We’re less aware of the ephemeral nature of cinema than ever in the medium’s history. The decay of a film print is a novelty now, and films are never gone when they leave streaming (if you know the right corners of the internet to look). Nobody’s throwing repositories of silent films into the sea anymore. Gance’s Napoleon is restored and extended towards its over nine-hour runtime again and again, and even Ken Russell’s The Devils is finally going to be re-released in a restored version of its complete cut. It was barely 10 years ago that the only way I could see the film with the “rape of Christ” and “burnt bone masturbation” scenes intact was from a bootleg DVD—which one could tell was the real deal compared to the other bootlegs because it advertised those things on the cover—rented at Movie Madness in Portland. A VHS they had of Godard’s King Lear was the only way I could see that film, too.
I bring this up because by the time this column is up, independent filmmaker Christopher Jason Bell will have deleted his 2018 feature Incorrectional. This isn’t some artistic stunt, but a practical funeral coming out of legal complications that have emerged from the work, as a mysterious “entity” appeared to claim copyright. After one last screening, which happened at New York City’s Roxy Cinema on Sunday, the movie’s no more. In his interview with Steve Macfarlane (which also goes into the “entity” situation, which Arlin Golden speculates on in his Letterboxd entry), Bell notes, “If you watch this film and you’re like, ‘Oh yeah, then he deleted it ten years later’ or something, I don’t think that would be too shocking.”
To elaborate: Incorrectional self-destructs some 30 minutes into the runtime. Up to this point, the film mostly follows Saed (Rayvin Disla), a middle-eastern immigrant teen who has a strained relationship with his father, Ali (Ali Alwan). The relationship between the scenes, too, is strained, as mid-take the fourth wall comes crumbling down when Ali quits on camera. It’s not unlike Jafar Panahi’s The Mirror, the neorealistic-inflected narrative film that the director is initially setting out to make becomes something else entirely as the collaborators refuse to continue to collaborate. In both these cases, the films are no longer a documentary of their own making, but the inability to be made in the first place.
It’s striking that Bell follows the take of Ali quitting with another prolonged take, although this one completely narratively non-sequitur. After Bell tells his camera operator to turn off the camera, a cut-to-black is stitched with a sequence of a goat giving birth, in all its strange, visceral beauty. It’s so natural, so surprisingly un-pained, even as the farmer helps pull the kid from his mother. She looks back in curiosity but doesn’t make a sound, neither does the one who’s fresh to this world. Bell’s filmmaking, from this point, becomes completely intuitive. Gone are the considered compositional strategies, the delicate glide of a swivelhead, and the deceptively simple lighting, which Bell has already revealed as not natural in his interiors despite their naturalistic look.
The rest of Incorrectional’s runtime is documentary footage of Bell following Disla and Alwan after their initial failed shoot, and eventually reuniting them when Alwan suggests they all go and see a psychic. Alwan uses it as an opportunity to be ostentatious (“I have this documented. It's a copyright,” he says with regards to wanting to use something the psychic said as a brand name for bottled water—this has a retrospective irony, given what led to the film’s demise), but Bell tries to take the exercise as seriously as he can while being a skeptic. As he has had with everything we’ve seen filmed so far, Disla has a more reserved curiosity to all of it. The psychic tells him, “There is an abrupt ending which you are not expecting which is about to occur,” and the film cuts to black for a final time. On Sunday, for a final time, the film reached an abrupt ending which Bell was not expecting. What would’ve, at one time, seemed like a joke about how the movie had finally run its course—and there wasn’t more to say about these three men’s dynamics than what was revealed, not by the cards themselves, but how they interacted with them—now proved prophetic after all.