pay is really low and I really just don't want to be participating in that no shade on people who's got to make a living but um yeah so i had to get out yeah i feel terrible for people who live in these you know beautiful places or even just these unique places around the world or around the country that are being inundated by like you know coastal people that can now do remote work and rich people who can afford to leave and buy up all this property so people growing up in like their hometown in missoula or

you know even like something like austin texas now having to deal with being priced out of their own community because rich assholes from other states are flooding in. That's just, that must, that must suck. Yeah, it was brutal. I mean, there's a lot of good organizing work in Missoula going on to fight gentrification, but it was also just like the city basically just hands over, hands over the entire town to people coming in to developers and whatnot. And then it's like a very liberal city, but, you know, it's, it's, they, they just, uh, you have lips service to helping people and then at the same time are really just giving tax breaks to big corporations to come in and build really dumb developments and then turn every building into a brewery. It's pretty brutal. You just wish that there was a little more creativity

in gentrifying, especially in the West. It's just like, all right, we got like the Patagonia stores and like the upscale like Western wear and then we just have brewery. every single block. And I love a good craft beer, but yeah, too much is too much. No, me too. I mean, there's a lot of good beers in Montana, but there's like a certain point where I just, we don't need that many more. The market is flooded.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, quickly, I just, I love Montana as well. It's the only other place other than Nebraska and Iowa that I've lived for any period of time. I spent a summer when I was a little bit younger up in Calispell, Montana, which I loved. And then I spent like a big chunk of my senior year in high school about 45 minutes outside of Billings, Montana, in a little town called Hardin. And I had some great experiences, but just the natural beauty of Montana and the sparseness of the population in that area of the country. It's just a really, it's unreplicable anywhere else really that I've been. Yeah, it's a really special place.

And I think that's like a, you know, we'll get into it more when we talk about my work. But that's like definitely a part of what my. ethos is about when I make films here is just to try to like complicate the narratives around the west and especially around Montana which just I think unfortunately has been siloed into this really fallacious kind of like cowboy western uh stereotype that was something that growing up in Missoula like as like a punk I had always like rejected and still I have that, that angst towards it. And I think, you know, that's one of the frustrations with, like, now with shows like

Yellowstone and whatnot, which are super, super popular and filmed here. It's just, like, continuing to codify this really, really obnoxious and I think really wrong-headed stereotypical view of Montana, which is just a really, really fascinating place culturally as long as well as like from a standpoint of just natural beauty yeah yeah absolutely my my time there was spent on on the kind of the edge of the crow reservation and so for me the cultural mixing of like the white you know cowboyish culture whatever white rural culture mixing with the indigenous culture um i i found it to be a very enlightening life experience to spend some time in that area but yeah i can definitely see it

how how certain stereotypes and tropes about that part of the country become really obnoxious for people that are born there and then lure in a certain sort of person that has this stereotypical view of what they think this place is all about and how that must be incredibly annoying. Yeah, they kind of, they manifest the fantasy that they want to live. But, you know, to be fair, like we all do to some extent. Sure. Well, let's go ahead and get into your, the point of this entire conversation and your work

specifically. As I said earlier, one of the, my introduction to your work was through that short film Meantime. So I was hoping we could talk about that. So can you talk about that film, the inspiration behind it, and how you got in the contact with Means TV to release it? Yeah. So Meantime is a short documentary that I made over COVID. And it's a film that's really about my dad, but it's also about our relationship. And I think like the impetus for the film. kind of like the way the film is structured is about this kind of limited time where I was able to be back home in Montana and to help my dad through some challenging health issues that with memory and with other things that were really like a sorry it's hard talking about

this sometimes but yeah it was just a really challenging time and I basically wanted to document that And I wanted to talk to my dad about, you know, his familial guilt about like struggling with addiction and having to kind of like leave the family when I was a kid. And I think the goal was like kind of an excuse for me to try to create like a space for forgiveness for my dad. And I think that the film kind of shows the challenges. and in some ways, like, the impossibility of doing that. But, yeah, it's a very, like, slow and meditative and melancholic film. But I also, like all of my work, I'm really interested in showing kind of the violence of capitalism in people's lives in a very, like, personal way. And not, I'm not necessarily making films that I would consider, like, good.

uh like political education but i think that i'm making films that i'm more interested in the emotional toll and the physical toll that capitalism takes on people's real lived experiences um and so this is this film was uh a part of that really yeah yeah and that that uh film was was deeply moving deeply relatable to me there's that old quote from henry david thoreau which is sometimes overused but the idea that most men live lives of quiet desperation and for my father and many men of his generation I think that that is absolutely true and the addiction and the deaths of despair that we're living through now the various epidemics of despair and suicide and drug addiction of various sorts are about that I think but a lot of the men in that generation also

they have trouble relating to their own feelings as well as connecting up their their individual personal sort of depravities and tragedies to a broader structural system so a lot of people in general

will internalize the failures which are often the catalyst to them are often structural they'll internalize them as individual failings and sort of

live a decreased deformed version of their own life and I felt like some of that came through very deeply and in a way

that was deeply relatable for me of my experiences with my father in that film so i really appreciated that side of it and again showing like not not bludgeoning somebody over the head with like facts about how capitalism is bad but just showing the human side the human consequences of that broader system um i think can be a really interesting and evocative and moving way into a discussion about these broader structures yeah i think of it kind of like as a form of agitation you know like it's it's not necessarily the education point, but it's the point in which we can start having these

discussions and showing like our collective frustration and the collective violence that capitalism like wields on us. And I think, you know, film and documentary is a really good way to do that because it kind of works in the same way as like a one-on-one would, like in an organizing sense, you know, where you're really trying to like pull out. the emotion to get people to really feel the pain that surrounds them that we're also like socialized out of survival to to push down you know and to to repress and I think you know going off what you're saying earlier like that's I couldn't have said it better myself but my dad I think is a product of especially this like post-war boomer mentality um of of

repressing your feelings and of like this hyper capitalist kind of uh trying to strive to get ahead and you know when he was growing up he was a very sensitive he still is a very sensitive person somebody who's like very deeply in tuned with his emotions and and i think he was really punished by his father and by the other men around him for for being sensitive you know and i think that's really kind of the crux of his trauma and things everything after that is kind of like based on that and then because of his PTSD because of his traumas you know um he has a hard time fitting into like a work regiment into you know being able to work an insane amount of hours um like that causes panic attacks and he doesn't have the kind of um he doesn't have the mental health resources that

he needs and that like a humane society would have you know and I think that that that to me is like really where kind of the crux of like the capitalist argument within the film lies is just the the inhumanity of not giving people the resources they need to live a dignified and fulfilling life and and and it doesn't even make sense from the standpoint of like trying to put somebody into the labor force because my dad is just just becomes part of the surplus population you know somebody who's like just barely getting by on welfare programs um which are humiliating to to navigate and is a full time job in itself you know just to get the bare fucking minimum oh yeah absolutely they're the whole thing is designed to make it absolutely

punishing to get any help at all um my my dad you know is similar story, and I'm sure our dad's stories, they're individual to us, but I'm sure other people out there resonate with them when they're listening to this. You know, my dad worked his whole life incredibly, you know, hard, and he had a lot. He was also very sensitive, and I think that was, you know, punished, as you said, with your father at a young age, and that came in the form of many sorts of traumas, physical, sexual abuse, et cetera, that he was never able to deal with in any real way. He was a talented guy, and at a certain point in his, like, 30s, you know, he was making

pretty good money, being like a finance guy at a car dealership, but as his life kind of continued on and his addictions got out of control, he obviously lost all of that and spent the last several years of his, I mean, several decades of his life, just kind of puttering around from low wage job to low wage job, hiding alcohol and drinking all throughout the entire shift just to get by, you know, and working at like, at the end of his life, I mean, working at like a pizza hut, you know, just trying to barely get through the work shift. and eventually at the very end of his life when his whole body was shutting down he went through this protracted period of trying to get disability

he couldn't work anymore it was literally killing him he couldn't even stand up at a certain point let alone walk around for eight hours a day on his feet in the kitchen but he couldn't also afford not to work because he was in kentucky at the time no way he's getting any help he went through this long year-long disability fight that was torturous to him and he died before that that even came through and he was just really sort of disillusioned i mean he believed in america he believed in capitalism he believed that if people work hard you can get ahead and that he believed that he paid taxes his entire life and then when he needed some money back some help

from his society that he contributed to his entire life it was just not there and that was right before right before he died um so it's it's a brutal brutal uh society we live in you know yeah i mean I'm so sorry to hear that and it's also just like it's so deeply infuriating like the really like the toll that this has on such a large scale that goes unrecognized you know like this these stories these experiences that like in a lot of ways like if we had support for our fellow humans these wouldn't be real issues you know I mean everybody's still going to have have like mental health crises. They're going to have all of these traumas and issues. But if we can just like give them, give people the resources they need to be able to take care of themselves,

it's like, you know, our parents wouldn't have to suffer this way. And we wouldn't have to suffer this way. And so, yeah, it's just deeply, it's deeply infuriating, you know. And I think that, you know, our goal as organizers, too, is to continue to like make the political personal to continue to like to take these these ideas that we have about the world that we want to build away from capitalism and and make them deeply deeply personal because i think that's what moves people definitely yeah and of course that trauma that that people suffer gets handed down if if you know our dads weren't able to cope and deal and come out a better version of themselves you know that doesn't just end with them it it gets down it affects our childhood and then now we

have to do the extra work of dealing with our own shit and dealing with the shit that we got handed down, break that cycle. And I also, I really think of suffering in terms of like necessary versus unnecessary suffering. You were talking about like, you know, people are still going to deal with mental health issues, et cetera. And I think that a certain part of being alive is to suffer in these various ways, right? Where these finite beings, it hurts and it's painful to exist in the world. Everybody we love dies until it's our turn. That's like necessary suffering that all human beings in whatever system or society will have to deal with. But then capitalism adds this entire layer of utterly unnecessary forms of suffering

on top of the already extreme amounts of suffering of just existing in the cosmos. And it's that unnecessary suffering that is so cruel, so needless, and it deforms so many lives. And it's intrinsic to the way that the system as a whole operates. And I think, you know, I think it's kind of helpful to think about that because sometimes you know people on the right will say you guys just want to make life easy for everybody you know you want to make you want to nerf the world you know you want to

help the weak and the vulnerable and you don't want anybody to have to work for what they have or you know struggle or anything like that and you know sometimes suffering builds character and like yeah suffering builds character you know watching the people you love die and having to live in this in this world they're suffering already there but do we have

to add poverty and not being able to afford health care and going bankrupt and all this shit not being able to access you know mental health services we have to add that on top is that necessary of course it's not but that's that's the that's the system that we're that we're in yeah and it's also it's it's just like such a waste of human potential you know yes yes it's like our dads could be such incredible pieces of society and have so much to give yes to the world like my dad is like a very very sensitive person. He was a he was a mental health nurse. He worked really hard to get his RN with fighting

through dyslexia, which is really, really challenging and got to that point and was just beaten down by this neoliberalizing of the health care system where they were just cutting nurses. They were creating more paperwork, more computer work, which he struggled with. And then that led to a panic attack and a stroke, which was the impetus for this film, you know. Like, he is, he's an incredibly sensitive person. He's also an incredibly smart person. I mean, I think a lot of my class consciousness comes from him. He was, he wouldn't consider himself a socialist back then, now.

He would call himself more of an anarchist. Or he likes to say anarchist, which I love. And I think it, you know, his like deep mistrust of the United States and, of imperialism and of war mongering and capitalism. You know, that was like deeply central to my understanding of class consciousness. And then that paired with seeing him struggle his whole life to navigate the welfare system to just struggle to even get, you know, the necessary addiction treatment that he needed, you know, which is a whole other thing and it's incredibly expensive. and also like the you know he's he's tried to get into group homes before and all of these things and like okay the waiting list is five years you know it's just like what is this um but yeah it's just a i think it's just a huge um it's a huge massacre of of human potential absolutely you know very well said and that doesn't even like we're not even talking about the way it it you know destroys him human potential when there's a proliferation of bullshit jobs and people working and, you know,

advertising and marketing and all of these places where it's, and, you know, scientists having to work for Facebook to be data scientists, you know, like that is like a whole other level too of like wasted potential intellect and things that people have to give to the world that they're unable to. Yes, yes, absolutely. Well, let's go ahead and move on and talk. talk more about the film itself and other films because you have you have multiple other films that you've released as well and i kind of just want to talk we've talked about obviously capitalism the destructive effect it has on human psychologies and families addiction and mental health but what other themes do you explore in meantime as well as your other

films and how do you choose um to explore them through the medium of film in particular because i'm sure that as a different way of expressing ideas that than other mediums might offer for sure Yeah, I mean, I think I gravitate towards working through trauma as like a theme. I think it's something that has an inherent arc built into it. It's something where people can deeply relate to the characters or the people on screen because they're trying to dig deep into themselves to better understand. themselves and to like move through trauma and i think that that has you know i didn't really think i don't really think about that consciously when i'm picking stories but i think it comes

kind of subconsciously to me um i made this film called from parts unknown it was kind of my first short doc that did well on the festival circuit um and it's about like an underground professional wrestler in Spokane who started this professional wrestling league called Spokane Anarchy Wrestling. And he was working through trauma of his dad being murdered by police in front of him. And he worked through that trauma through his backyard wrestling persona, which was like the madman. And he kind of like manifested that in himself and used that as like a way to feel something when He couldn't feel something, but also as a way to express his struggles with depression and whatnot.

And the film really centers around him having to navigate leaving this thing he loves because he destroyed his body more or less at a very young age. And so I think that film and my other films are really about people who are trying to work through trauma and overcome something. Like another film I made with a good friend of mine and an incredible artist from Oakland, Adrian Borell, called Favor and Grace, is about a woman in Vallejo, California, whose nephew was murdered by the police. This is Ronnell Foster. He was on his bike and a police officer tried to pull him over for not having a light to do a supposed safety stop. and he got scared and ran away and the cop chased him down and murdered him. It's a really, really brutal thing. Balejo is one of the most violent police departments in California.

In Northern California, is the most violent police department. But Angela Sullivan, who's Ronnell Foster's aunt, is just an incredibly powerful person. She's like a force in the Bay Area community of people who have been affected. by police violence, you know, and the film really follows her trying to get justice for Ronnell, but, you know, working through that trauma through her solidarity with other moms and victims of police violence in the community. And so I think that comes up a lot. I think meantime is definitely about that. It's kind of like the most like pure form of like this idea of working through trauma.

And when I make documentaries, I feel like sometimes they're an excuse for me to also, like, create a situation where I'm, like, intervening, you know? Like, I think a lot of times people look at documentary as, like, the fly on the wall kind of way where it's like, I'm not, you know, intervening in people's lives. I'm just, like, recording what happens, right? but with like meantime really like the film is an excuse to work through this trauma right it's like an excuse to connect with my dad on a deeper level and it's really like more of an intervention and documenting what happens when like the camera comes in conflict conflict with somebody um and i don't mean that in a bad way but it really is like documenting kind of this like this conflict and this situation that's created and then And we document, you know, what happens once that situation is created, more or less. And I think it's like, I think about it as like creating, creating a situation in which hopefully, like, revelations can happen on screen that people can deeply relate to.

Because I think when you go really deep and you're, you are vulnerable, like, that's what people really, really connect with, you know? And that's something I just love in cinema. in general. I think it's something that cinema is uniquely good at doing. And so I think I really focus on that a lot in my work. Yeah, absolutely. What did your, what was your dad's feelings about the film when he finally got to watch it? I assume that he watched it. Yeah, it's, that's a complicated one. I feel like documentary is also like an ethical mind field. I think it can be easily very exploitive of people's stories and you know there's a lot of conversations in a documentary film world that I feel like are more like liberal and and superficial but I do think a lot of

the conversations around ethics and the conversations around you know using or exploiting people's trauma are very real and need to be taken very seriously and it's something that I struggle a lot with while making meantime and I still kind of struggle with. I think my dad agreed to be in this film because he wanted to help me, you know? I don't think he necessarily

wanted to be like, I want to share my story. I think for him, it's not necessarily like the trauma that's hard, but it's that's hard to talk about. It's something that he's pretty comfortable talking about. But it's also just like, you know, it's like,

seeing yourself on screen and hearing yourself on screen, you know? And, and, you know, with, like, after his stroke, he's had, like, some, like, some challenges, like, with speaking and new ticks. And so I think it's hard for him to see that. And I totally understand that. And, I mean, like, there is a kind of unfair power imbalance in the film in that, like, I'm directing it. And also, I have control over how I come off. but my dad doesn't necessarily have that control.

So anyways, back to your question about how he feels about it. When I showed him the film, he was basically like, it's a good film, you did a great job, but I don't want to watch it again, you know? And I think that like that was probably as good as like I could think, you know? But I think it's hard because for me it's like I think of the film as like a, a it's almost kind of like a love letter to him you know totally it's like it's I'm trying to like manifest my perspective of my dad and in some ways it's like a desperate cry to show him how much

I respect him you know and there's almost like an impossibility to that but I think that in the end like that's that was probably like my deep deep goal with it and so and I think it's like that's kind of me and my dad's relationship is like his depression goes so deep there's nothing that I can really say necessarily to him to make him hear what I'm saying if that makes sense to make him hear how much like I love him absolutely you get that one of the things my dad would what one of the ways he dealt with his trauma was to make everything into a joke to the point where you could not have a serious conversation with him about anything that was deep like it was obviously the defencing the defense mechanism that he propped up so when you would try

to especially towards the end of his life when we knew it was coming to an end you wanted to kind like talk about some of the tragedies of his life and you know kind of like ask some questions and stuff and he was he wanted to be there for that and he wanted to open up almost but he was so trained after decades of these ways of not fessing up and not dealing with that stuff that he couldn't help himself but to distract by throwing out these you know silly little jokes he's a hilarious man um and humor was obviously something that he a mask that he wore if you will to to get around um you know in the world and it was effective for him but that's one of the ways that he dealt with it is to when it got too deep he would he would make a joke and it would be a

red herring that would stop the conversation more or less you know yeah totally yeah i feel like we all have those defense mechanisms you know and and i think in some ways it's like my dad's was to like it's almost like to not acknowledge the thing you know and to like continue on a path forward like if but then I think there's something and maybe this is like goes to people that I'm drawn to to make films about is there's some people who who just bear it out outward you know and I think my dad is one of those people he's one of those people that his face says a lot and and he's open with these things and he's open with exploring these things and at the same time he's reserved in other ways but that also i think is a similarity with um jesse who is the

wrestler in my film about underground wrestling is he's a really really emotionally um intelligent person in a space where people really try to repress that and not talk about about it. And so I feel like I'm also kind of drawn to people who, in spite of their circumstances, are able to, like, speak truth to their emotions. And I think that that's something that, like, is just deeply relatable and is also very, very noble and terrifying to do, especially if you're a man in this society, you know, like, we are violently socialized. to repress these things. Yes. Yeah, definitely. Well, let's go ahead and zoom out a little bit and talk about, you know, film more broadly.

And one of the questions that I wanted to ask you is how can the sort of artful and emotional cinema that you make and, of course, others make as well, how can that sort of cinema play a role in building class consciousness and solidarity? How do you see those two things going together? Yeah, I mean, I think for me

there's kind of like two forms of at least if we're talking about documentary there's kind of like two approaches to it one I think is the more traditional informational form something that's like closer to journalism or is closer to like

historical nonfiction and then there's like documentary that's focused more on like people and people's stories and storytelling and for me I think those two things, they serve different purposes. Like one is more focused on political education towards class consciousness. And then I think the other is towards agitational purposes for class consciousness

and building solidarity around relationship building. And I think that in documentary as an art form is an art form that's based around relationship building and is based around similar principles to work. organizing and building, you know, rapport with people, building trust with people, getting to relate to each other deeply, and then doing something with that. And so I think with cinema that's based in emotion and based in storytelling, it's a really, really great tool for agitation, a really great tool for relating to people, really like, all over the world to understanding their internal struggle and their

internal relationship to capitalism to be able to relate to all different types of people which I think helps build solidarity where we can see our differences in experience but we can also see the things that we deeply relate to and I think that goes back to the importance of like digging really deep in films into people's psyches into like what

what their traumas are what their vulnerabilities are Because I think when we reveal those things to each other, we relate in really deep ways and we build trust and we build good faith, you know, even if we may have different views on something. And so I think to me, I really think about like cinema as like a, in relation to organizing and in relation to the A-A part of the A-E-I-O-U, you know, like the agitational part. I think it's really, really essential. I think one of the challenges, though, that we need to overcome on the left is to really figure out how we can get these films out into the world, you know, and to get them seen on a mass scale because it's really, really hard to compete with things like Netflix and whatnot, and sometimes things get through on those platforms,

but a lot of the times they're very, like, sanitary, they're cleaned up, They're not necessarily like taking more overt kind of like stances on capitalism. And so I think that thinking through like how we can break through that is really challenging. I think that's one of the things like going back to talking about Means TV. That's something that I'm excited about as like a form of experimentation with how to get leftist work made and distributed. without compromising our values. But I think the challenge of that is really like we're living in their rules. You know, like we live within their world.

We live in the world of capitalism. Netflix rules the world. They make trash. And people watch it. And they even hate it. Like I barely ever talk to people who are like watching a lot of things on Netflix and being like, oh, like it's so good. They're just like, yeah, you know, I watch this thing on like whatever Abercrombie and Fitch.

the fourth fucking fire festival documentary and whatnot and it's just like it's it's drivel um but i think that when people see like artful films films that really dig deep into our emotions they do respond to them you know and and i think that you know there's other countries in which they've been able to better um i would say like train their audiences to be more open to different types of art to be open to different types of filmmaking through like public broadcasting and whatnot that have like robust you know free programming of like world cinema and art cinema and things that you know push the forum and are challenging and may not allow you to shut your brain off to enjoy them but your enjoyment can come through like critically engaging

with them and really like thinking about what you are uh watching and i think that's really important i think it's something that like you know other like socialist experiments have really tried to do too especially early on even in like the u sars like think about how to build like a culture a critical culture that can consume lots of different kinds of art and and to be able to like push the art form and to build a society around people who are really deeply engaged with understanding different art forms and to be open to them. And that's something that's like, that gets me excited about organizing and building a new world out of this capitalist hellscape.

Yeah. Yeah, well said. And I totally agree with that point that we have to build our own culture and our own mechanisms of replicating and purveying our cultural products. As hard as that is in the belly of the beast and with all the components. modification and the corporate behemoths and the shared monopolies and trying to break through his almost impossible but whether that's an intellectual culture and artistic culture even like a sports culture you know like there's there's always these intimations in other parts of the world

perhaps where these sort of like soccer clubs could turn into their own little cultural hubs of various political worldviews and ways of viewing things and i do think one of the tasks that we have our generation of socialists and revolutionaries have is to continue to try to build up this capacity because one of the things having our own culture allows us to do is tell our own stories whether that's you know podcast movies or any other form of cultural production that you can think music to be able we are storytelling animals and ideological hegemony is about having a hegemonic lock on the sort of stories we tell ourselves and breaking through that and creating our own narratives and telling our own stories is, I think, a really crucial foundational thing

we have to do to build up the sort of class consciousness that can turn into organized political movements, et cetera. And I think we're seeing little hints of that appearing over the last several years, especially. And Means TV, I think, is one of the mechanisms that is trying to do precisely that. And that's why I think it's an invaluable resource and example for everybody on the left and to give voice to artists like you that, you know, might not ever be able to break into a large mainstream, you know, movie, shared monopoly, whatever, you can get, you can tell your story and you can get out your artistic vision in a place that has your values and that is working with other artists to continue to promote those values. And I think

that's really important. Yeah. And I think like one thing I'd like to add is that like in the spirit of like scientific socialism like we need to be experimenting with different ways of distributing and funding art you know within our means and i think that that's something that means tv is exciting to me about like it may not be perfect yet but it's like one of the first times that we're trying something new we're trying to create a way in which you know people who are making films and also making other types of content on the left are able to, you know, connect with each other, make work together, and then hopefully like at some point fund new work. You know, I think that that's one of the impasses for filmmakers on the left is one,

it's like, unfortunately, we're few and far between. It's very isolating being in the filmmaking world on the left. And so means and other things like that are a way for us to connect with each other, to work together, and to help continue to make work that is critical of capitalism, but also is true to ourselves, whatever that is, even if it's not work that's like overtly critical to capitalism, just work that we want to make. And I think that, you know, other things that we're trying to do at means that are exciting to me is we're pooling, you know, profit. from the co-op and trying to put that into funding new work, new films that co-op members basically can pitch like a grant would. But then co-op members decide kind of what projects get funding and then help those projects get made. And especially for projects that are basically in their infancy, which is where most projects die. Most films die before they, you know,

even get one shot on the screen and a lot of times that comes down to you know them not being able to get funding for the necessary resources to start that film and so that's one thing we're like experimenting with and like hopefully we can get you know a few films made and and see where that goes and then go back and think about what worked and what didn't and then try to do better next time you know but we got to start somewhere and i think that's what's really exciting to me about means definitely and if and if anybody out there listening you know, likes this idea, likes that sort of project, likes that sort of vision, you can definitely become a subscriber to Means TV to help support that idea,

to help support that culture grow, that mechanism grow, and in sort of like it's never going on the left, you know, even as like a podcaster, I often think, like, if I could, if I could, if I could be like the best right wing podcaster ever, like there's so much money sloshing around that they will make it rain on even somewhat articulate people that want to, you know, voice the most reprehensible reactionary ideas, you know, like the Matt Walsh's of the world,

the Candace Owens of the world, the entire T.P. USA. I mean, we can go down the line. These people are showered with money to talk that sort of shit, right? On the left, we do not have anything like that. There's no big money that wants to finance us. There's no advertisers scrambling to promote their stuff on our outlets. And so we're going to have to do it by ourselves, amongst ourselves, for ourselves. We're not getting any outside help.

And I think that's our strength. I mean, it's a weakness, technically. We don't have the ability to break through like right-wing commentators and creators have that get money reigned on them. But it also is the authenticness of our message and how it is actually in conflict with the status quo is the reason why we will never get that support. And so we have to take it amongst ourselves to support each other in these projects and help this sort of culture grow. And I think, you know, Means TV is one of the people, one of the entities that are doing just that. But I want to move forward and talk about kind of some of your influences.

And importantly, and this could probably be an entire episode in and of itself, but I know you mentioned that your work is influenced by Soviet cinema. Now, Soviet cinema is something I've never really doven into. I would like to. It's always been on my to do-do list. of things to explore haven't quite gotten there yet but i'm interested in it and i was hoping you can kind of talk about soviet cinema maybe some specific Soviet filmmakers um that have influenced you and just kind of give us a taste for the um for that influence that that comes through in your filmmaking yeah i'd love to dive into that and maybe at some point in more in more detail with you breck

because i think there's a lot of interesting things we can learn as as socialists from from soviet cinema I think both like failures and successes, which I think there's a lot of in the history of Soviet cinema. And really like Soviet cinema, I'll just start really briefly, and then I'll go into more of my interest in it. I'm by no means an expert. So I'm sure there's listeners who know much more about this than I do. But Soviet cinema really starts around the time of the NEP, the new economic policy in the Soviet Union. and it's funded through taxes basically from that. And that first era of basically through the 20s of Soviet cinema

is kind of like the golden area of Soviet cinema. It's the era where Soviet cinema really pushed the cinematic language forward globally in really, really instrumental ways. A lot of the major filmmakers around that time, like Kulishev and Eisenstein, their works, are still held even in capitalist countries as these pinnacles of cinematic achievement, basically. And a lot of cinematic theory is based in the theories that were written at that time. Like one of the main theories that I'll kind of go into more when I'm talking about my influences later,

but is the Kulashav effect, which some people would know about. That's a theory of montage editing that basically Kulashav was a theorist and filmmaker who had this experiment where he basically showed this guy's like gaunt face that's like totally a neutral face and then he would juxtapose that against different images like a coffin or an empty bowl of rice

things like that and then they would study more or less like what the effects on people's perception of that person's emotion was so like it was the same face but it would change people's perception of his emotions, basically, by what it was juxtaposed against, which is kind of one of the core theories of montage theory. And montage theory comes out of Soviet School of Cinema. And then a lot of, there was just a ton of playing with the form in the 20s. A lot of that

slowed down with like socialist realism in the 30s. But that time really pushed the form of cinema globally forward. And it's really like, it's very interesting to me because it's one of these moments where even in the U.S., they're not very critical, they're not really critical, that critical of socialism. Like in film school, like, there'll still be, like, do the, like, boring jab of, like, whatever.

Like, they made it, like, in spite of, you know, totalitarian, whatever. But, like, they're still, like, very celebratory of it. So I don't know what that means as far as like what we can do as like leftists to like talk about, you know, Soviet history with more nuance than it's given to us. But I think it is like an interesting way to approach it. But really like Soviet cinema that influenced me more like personally is the kind of poetic period of Soviet cinema. So this is this is Soviet cinema kind of after the war in the 60s and 70s and early 80s. 80s. And it really opens up more again to having more being able to look or make work that's really about kind of like poetic truths or emotional experiences. And I think that's where you get

filmmakers like Andre Tarkovsky, who's probably like the most famous of this era, who's deeply, deeply influential on me. And I have a very complicated relationship with his work. because although I think, like, his visual style, his cinematography, the moods and atmospheres that he's able to create visually in his films are probably the most, out of any one filmmaker, that's probably what I strive to visually and to create, like, tones.

And I think I was really looking at his work a lot when I was thinking about making meantime because I wanted the film to have this very, like, blockative and distinct mood to it. I want it to feel like cold and foggy and snowy. I want it to kind of mirror my dad's relationship to his mind, his memory kind of fading, but also, you know, his love for skiing, which is a big part of the film and his love for winter. And so for me, Tarkovsky really just his visual language is just stunning. And I love. And I love, his like dreamlike qualities and then another part of his work is his work is like very dense

poetically like it's full of of voiceover it's full of really dense poetic dialogue that's very hard to follow and and I will say like I feel like I'm like a bad like film scholar because I I feel like I relate much more to the visual language than I do the verbal language but the verbal language is also very beautiful. I think another influence of mine from this Soviet period is Klymov, who did come and see, which I'm sure

many of your viewers have seen. I think it's probably one of the greatest war films. In my opinion, it's the greatest war film of all time. It's one of the most excruciating films to watch, I will say. It's incredibly brutal.

It's totally horrific. And it's a film that follows basically a child, a teen, more or less, a young teen who tries to join the partisans in Belarus during World War II. And it's both like a film that I think shows the heroics of the partisans and the heroics of the Red Army in fighting Hitler and fighting fascism. And at the same time, it shows just the horror and trauma of participating in war in general. You know, and I think basically we follow through that film, we follow like a kid who comes in very idealistic and ends up like aged and traumatized, you know, through the process of war and through really trying to join the partisans but failing. and then we experience kind of all the horrors of the eastern front in all of their horrific. I mean, this is a disclaimer to anybody who wants to go see this film.

I highly recommend it, but, you know, it is really, really brutal to watch. But to me, like, I love Klamas' focus on faces. It's something that, like, Soviet cinema and socialist cinema, even in like Polish documentary really does, where they focus on people's faces. And like, without them really saying anything, you kind of like infer their emotion. It kind of goes back to what I was talking about,

like the Kulashab effect, where you like feel the emotion and their experience through reading their face and to looking into their eyes. And to me that that was really influential when thinking about how we would frame meantime, because Meantime was really centered around these conversations that I was having with my dad at the dinner table. And the camera really focuses on my dad's face.

And through silence and through talking about these things, like, I really wanted to focus on his face throughout the film because I think it says so much. And I think that's something that Soviet cinema does really, really well in this era. and has historically, is to just let faces speak for themselves. So it's, I think that the Soviet cinema is just like so exciting to me. It's very interesting as a socialist to think about, you know, the ways in which we could create different structures for funding films and making films. I will say that like Tarkovsky wasn't ever really that popular in the Soviet Union. who's more popular outside of the Soviet Union.

And so I think even within the Soviet Union, the things that were popular were like genre films still. Like the most popular films were not necessarily the most artistic films. But, you know, a lot of the times people would be like, oh, like, Tarkovsky made like only like seven films in his career because of the Soviet Union. And it's like he would have probably never gotten a single one of those films made in the United States to the funding that he got,

the support that he got. And especially that his lack of kind of popularity in the, in the Soviet Union, he definitely wouldn't have gotten like a second film made in the in the United States, you know, to that degree. And so I think, you know, like I love there's this quote from George Lucas where he's like talking to Charlie, uh, Charlie Rose about how I love that it comes from him because it's like, I think he's like very much to do with like kind of a lot of. the horrors of what American cinema has become, but he told Charlie Rose basically that like Soviet filmmakers had way more creative freedom than American filmmakers, because American filmmakers are limited by the market and market forces and what sells. And Soviet filmmakers weren't limited in that way. There were other limitations for sure, a lot of them ideological, some of them rightfully, some of them were over the top. But more or less, it's like Tarkovsky can make

seven movies that were like super challenging and in some ways like impenetrable you know and i think that that's that brings up something about like uh you know how we think about like these soft forms of censorship versus overt forms of censorship like them america and the united states and capitalist forms of censorship a lot of the times aren't overt they're very covert in that people just don't get funding and don't get their films made or don't get their films distributed if they don't fall in line lockstep with a capitalist ideology

and what sells. So I think that's, you know, that's a huge limitation of capitalist forms of funding, filmmaking. Yeah, and one example that jumps to mind of precisely that is I was actually just watching something on Stanley Kubrick's 2001

of Space Odyssey. And after he made how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb, there was, a lot of institutional dislike of Kubrick because that movie not only is lampooning the military industrial complex and the nuclear Cold War threat with the Soviet Union but actually like sought to to basically depict individuals in the ruling class to mock and humiliate and he was actually kind of having trouble finding funding after that and I think he like

he basically got Arthur C. Clark to be his pitchman to get the funding. for his, obviously now we look back and say this wonderful film, 2001 of Space Odyssey, but Arthur C. Clark had more institutional buy-in and was more of a respected person in those circles, and so he kind of like got him on to be the pitchman, to get the funding, to do the film that Kubrick wanted to do and then use sort of cryptic imagery and ideas that actually were antithetical to the ideas that Arthur C. Clark was promoting the film as wanting to promote. It's a whole thing. But, yeah, basically having. to make the financiers happy and the ruling elite happy in order to get his films funded.

So anyway, Dr. Strangelove came out. Kubrick got attacked in the press as being a commie, and his career, I think, probably would have been finished after Dr. Strangelove because he'd upset too many people, powerful people. So what do you do next in that position as a filmmaker? How do you get the funds in and how do you make sure that you don't get attacked again? Right. Well, you go and make a movie.

which on surface appearances gives the establishment what it wants. He knew that the moon landing stuff was coming up. That had been talked about by Kennedy. Oh yes, we're going to put a man on the moon. And Kubrick's like, okay, so they want a pro-space race

propaganda movie that's going to sell the moon landings and it's going to sell space research and it's going to sell technology. So he started developing it from there. And he was approaching different famous sci-fi writers. And he ended up with Arthur C. Clarke. And as far as I can tell, what he was basically doing there was he needed somebody to be a front,

a convincing front who could go to industry and sell them this bullshit movie, this ultimate pro-space race, evolution of man to becoming God. And, you know, transhumanist in a while of ways, 2000. the one. He needed to sell that bullshit story. And rather than do it himself, I don't think he would have had the heart to go and stand up in these rooms with these corporate

bosses and sale this stuff, gets Arthur C. Clark to go and do it. And Clark actually believed in all those messages anyway, so that made it convincing. And then all these corporate bosses and people at NASA and places like that, they all loved Arthur C. Clark anyway, because he was very much into the idea of man turning

into machine and travel into the stars and contacting alien races. And when we when we contact these alien races they're going to be nice to us. They're going to come to us and help us become gods, which is bullshit because if you look at human history

whenever one civilization goes to another, they steal all the resources and enslave them. Why would it be any difference of an alien race superior came to Earth? But, you know, this was all the stuff the Clark was into and it matched up with the establishment opinions on that stuff.

I'm not giving you a very short answer here. No, but this is, this is good. Okay, this is good. Okay, so he gets Clark. He develops the story with Clark, and he has Clark sandboxed within that narrative. Meanwhile, as far as I can tell, Kubrick's like, hmm, how can I make it appear

that I'm making this particular narrative that Clark believes in, and which all the investors are going to believe in? How can I make the film look like it's going to be that when it's released and I will covertly turn the film slowly into what I want it to be which is basically the opposite message

right and so the film has two conflicting narratives and it's very complex how Kubrick did this it's amazing skill and the chess moves of how he did it keep Clark sandboxed keep the investors thinking within that sandbox keep Clark talking

to them meanwhile develop a vision code for the film that communicates the story that he really wants to tell. So you, okay, so you're a psychologist, but what stopped you from studying psychology is the arts. And what I see here is he's using psychology to fulfill his intention, but he's, to, not exploit people, but keep people where he wants them, but then he's actually going to fulfill his intention through art. Yeah.

So the art is how, it's the real subversive side. We'll just sandbox these people, get the investors on board, but then the art, because you can hide behind it. You go, well, that's your interpretation. Maybe that's what it means. Yeah, that's what it doesn't mean. And Kubrick, of course, having made lots of movies, and he was always studying psychology and science and everything else. He was always reading tons of material, fill in his head. The guy must have been a walk in the library, you know.

But he, so having that situation with the sandbox. box, he's sort of with his knowledge of how metaphors worked in films he sort of had taken a lot of the stuff that already existed in movies about how to convey things nonverbally.

It's not like he was the first one to do visual storytelling. That was already done in the silent era anyway. But he took all of that stuff and he turned that into a much more precise science and he did something which I think is a first in film history. He made

movie, which actually carries two narratives at once. One is what the investors wanted. That got all the money in to make the movie. And the second is the visually conveyed narrative, which is the art side that he wanted to tell, which he couldn't let them know about. He couldn't let the crew, Arthur C. Clarke, he couldn't let them know about because if we had got back, investors would all pull out. So on the one hand, you've got a story of the space race because we hadn't done the moon

landings yet. It's going to be good. It's optimistic. It's positive. There's going to be a positive end result. And what was, what's his real narrative then? What's his real story? As far as I can tell, the real narrative is that I'll try, I think there's a lot of things communicated, but I'll tell some of the basics. One is that this whole notion of interstellar space travel is almost a ridiculous fantasy, the distances to travel and the hostility of empty space to the human condition is unbelievable. It's like, it's scary. And so at the start of the movie, you get the bone is thrown up, becomes a spaceship, and then you get all this fancy music. Oh, isn't it wonderful? All these spaceships flying around and then you go to the moon and you've got

a huge moon base in the year 2001, which we haven't even got a tiny moon base now. And, And so that part of the movie shows the fantasy of space research. Oh, isn't it wonderful? We're all going to the stars. And oh, aliens are helping us get there and all this kind of stuff. Later on in the film, after Bowman has defeated Hal, which is like a defeating transhumanism, basically. Then you get like the whole crazy end sequence with Jupiter and stuff.

And suddenly the music becomes terrified. scary. Yeah. It did towards the end of the movie. You see Jupiter and all its moons. And, I mean, Jupiter's a fucking colossal beast, isn't it? I think it's a tenth of the size of the sun or something like that. And I think with all that scary stuff, he was showing, look, space isn't this wonderful, pretty music type?

It's terrifying. And I think his is still one of the very, very few movies. And it was probably the first one ever that actually had space as being completely silent. you know and so he was trying to show people that look this is a bullshit fantasy the void the void of space is terrifying it's not built

for us and the chances of us traveling through it I mean 18 months just to get to Jupiter you haven't even come near the edge of the solar system so all that came across and then all the stuff about defeating Hal intellectually in battle

I view that as being basically instead of celebrating artificial intelligence, because IBM invested in the film. They thought they were getting a pro-AI movie, and Clark had sold it to them on that basis. And then the movie that they got had Hal going crazy,

killing people, being very manipulative, and then organic humans, or one of them, defeating Hal, and seizing back control of his life from the machine. That's not the message that they wanted. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And in the Kubrick archives, you know, I found

there's letters there at IBM were pissed when they saw the movie. They were like, take our logos off the movie because they were all over the place in the movie. They were annoyed. And actually, a lot of the investors were very annoyed. And what one of the things Kubrick did

that was incredibly sneaky, one of his many chess tactics in making the film is when the first sort of executive cut of the film was shown, not the cinema release, it was framed so that it would look more like what they wanted. It had a voiceover narration occasionally in the film that gave some waffle that fitted in the communicated Arthur C. Clark's narrative.

And at the beginning of the film, there was 10 minutes' worth of interviews with real scientists about how plausible interstellar space travel is and about how artificial intelligence is the future of humanity and all that. All the messages that the executives and stuff wanted to hear. Then when he releases the movie, and he must have had final cut to do this, he must have convinced them so much that they gave him final cut. He must have thought, wow, we've got the brilliant Stanley Kubrick on our side. Yeah, we'll give him final cut.

They had no idea he was going to use a visual and code and thing. So when the movie got released, the narration was removed and the 10 minutes' worth of interviews and scientists were removed, and it's like, suddenly the movie ceased to be that narrative and it became a visually encoded experience and Kubrick was doing interviews and he's saying there was one, I'll paraphrase it, he said something along the lines of people watch this movie

well people don't watch this movie, they listen to it, they expect to be told they listen to this movie expecting things to be explained they shouldn't be listening. You don't get much from this movie from that. You have to look at what's going on in the movie. He was

talking about visual encoding. And I assume, and correct me if I'm wrong here, but in Soviet cinema, are you alluding to the fact that there was just this robust public funding for the arts like this? And that that's why it couldn't have necessarily been done in the U.S.? Yeah, I think there's that. And that capitalism basically is risk averse. As much as people say it leads to innovation and risk. It's really a risk-averse system. Like just from a logical way of navigating through capitalism, like you want to do things that are good bets on the market. And So something like, you know, a Tarkovsky film is not a good bet on the market.

It's very challenging. A lot of people will probably like get bored or whatever, just shut their brain off in it. And yet those films were still getting major funding and support, you know, distribution channels. I think it's like a lot of it comes down to like, yeah, there's funding for it. But it's also that the films themselves are getting funding from the pit. which, like, in a capitalist system, there's just very few films that will get, like, big dollars when they're making something that's challenging, that's not a good bet. But Kubrick is, like, a very interesting example of that because he's one of the few within capitalism that I feel like really was able to make very challenging work that was also highly popular and respected. and I mean he's like probably the most influential filmmaker on my life

throughout my life even from like you know the first time I was like really getting into cinema in middle school you know 2001 and full metal jacket and especially the shining the shiny is probably like my favorite film of all time um like those films were just deeply influential to me and it is a miracle that I think he got those films made but it was also like a huge struggle for him even with his popularity to make those films and you know he was also just like super stubborn um yes he was and in maintaining he had his vision yeah yeah and i mean i but it's just there's he was very influenced also by like soviet filmmakers too so i think there's this this relationship between those forms um and that like now i also

think that it was a different time for American cinema in the 70s, which I think is probably one of the greatest times for film ever. You know, people were even within the United States, like it's a golden age in my eyes for cinema. There was like quite a bit of work that was pretty challenging that was being made. Like I think about Robert Altman, he's a huge influence on me. He did film, like his film McCabe and Ms. Miller is just an incredible film that is also very challenging and and he was getting funding for his work for a while but then when the 80s hit a lot of that started going away that's really like the advent of the blockbuster like uh which is funny what i was talking about george lucas who directed star wars you know star wars i think is

is one of the like primary things to blame for where we're at with cinema now which is just like superhero movie after superhero movie and just finding intellectual properties that are safe bets and then just turning out the same boring drivel over and over again you know like i think star wars was was kind of the you know that was the catalyst for what became in the 80s this kind of like blockbuster focus and now we're in like a whole new level of that where there's very little art there's very little innovation in the form it's just turning out safe superhero movie after safe superhero movie and then trying to attach social justice politics to those superhero movies to make you feel good about what you've been consuming you know right

yeah exactly i said for some reason the subtitle earlier of course the movie i was referencing is dr strangelove i don't know why the subtitle came out not the title but of course you mentioned some great films but there's eyes wide shut there's clockwork orange as well um all those all those films are barry linden too uh that was a hot take for me i the first time i Barry Lyndon, which is a Kubrick film, I really didn't like it, but it slowly has become one of my favorite films of his.

I'll have to revisit that one, yeah. The cinematography in it is just incredible, and it is really nuanced. It's a challenging film. It's very long, it's very slow, but the more I watch it, every time

I watch it, it goes higher up on my Kubrick list. But Dr. Strange Love was really one of my first loves. I remember I made like a really, really cheesy, like, stencil art piece in high school that was Dr. Strangelove. I was just like obsessed with it. It's a great film. But yeah, it's just an incredible, incredible film. Yeah. Do you have any other American influences, American filmmakers that, that you do like and respect or draw inspiration from? Oh, yeah. Tons. I mean, I will say like on the, I mostly make documentaries.

but I feel like a lot of what I watch is like fiction cinema and I also love like weird horror films and so like John Carpenter was a huge he doesn't influence my work specifically but he's just like an important part of like of my love for cinema as art form because I think his films are like really really fun and weird and interesting and different and then they have these moments I would put it in the category of what I consider like dumb smart where they're like moments where I'm like, I don't know if you're like fully with it as far as like class consciousness knows, but like they live is very, very on point. And I like love those moments where I'm just like it's just like somehow like this film that I feel like is just really on point as far as like class analysis goes. I mean, not in a super deep way to be fair, but like just made it through because like John Carpenter just made a weird alien movie with Routy Routy Piper. I haven't heard that name in years.

Yeah. Yeah, it's just incredible. But I mean, I'm also like, I'm really deeply influenced by like documentary filmmakers, obviously. And like one of my favorite docs of all time, I'm sure some people have seen. If they haven't, they should they should grace themselves with it because it's an incredible film called American movie and it's it's just this really beautiful okay beautiful maybe isn't the right word it's it's very funny and endearing film that was made in the 90s about this filmmaker

who's a horror filmmaker who's trying to make this low budget film called coven or coven that's part of the joke in the film but it's it's just an incredible film it was deeply influential to me because it just I really am drawn to documentaries that feel like they're just another piece of cinema. They're not necessarily like they don't feel like a documentary. They don't have like the Talking Head interview. They don't have like the Ken Burns like slow zoom in and the cello music playing. I really like documentaries that use all of the cinematic tools that that we have as

filmmakers to tell really compelling stories. I think another film, if people are looking to watch stuff on Means TV, because I help curate some of the selections, too, is These Birds Walk, which is an incredible film filmed in, in, in, in Kabul, and follows, like, basically these orphan kids who are at this orphanage, who are then, like, because of the lack of kind of, kind of, like, social welfare programs and whatnot are being, having to be taken back to their family. and a lot of times they're abusive families that they've run away from

deep in like Taliban-held territories but it's just one of those films that like it's just so poetic and beautiful and melancholic and thoughtful that it was like a essential film

for me as in my early development in thinking about my cinematic language for documentary filmmaking. I think another film if people are looking for stuff that's on means too is Bisbee 17 is just an incredible

interesting, totally unique film that takes place in Bisbee, Arizona, where there was this mass deportation in 1917 of striking minors, and they've left them in the middle of the desert. And what

the filmmaker Robert Green does is he goes into Bisbee and then basically organizes this re- reenactment of the deportation with the current residents of BISB. And a lot of those people were people who are on like the company side of the town. And at the same time as he's like creating this situation where that he's documenting where they're recreating this, he's also like asking them about their experience of their, of that

history and their understanding of the history of like what their great grandparents did, like working for the police or working for the company. but then putting them basically on the side of the workers and having them experience what the workers went through. It's just an incredible film. Truly, like, unique. And for anybody who's kind of interested in that type of labor history in the United States, it's a really a must watch.

Wow. Okay, so Bisbee 17 and these birds walk, and both of those are on means right now, right? Yeah, yeah. Cool. Yeah, so you were mentioned earlier about the sort of issues that American cinema faces today, right? We're seeing these remakes. We're seeing sequels, prequels, these safe bets, right? Like, oh, this has a built-in audience. Let's make the 10th fucking film about it. Or these incredibly increasingly grading superhero movies, C.G. I doubt. I mean, I find that entire genre to be utterly cold and dead to me personally.

But I also think that this cinematic malaise, if you will, is a, there's not only a reflection of the inherent incentive structures within capitalism, but I think it also, because capitalism, of course, existed in just as brutal of a form in the 70s, right? And that's when there was like the golden era of American cinematography, but there was a cultural dynamism that was present in the 60s and into the 70s that is completely not present now, right? We are living in a cultural malaise, a malaise where it just feels like we're completely stuck. There is no way out. Our government can't function to solve any problems. Nothing dynamic is happening because of the dynamics of capitalism and neoliberalism and late capitalism. And we're living in a period of it feels like cultural decay. And I think that perhaps that cultural malaise is being reflected in the cinematic malaise.

a culture that has lost its dynamism, has been suffocated by the neoliberal era and can't create the things that it used to create. Because capitalism, for all of its flaws, weirdly, the depravities of it, the struggles that it imposes on people, can also generate beautiful art because humans often create art as a way of coping and dealing and understanding their own circumstances. Hip-hop is a great example of a very specific experience. of black people in the United States producing not just hip hop many forms of music I'm a fan of hip hop so I highlight that one but creating this beautiful work of art

and so even in the 70s is a time of incredible despair and recession and we just came out of the 60s and the hopes of the 60s were kind of dashed and yet we generated American Society generated these films that it can no longer seemingly generate today is that simply an issue of monopoly

in the movie industry being the only mechanism that you can break into the mainstream now. Is it a product of cultural malaise? How do you make sense of that? Do you think that theory is right, more or less? Or, yeah, just kind of hear your thoughts on that. Yeah, I feel like I agree with that. I mean, I think a lot of it, too, comes down to, like, I think we've been conditioned to numb ourselves through what we consume, to, like, take all.

of the bad feelings that we have from our experience through life and to look at media as a way to turn off kind of really thinking and and grappling with those issues. I think this is like the really, really insidious side of where capitalist kind of media has gone. It has become like an opioid for the masses. And I think that's always been around. But I think we're in a really acute era of it, where we can be completely inundated with information constantly, where anytime, you know, like, we have a feeling or we're thinking and it doesn't feel good, which usually means we should probably lean into that and work on it. Right. Think about where that's coming from. We can just turn off by, like, turning on some dumb, you know, like, a true crime show or.

or whatever it is, like scrolling through TikTok or scrolling through Instagram, which like makes us also feel horrible. And so I think there is this aversion to really confronting our struggle right now. I think it's because it's very easy to distract ourselves from it. And I think, you know, I don't want to be like too much like the old guy who's like, oh, now everybody has phones and whatnot. But, like, I do think it's, like, much easier to distract yourself than it was even in the 60s or 70s. You know, there was distractions around, but not to the ease that we have now.

Or even I notice myself doing that all the time where I, like, feel, when I'm feeling bad, I'm just, like, feeling every moment with, like, information or, you know, something that's, like, really getting to me. And I know that you're really into meditation and Buddhism and whatnot. And I have a deep respect for that. And I think that things like that are really important now. And not in the dumb, boring mindfulness, like dystopian bullshit. Like, but really thinking about, you know, being able to lean into your feelings that are bad. And being able to like take that and have an internal struggle and then move that struggle into action. I think is really important.

I think that the hard thing to overcome right now is, that like i don't necessarily have an answer for how we like collectively get to the point where we can really start to confront that part of ourselves which i think is really necessary to deeply engage with art in general like to deeply engage with cinema that is very vulnerable and emotional i think we have to like overcome being able to like sit in that discomfort yeah and not only like put up with it but to seek it out and to get fulfillment from exploring kind of our inner struggle. So I think there's like that emotional side of it along with the capitalism's ability to just like tap into like the shit that just makes us honestly like nostalgic.

I think that this like Mark Fisher wrote a lot of really incredible things about this this type of nostalgia for this like imagined past that never really. existed that we just keep cycling culture you know we keep cycling the 80s trope it's like i wasn't even born they was born in the 90s but i still have this like weird socialized nostalgia for that or this like fallacious idea of the 60s and the flower children you know people have like that type of nostalgia for this imagined past you know you know that's yeah it's so good 80s films definitely gives me it's weird a sense of nostalgic comfort i discovered this during covid old movies do but shit i was born in 89 even film noir films from the 50s and 60s weirdly for some unknown reason they give me a sense of like comfort and i'm not exactly i can't quite trace

that line out um but it certainly has something to do with the inherent comfort of even false nostalgia in an era of complete precarity and uncertainty and having the false sensation ultimately right because these past times were not the golden eras they're made out to be but this false sensation of like a prior time where stability actually existed and and in this culture it actually existed at one point even if that's a false idea there's something comforting about it and that i think that also plays into your wonderful point and insight about the films that we reproduce because so much of them are coming from like the 90s right and and and doing prequels and sequels of things we used to love in the 90s when we were growing up and that that functions as a sort of salve as a sort of um as a sort of opiate, as you said, in one way or another. But I also really, really appreciate that point about how we use all the techno distractions and techno-escapism that we have to get away from these, even sometimes not fully consciously felt feelings, right?

You'll just have like a subconscious vibe shift internally, and it's almost not even registered consciously or maybe half-registered consciously, but then there's like this training, this muscle memory that then reaches for the phone, that, reaches for the thing that can distract you for a second and those never make you feel good in fact the more time you spend on them the worse you feel but at least in that moment you can look away from like the howling wind inside and distract yourself with some stupid shit um that you're scrolling that you're scrolling past and i truly do believe that while certain shallow forms and co-opted forms of mindfulness can actually function as a salve as an opiate itself to try to adjust yourself to

maladjusted conditions when done correctly and with the depth that they deserve is the means by which we don't grab the phone we face those feelings and by facing those feelings we get a deeper understanding of ourselves of others and we're more able to go out and face the world because face the world and specifically the way of confronting it organizing to change it right because i feel like if we don't do the work of dealing with some of the stuff that's inside. If we allow these corporations to steal our attention away from looking inward and then the scrolling onto their little profit misery machines, that's a way where we're unable to even deal with our own shit. So how in the hell do we think that we're going to go out

in the world and deal with all of that shit? So there's something deeply connected between being able to face the shit inside of yourself and being able to more appropriately and effectively face the shit that's outside of yourself. So yeah, I agree with that 100%. so yeah totally i mean it's just such a i think it's these conversations are really inspiring and helpful to me you know to think about organizing now because i think this is an impasse that's essential to overcome if we want to build a mass movement you know like we have to find ways to support each other and to find other methods of dealing with the destruction of the situation that we live in in this like this form of capitalism to be able to really wrestle with that

internally and turn that into action yes you know absolutely uh one more thing i just i just thought of we're talking about nostalgia and this is kind of jarring for me uh what what year were you born and just had a curiosity 93 93 okay so i'm on instagram and i come across to this um this page called liminal spaces and it's like you know liminal spaces these weird sort of like environments like this old shut down chucky cheese or a deserted mall right these liminal spaces whatever but it's clear that the person behind the account is like a younger person because the nostalgia that they'll promote is like growing up in 2011 and then it goes to this really nostalgic video of like being in high school during 2011 and i'm like fuck dude like that i know that's false nostalgia because

i was a full grown adult by that time and it sucked ass then too so but the the the allure of false nostalgia is so real that even now like 16 and 17 year olds are romanticizing the childhoods of you know during like 2008 versus 2013 or something and it was just like a wild moment of like realizing like oh shit that that nostalgia is so false but it still functions in this way for now younger people who are trying to romanticize that period of time which is really just romanticizing your own formative experiences as a teenager It's not that the social conditions were somehow, I mean, they've certainly deteriorated, but it's not like they were radically better then, but you were living through a time that was

packed with meaning and importance. And so whenever that happened for you, it feels like that was a golden era, you know, in some sense. Yeah, I mean, I think it's like a form of collective regression. Like we're going, we're trying to go back to a time where we were more innocent, you know. Right. Like, we're trying to unlock that feeling. The feelings we had when we were a kid and we didn't really fully understand or understand well what was going on around us you know and i i think that's the scary side of it and i feel it too like i'll like play like n64 games all the time i'll be like oh yeah like i'm just it's like i'm not even i enjoy it but then it's like i'm also just like i feel like i'm i'm really just trying to get back to that

kind of infantile phase in my life you know yes and i think that can't you don't we don't need to like fully, like, write off that as something that's totally wrong. But it is scary that when it becomes the primary mode of engaging with things that are created, like, our, you know, video games, whatever it is, I think that that is something that's terrifying. And it goes back to what we're talking about about superhero movies. I mean, what could be more overtly regressive than that, you know? Going back to, like, a bunch of dudes in spandex, like, acting like, kind of.

cops you know and like from comic books you know like it's just like it is it is crazy and most of the people who consume that are are adults you know and and they're trying to get back like it's really it's sad and and I'm not saying that like I'm definitely not above it like I said like I'm going to play like Zelda just to like shut down every once in a while but it is scary that I like feel that need you know yes yeah and I mean our job is to move forward we can't We can't be regressive. We can't fall into these pits of false nostalgia. We can't fetishize that stuff because the right wing is great at weaponizing nostalgia.

You know, so much of right wing politics is about this lost golden era that we once had. And once you start playing into nostalgia, once you start fetishizing it, once you start believing that your feelings from that time were actually indicative, that the conditions were better, you know, were better, then you can really fall into the grasp of this right wing nostalgia. I mean, what is make America great again? false nostalgia weaponized. It's the idea of a lost golden era, which is a cornerstone of right-wing politics and this doomed attempt to get back there through the violence against your perceived political enemies, right? So it's something that we should be wary of. We should see how it functions in ourselves, nostalgia, because it functions in other people in a similar way. And if you understand the mechanics in yourself, you can more easily understand how it

operates in others, but we can't let ourselves fall into it. We have to be painting a vision of what could be. We have to be pointing everybody forward to the future. The only way out is through. There is no way we can go back. And that's the political project of the revolutionary left, right? Yeah. And I mean, I think this, it made me think a lot about how I think we also need to create a culture of like, of doing challenging work, you know, in our spare time even. Like, political education is hard you know there's like no way around that and i i i love rev left and like you know the deep program and these other uh podcasts that really help i've helped me you know dig deeper into my own reading into my own political education but it's hard you know like

it isn't something that i think is fully comfortable and i think i don't know what the answer is but i do feel like we do need to develop kind of a culture of like of being able to lean into the challenges of that and and have like a discipline around it you know i think it's really like the only way out is to is to figure out how internally you can create a discipline for yourself to to shut off the goddamn phone i'm saying this to myself you know and like read a book and go hang out with friends or like sit in nature you know go swimming and think about these things and really like in a healthy way kind of confront our internal struggles yeah i think it's totally necessary i think the scary part is figuring out how to get there and i think it's

you know like in my organizing history i think it's been a challenge to think about how to incorporate kind of challenging political education into into organizing you know i think there is like an aversion to it a lot of times aversion to like reading theory aversion to really do deeply analyzing history as a part of our political education. And so that's something that I would love to figure out as how we can, like, build a healthy culture around, like, doing things that are hard, you know. Yeah, I really, I really believe that. And one of the, there's so many ways to do things that are hard. This is just one way that I've done at least recently, which is I've just gotten really into, like, weight training, like lifting weights. And, you know, the difficulty of

it, you're off your phone, you're focusing, you're, you're, you're exonerable. inserting your body, you're getting out of your mind, you're getting into your body, you're not, yeah, you're not being distracted, you're building strength, you're overcoming difficulty, you're being, you know, you're building up the capacity to persevere through struggle. And this is an individual thing. It's not going to change the world by any means, but it's just one personalized way that this idea of like overcoming hard things and doing hard things and not succumbing to like the passive river current of the information overload and the scrolls. and it's changing from the medium screen to the small screen then going home to the big screen and just never having a moment where you're sitting there with yourself with your own thoughts or overcoming something difficult or yeah out in nature i mean even meditation i mean from the outward perspective when it's done right it looks like you're just sitting down and breathing and relaxing but inside you are you are training your attention in the opposite direction that the distraction economy does right you are training yourself to be able to sit

there with whatever is present sometimes it's feelings of excitability sometimes it's feelings of anxiety sometimes it's just a generalized restlessness sometimes you're in a good mood and you feel great but no matter what every single day coming back and sitting and looking in what is here now how can i sit with it how can i honor it how can i not distract myself from it and there's a difficulty in that even though it's from all outward appearances and really technically it's a simple thing, but it's not an easy thing. And I think this is one way that we can sort of build up the capacities within ourselves not to be constantly lured back on to ultimately these corporate platforms that are sucking out your data and selling them for profit. The more

angry you are, the more upset you are, the more anxious you are, the more you scroll, the more data they pull, the more data they sell, the more money they make. And we have to realize at the bottom at the end of the day that their bottom line is keeping us distracted keeping our attention scattered unable to focus and spend it spend a few hours on social media and then try to read a chapter of a book you know it is it is devastating our attention spans and i think that's a real issue for those of us that want to build a better world and that entails hard long protracted work to get there and that's never going to be done if we can't even finish a paragraph without our attention span being scattered in a billion different directions. So these are things that we have

to take seriously on the individual as well as the collective level. Absolutely. And I think it's something that we need to be talking more about as leftists and organizers, you know, is to be able to create a culture of hard work, you know, and to be able to get real feelings of success, internal feelings of success and pride through working through something hard, you know, because In the end, it's like you feel so much better after doing something hard. After reading like, you know, a really dense chapter in some theory, it's really challenging. And for me, it's not very fun. But when I've done, my mind is just like going and I feel great.

You know, I feel like I've progressed, you know, and I think leaning into that versus running away from it is really kind of the answer to overcoming this kind of like. quote unquote attention economy is exactly what they don't want us to do which means we should probably fucking do it exactly and your internal state says a lot spend five hours on fucking Facebook and Twitter and then check in with yourself and you'll feel like shit spend that same five hours working through theory doing something physically difficult meditating whatever you feel nourished you feel invigorated and i think checking in with yourself to sing like there's like an intelligence in your body. It knows when you are doing something that is

productive and nourishing for it, productive in like a self sense, not like a economy sense. And when you're doing something that is just deleterious to your entire mental and physical connective apparatus. And so checking in with yourself being able to see

how you feel, yeah, I feel invigorated after I work out, after I go walk in the woods, after I read difficult theory and where it was able to wrestle with and grasp it, I feel like shit when I spend all day sitting on a couch scrolling you know and that that in and of itself is a little alarm bell letting you know that you know you got to do something different here totally totally well let me wrap up with one more question and because you know we're talking about role that culture plays

role that storytelling plays and building up our own sort of culture and i truly believe that everybody has something they can offer right some people are really good organizers they're gregarious they can relate to people some people make films right some people do podcast some people there's a million different things that everybody does and i think everybody can find their talent and their skill set and apply it in the direction of building a better world so for those out there that might be interested in using film as that mechanism or at least exploring that capacity within themselves what advice would you give uh to someone listening right now who wants to get into filmmaking but doesn't know where to start or you know can't afford to

maybe studied at the university level yeah i mean first of all as a university teacher in filmmaking you do not need that i'll just say that i mean you can get a lot out of that if you care enough to do it but that is definitely not the end-all be-all and so many incredible filmmakers never did that like paul thomas anderson is one of them who i love um he he dropped out of film school within like a year or something. What I would say is that it's very hard. It is an industry that is dominated by rich kids, and it's a very financially risky pursuit.

But I think now is better time than ever because getting high quality filmmaking equipment is much, much cheaper than it has been historically ever. And the quality of camera that you can get for, under, you know, $700 now is just insane. And so, I mean, you could also just use your phone. You can use all these things. I think the main thing that I would say is, like, if you're interested in filmmaking and you don't have a lot of money, that if you kind of work hard making films,

like making things that you want to make and allowing yourself to fail, allowing yourself to be a bad filmmaker for a long time, and just making things and enjoying that process, I think that will lead to the best kind of outcomes for it. I think that's kind of how I got into it. I mean, I grew up partly with my dad and like a trailer. I didn't come from money at all.

And I also worked the whole time that I was, and I still obviously like work like four jobs to make a living, doing it. But I think for me, I just really prioritized making my own work and doing that on a small budget and a small scale. like meantime was just me i was the only person that you know was there filming that um i edited that um really the only main collaborator i had was uh nicholas merr's who did the score along with

evan backer um a really incredible score great musicians you should check out their work um but yeah i think it's just like just get out there and make things i mean i think this is something that I talk about with my students too is like it's it's more about your excitement and your interest in the form than it is about like like getting like a really good job like that probably won't happen like it's probably not going to happen for me even you know but you can still get a lot of fulfillment and then do a lot with your films but you just kind of got to make things and just be really passionate about it and then I would say like watch lots of movies like and watch lots of challenging movies do like what brett and i have been talking about but like

really like trying to find things that are difficult and different and you may be uncomfortable by and just sitting with that and watching them and putting your phone away and enjoying that process even if you hate those films and i think like you know like criterion is a really good resource for that the criterion channel they re-release a lot of really incredible works of world cinema, older cinema, and also Soviet cinema, and it can be a really incredible resource for gaining inspiration in building your cinematic language, which I think is really, really important. And then I would say beware of production assistant work, entry-level production assistant work. The film industry as a whole is insanely evil and very, very good at taking really

talented, creative, kind, interesting people and just turning them away through just like the violence of the hierarchy of working in film. I worked as a production assistant for a few years. It's probably some of the worst work experiences I've ever had in my life, just being totally disrespected, 16 to 18 hour days for very little pay with really no way of like moving up so i would be a be very like uh hesitant i think to go to be as a production assistant for too long i think working on smaller scale things with people who respect you and will help mentor you and trying to find those people should be like a really is really essential to being able to move forward you'll get better pay you won't lose as much of your excitement for the form which i think

is critical because this system beats it out of you and they want you to become a cog they want you to just get the coffees you know but we know that like a lot of those people who are at top asking you to get the coffees like are just like a boring ass rich kid you know that daddy had connections too exactly and they're not good talented you know as much as they think they are they are not so you know we need to take our stories back Amen. Great advice. Two things you said in there that I just want to pull out and apply to anybody wanting

to do anything in their life, which is allow yourself to fail, something that I think I've learned a lot in my life. I've failed at more things than I've succeeded at, and that's always going to be the case. I always tell, like, my family and stuff, like for every one success, just build in three to ten failures because that is the learning process. And so expecting yourself to come out of the gate and never fail, I think you're already setting yourself up for disaster. but the other important thing you said is that make what you love and end in and of itself don't

instrumentalize it immediately for a career for a job like the only way i can enjoy this is if somebody recognizes my work and i get the fame and the money and the status that comes with being a well-known filmmaker or enter whatever interest you have here but really you have to love something do it for the love of it treat it as an end in and of itself and i feel like if you do that you're much more likely to find any sort of success on any level than if you come into something immediately trying to turn it into a utility for you to get something else, a means for another end.

I think a lot of people make that mistake and they feel like I can't even be a good fill in the blank and this will just use filmmaker unless I'm successful. Unless it is validated by other people in some way, shape, or form, then why even do this thing? And I think that is the sort of killer of all passions And so allowing yourself to fail and treating the things you love as ends in and of themselves, not a means to a further end, are two great ways to approach anything you want to get good at.

Absolutely. And I think going on that, too, is just looking at my friends who have, like, made it, quote unquote, it does not bring happiness, you know. And a lot of the people on top are not the best. And if your work isn't largely celebrated, sometimes that can be a compliment. Like, I even look at, like, the Academy Awards is a great example, especially for documentaries. Like, most of the best documentaries never will get close to being nominated for an Academy Award. So if that's your goal, it's like, you know, it's not always like the great quality, like, stamp that we all have been, like, bred to think it is.

And that a lot of the times when as you progress in your career, I think this is something I'm struggling with, as you progress in your career, it gets harder to maintain that joy. You have to be more intentional about maintaining the joy of making things because the stakes get higher and higher. Every time you succeed, it sets the bar a little bit higher. You have to do a lot of work to be okay with not hitting that bar every time, you know? And we really, I think with social media, this goes back to we're just constantly comparing ourselves to other people. And when you get into this, like that is what you're going to have to deal with.

It's something I have to deal with all the time is this internalized self-loathing for not being good enough because I'm comparing myself to other people all the time. And I think that's something that we need to overcome, especially to make good work as artists because we don't want to be making work for the corporations. Like, we want to be making work for each other, you know, to relate to each other deeply and to share that with each other. And if we get the corporate stamp of approval, that's not always a good thing, you know, Sundance is funded by a lot of blood money.

Let's just say that. Absolutely. Yeah, the comparing mind is the thief of all joy. To begin comparing yourself to other people is a guaranteed recipe to make yourself miserable. And I think the comparing mind is put on steroids and social. social media because you're always as they say comparing your behind the scenes to everybody else's highlight real and it can become not only re-entrenching the comparing mind but just inflaming it beyond belief and i think that's one of the reasons that will often step away from these platforms

feeling like shit is because there is that even if it's not fully conscious at a subconscious level the mind is comparing itself to everybody else and um it makes your your passions shittier it makes your life less full of joy. It's just a bad way to approach anything at all. And of course, I still struggle with it. Everybody struggles with it. There's a natural impulse to social animals to compare ourselves to others. But that is a product of egoism.

The ego wants to see how it stacks up to others. And that sort of takes away the passion and the joy that you find in doing the thing in and of itself. And so that's a great piece of advice. Well, Michael, this has been a wonderful discussion. It actually got a lot deeper than I even initially thought that it. would. I really enjoyed your insight and your commentary. I would love to have you back on the show, but before I let you go, can you just let listeners know where they can find you and your work online and then anything else you want to promote. Yeah, thanks, Brett. I mean, it's a real honor

to be on here. I think you just have some of the most incredibly principled, intelligent guests on this show. So I'm honored that, you know, you took a chance with me being a little bit of the ding-dong sometimes. But I really appreciate it. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. I appreciate the work you do, I think it's absolutely essential to building this movement. People can find me, unfortunately, on Instagram at Michael Workman. I also have a Twitter technically, but I don't ever use it, but that's workmanship film. If you really want to keep up with my work, though, it's on my Instagram, unfortunately. It's basically all I use it for anymore. And then I also have a website which is michael t workman.com and that that's the best place to find my work if you want to

watch any of my films they're all available through that website i also do a lot of music videos with some really talented friends that are really fun uh if you want to check those out those are there um i also wanted to plug um a new project that i'm working on with a couple of comrades um that is basically a collection of anonymous confessionals of people who work in meaningless jobs and know that their work does not give anything to the world. And we're looking for people for this film to share stories anonymously. We would, if you want to be a part of it, you can email me through my website. My email is on my website in the About section. Give me an email and let me know what your job is.

This is going to be like a fun, weird project that we hope can alleviate, you know, the world of some of our more dumb jobs, really inspired by like David Graber and also a processed world with it. If anybody hasn't checked that out, it's this awesome Marxist zine from the 80s in San Francisco that was really kind of on the forefront of finding, you know, know, criticizing kind of these like meaningless corporate jobs that were proliferating the Bay Area at the time. And now, unfortunately, the Bay Area has really exported all of these jobs globally. So, yeah, just send me an email or DM me on Instagram. I don't check that as much, but

I'll answer there. Cool. Yeah, and I'll make sure to add all that in the show notes as well as your email. And of course, as well as Means TV. That's the main way that somebody can go watch your your actual film Meantime, correct? Yes. So from Parts Unknown, Favor and Grace, and Meantime, all of those, those are three short films I've made. All of those are available now on Means TV. So, yeah, check those out. I'd love to, if you have any thoughts, like send me messages, I love to talk to people about, about whatever and about my work. So perfect. I'll add that in there. I'll add that in there as well. And I would just tell anybody listening that, you know, as I was saying earlier, we're all we have, all we have,

all we have is each other. We don't have big advertisers or billionaires with a lot of money to fund our shit. So I think like, especially if you have some financial flexibility that you should at least try your best to help fund at least one organization, one outlet, something that aligns with your political values and that depends on, you know, sort of DIY grassroots funding for its support. It's a really critical thing to do. And if we all pitched in a little bit, we all sort of threw a few dollars at our favorite, you know, content creators or sort of platforms that we think are doing the right stuff and doing good work and reaching people, I think it could really help just the burgeoning and blossoming of our various, you know,

our counterculture, if you will, our culture we're trying to build out of the ruins of this shitty corporate culture that's been shoved down our throat. So if you have the means, of course, try to fund one, at least one entity like that. And I think Means TV is a great option for those that are interested in that. And there's lots of good stuff on Means TV. All right, friend. Thank you again so much for coming on. Keep up the great work and let's keep in touch. All right. Thanks so much, Brett. It's been a real honor. Defining what is there. Defining what is there.

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