Is the "director" in the room with us right now?
a conversation with COINCELLPRO, about the film COIN CELLEIL
At a gallery in Manhattan three or four screens played colorfully at one another. Anywhere you sat, you could see not only the movie itself, but the mannerisms of your fellow viewers. For instance, you might catch another attendee’s profile as it laughed or sipped from a cup, silhouetted by a pair of bouncing anime tits.
The feature that night, following a collection of shorts, was Coin Celleil, a full-length film by the anonymous shitposting account, or series of accounts, called COINCELLPRO. The movie is a loose remake of Chris Marker’s 1983 Sans Soleil, an influential film-essay exploring time, travel, and memory. Coin Celleil was created collaboratively by around 50 people, many also anonymous, and it was orchestrated by one main account admin. Allegedly, the orchestrator’s identity was to be ceremoniously revealed for a Q&A following the screening that night.
The man about to reveal himself was tall and jumpy and about twice the age of most of the audience. Just before the film ended he frantically handed out stickers of the COINCELLPRO logo, suggesting audience members use them to cover their cell phone cameras. Shortly after, he took the stage. Host Tomi Faison ran through a list of boilerplate questions, and the tall man responded with a precisely rehearsed, but still unhinged, series of answers. “Bernie Sanders is a businessman,” I recall him saying, and “I’ve eaten many a French ass,” and something about Kanye West and Kim Kardashian. He shouted and gesticulated and demonstrated his poor French. For a brief moment there was a sense that one didn’t know what might happen – a feeling that is unfortunately rare to achieve in a gallery setting. As a crescendo, the tall man caught an audience member filming, smashed their phone, and stormed out. The crowd was puzzled, but applauded anyway.
A sense of distance defines the original San Soleil, and Chris Marker’s creative career in general. Marker was born Christian Francois Bouche-Villenueve, in Paris, or maybe Mongolia, and he often presented himself using a cartoon cat in lieu of a headshot. In Sans he is represented by the character Sandor Krazna, though the audience never meets him directly. Instead, an anonymous woman reads us Krazna’s letters. These monologues, along with a minimal synthesizer soundtrack by Marker, accompany footage from Japan, West Africa, and elsewhere – some of it borrowed, but much of it shot during Marker’s travels abroad.
In Coin, contributors maintain and resituate the same monologue[s] scene by scene, this time alienating the words and images even further from their source. The footage from San Soleil is reenacted, distorted, or replaced completely, and, as in the original, much of it is borrowed. In this case, however, most of the borrowed content appears through the prism of the internet: TikTok videos, Twitch stream gameplay, memes, etc. One section in Marker’s film depicting Tokyo street dancing reppears as a gyrating DJ Khaled, flanked by a pair of gyrating CGI Michael Jacksons. Coin Celleil takes the sense of dislocation from Marker’s San Soleil and multiplies it.
Coin isn’t the first feature-length movie made under an anonymous shitposter account’s umbrella; Angelicism’s Film 01, released last year, is a natural reference point, though I haven’t seen it. Could movies like these, and their accompanying spectacles, offer an exit strategy – a way of channeling the energy of a niche online space into something less ephemeral, more substantive than being funny on the internet?
Chris Marker investigated and incorporated new technologies into his work as they emerged. In 1997 he released Immemory, an interactive CD-ROM further exploring some of the same themes as Sans. Before his death in 2012, he worked within the online open-world game Second Life, even using it to host a virtual exhibition in 2009. Marker is rumored to have died at his computer desk.
For better or worse, Coin Celleil continues Marker’s technological exploration in his absence. While Marker was always downplaying his own directorial role, the collaborative Coin comes closer to erasing the idea of authorship completely. Its many filmmakers are credited only by Instagram handles that will someday be banned, forgotten, or left behind. The borrowed footage remains unattributed.
Authorlessness, like all freedoms, is a double-edged sword. Maybe it’s fitting that here, in the mid 2020s, Marker’s proxy cat is reposted, animated, democratized – freed, or bound, to engage with Tik Tok dancers and Gen Z anime foot fetishists. The director’s game of telephone continues, and its content distorts accordingly.
I spoke to the alleged person, or people, behind COINCELLPRO online, in 2024.
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[Discussed: Coin Celleil, Sans Soleil, cognitive warfare, French New Wave, delicious Italian sandwich, Bertold Brecht, collaboration, corecore, shitposting, COINTELPRO, Black Panthers, Film01, Angelicism, etc.]
How many people worked on Coin Celleil? How was it all coordinated and organized?
I divided the original film into 50 sections and then DM’d a lot of people, mostly meme pages I fucked with or filmmakers/video artists I know personally, and lots of good friends of course. Once I had 50 accounts signed on I started a big group chat and made a spreadsheet on Google Docs and put everyone’s information in there. The plan was to post a scene everyday, but about half of the original crew would eventually drop out (usually at the last minute), and so I’d replace them with someone from my ever changing list of backup accounts. There were a lot of really brilliant and funny people from the initial lineup who failed to get their submissions in, but there also ended up being a lot of really genius stuff from the people who hopped in later, so I’m not mad at all. It was more or less half a year of me harassing strangers on my phone every day until we had a finished feature film.
When you say the original film, you mean Sans Soleil, yeah?
Yeah, Sans Soleil, written by Sandor Krasna and directed by Christian Hippolyte François Georges Bouche-Villeneuve.
Why did you choose that film? Besides the pun.
It’s a movie that I’ve loved since I was very young, and it’s also a very prescient text for the shitposter in the “from now on I will post meaningful images only” sense. We had spent about half a year on coincell posting about the Knicks and when we were finished with that we were either going to stop posting altogether or commit to a new long-form bit. We had organically started to pepper in Sans Soleil references into some of the memes, and so me and one of the other admins thought it would be funny if we posted every single frame of the film in order, but then we determined that it would be much less of a headache to just remake the whole movie from scratch. It’s like a really baroque shitpost and the pun in the title wrote itself.
Did the remake reveal things that you didn’t expect ? Either about the original film, or something else?
Probably, although maybe not. I don’t know. I think the movie wanted to be remade, and so whatever happened with us felt on some level like it had always been there and we were just facilitating what it wanted to become. We started to develop a decentralized method of production which could become very efficient with a little bit of discipline, and I think it would be cool to take that and transition things into a sludge content hype house type situation for pumping out 75 minute Tubi movies using MLM style organizational hierarchy or something, like a soviet pyramid scheme. In regards to the original film, I think Resnais was spot on when he called Chris Marker the prototype of the 21st century man. There’s a bit at the end about the narrator’s maniac friend who busies himself with electronic graffiti in his basement, “composing his own list of things that quicken the heart, to offer or to erase”. The next line is the motto: “in that moment poetry will be made by everyone, and there will be emus in the ‘zone’.” The revelation of the unexpected for us came through the realization of this prophecy, that although it might feel like internet addiction now, we are already writing this electronic graffiti everyday, and with a liberated mindset (best advanced by revolutionary praxis) it can become poetry.
Did you see the angelicism movie, film01?
No, but I should watch it, even though I know I’ll hate it. I had friends at the premiere and they thought it was insufferable. I am proud to say that I did steal the original poster for the film and it’s still in my possession. There was one day where Angelicism (unblock me coward) had shared some ridiculous promo clips of his waif muses parading the movie poster around Dimes Square, so when I got off work a couple hours later that day I went over there and used my pattern recognition skills to track it down, and when I found it I ripped it off the wall and held it hostage for a couple hundred dollars. I used the poster as a placemat for a particularly delicious Italian sandwich and it also found its way under the blade of a circular table saw at one point, so it’s all scraps now, I’m afraid, but I’m willing to get rid of what’s left of it for $5 if anyone wants it. Important cultural artifact!
I haven’t seen it, but it seems hard to ignore as a reference point given the timing and format. I was refreshed when something similar in scope came out with what appeared to be more interesting aims.
Right. No, it’s something some of us were aware of by the time we were almost done with our movie. I think he was channeling Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinéma, too? Which is a hilarious coincidence. We even almost shared some collaborators, but it didn’t end up working out like that.
He does ask interesting questions though; like, “What if memes weren’t funny?”
Yeah, I don't mean to dismiss it entirely. I’m mainly disinterested in the use of New York art world people as avatars.
Yes, that should be illegal. Something deeply pathetic about some old British neckbeard obsessing over the most boring generation of New York scenesters and everybody knows it.
So I saw Coin Celliel at Sara’s gallery and a portion of it in a Discord screening after that. In both cases the presentation reminds the viewer of the other viewers. That sort of feedback mechanism, the group dynamic – is it important? Is there an ideal setting for watching the film?
The group dynamic is essential. I’m a Brechtian, more or less, and those kinds of distancing effects are crucial – anything that takes you out of the spectacle and inspires a more complex audience experience is valuable. I think all of the best shitposters are already doing this on an intuitive level, even the really stupid ones, or the ones that play stupid at least. It was really great to have the three screens at the gallery because it helped force that group self consciousness of how everybody else in the room is relating to these images and relating to one another relating to these images. (That set up was thanks to the curator, Tomi Faison.)
For the discord screening, the chat serves a somewhat similar function, where you have all these people who know the lore and will organically situate things within long-form posting arcs, which is really where all this stuff lives, situated within knowingly self-contained contexts, as opposed to floating around as discrete images. Or something like that.
How many admins are there, roughly? Is there a “main” one? I saw the, um, “admin reveal” at Sara’s gallery…
There’s probably been over 50 admins over the course of all the accounts, with about 20 people who come and go over the years, and I’d say there’s three or four of us who have consistently defined the character of everything. Lots of very good friends. All of the main accounts have been under my email address, and I sort of decide who gets the password, the only real criteria being that you have to be a Marxist and you have to be funny. If people are posting uninteresting stuff too much I’ll change the password and hope everyone gets the idea to post better. I’m the only one who has ever really checked the DMs, so I’m also the only one who ever goes rogue opportunist and does a podcast or interview or whatever, like I’m doing right now. The admin reveal was fun – some jerk who used to be a Levels of Nuance admin was trying to film it, so I smashed his phone.
I heard murmurs that the admin who appeared was a paid actor. I believed them.
I mean, I’m a paid actor, so yeah.
There are a lot of collaborators, but you seem to be the main orchestrator or director, both of the accounts and the film. Would you say that’s accurate?
Maybe, but lingering on that too much doesn’t help. Each scene in the movie has its own individual director who was free to do whatever they wanted with their time slot as long as they respected a few universal rules, with the downside of that being that it ended up feeling kind of like an anthology film. As for the meme page, it’s a multi-admin shitposting operation. A goal for both sides of things is to diffuse authorship as widely as possible, so maybe there’s a secretary role in there somewhere to make sure things stay horizontal and that people aren’t just posting stale garbage and disrespecting everybody else and the viewer. This is more Leninist than anarchist I think, but we don’t have fixed rules or roles or anything. Cornelius Cardew and the Scratch Orchestra are a good source of inspiration for this kind of spontaneous but structured and amateur-friendly autonomous art-making; it would be cool to do something like The Great Learning but with images. I had a moment of despotism once when I deleted a video of a raccoon eating a grape. I used to get pissed off when admins posted selfies.
To what extent is the project, the account, political?
I mean, it’s in the name, right? Like a lot of people, I was deeply interested in the machinations of anti-communist repression and recuperation back in 2020 which was when I started the first account. I think the Panthers were probably the proudest moment in the history of US politics, and for a lot of people back then, radlibs and genuine Marxists alike, there was a rediscovery of Fred Hampton and George Jackson and The Rainbow Coalition and Assata and Fanon and all that which lead to a greater interest in the history of COINTELPRO and contemporary psyops, and to a much lesser extent cognitive warfare (which is maybe the more important of the two right now, in my opinion). I think it became tiresome reacting to every example of capitalist realism or neoliberal cringe or whatever that popped up in the feed, and so we gradually shifted toward a silliness that was less explicitly political. (None of this is unique to us by the way; a lot of people followed a similar arc.) The ethos has always been that you have to be a Marxist to post on the account, but you are by no means obligated to post about politics.
I think in doing Coin Celleil there was a gap that was bridged between the two modes, and we were able to do a comically obsessive shitposting arc that was also rooted in well-established communist aesthetics and allowed us to draw attention to the digital platforms we inhabit and how they destabilize our sense of place and political history, but in a less technophobic way than some others where you can also fuck around and make jokes. I jokes. Sometimes I think about how MK Ultra led to the recreational use of LSD.
I could see how someone seeing the film out of context could mistake it for being nihilistic rather than political in nature.
Right, well, I guess that’s what we get for playing with context collapse. Optimism of the will.
What is corecore?
It’s a meme. RYM User Notebooks’ now-deleted review of Floral Shoppe sums it up best for me. (“I bet you think this is a joke, too.”) I think what happened is that a lot of people in 2020 started to spend a lot more time on their phones, and when you use TikTok too much it starts to produce what I refer to as an “accidental montage,” which is when the feed rapidly juxtaposes clips. Certain shitposters took notice of this and replicated it within their content and brought authorship to an already existing automatic phenomenon. Certain over-intellectualizers will point to Adam Curtis’ editing style as a precursor, which is probably correct, but I think that what’s actually happening is more organic to the platform, and as usual, it’s the more intuitive posters who do a better job than those who self-consciously parody Hypernormalisation or whatever.
A lot of corecore too is just suicidal teenaged boys doing things too literally; you can watch the corecore clip they played in congress for a particularly vulgar example of this. Going further back, Trevor Bazile’s story posts on his personal accounts and on incellectuals were an under-acknowledged early influence on the whole thing. He would post the same video clip, usually some ~18 yo white jock twink, like 30 times in a row with super slight editing variations and “Agape” by Nicholas Britell playing, and at the time this was the most advanced thing in the world to me. Idk, none of this shit is novel though, just contemporary. Primitive forms of montage have been around since the earliest cave paintings, but of course montage wasn’t realized in actuality until the Soviet avant garde. The real innovation of corecore is not of form, but of subject matter: sludge and doom.
How do you avoid fatigue or psychosis when working with so much digital content? Ever just need to disappear into the woods or something?
No. I love people and I love the world. Although the woods are nice, too.
All of our lives are pretty rich and fulfilling, and I can’t say we’ve ever been less online since we started.
We’re taking a break right now, maybe for good.
If someone is interested in seeing the film, what should they do?
If you’d like to watch Coin Celleil I’d recommend organizing a screening in your hometown and I can send you a link. A certain website offered to host it online, so it’ll probably be up there soon, but I’ve been very distracted making another movie. Otherwise, you can watch all the clips in order on Instagram @coincellpro7, and if you don’t get too distracted it’ll feel like you’re watching a *real* movie.
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