Notes On The Anti-Film

KB: This was an essay I originally wrote during the height of the COVID pandemic in 2021. I’m honestly unsure when that year I wrote this. What I do remember is that I was becoming increasingly obsessed with the power of the moving image, the writings of Sergei Eisenstein, and this concept that the art of cinema has slowed down to a near halt ever since the end of the silent era and the coming of sound to cinema. I spent many hours deliberating and debating with friends, and often myself, about how there must be a way forward. To break out from the shackles the art form has become comfortable in. And, one day, it hit me! Like a fast-moving bus colliding with me as I cross the street, the concept of The Anti-Film hit me. I attempted to put it into words in the form of an essay. An academic style document, similar to ones I wrote as a student, but this time, I wasn’t writing to get good grades but to get an impassioned point across. I’ve been thinking about this concept on a near-weekly basis, year in and year out, since 2021. When I picked the original essay back up again this year, 2025, it was unfinished. I had only written half of my thoughts and ideas, and never dove into how or why I came up with the concept to begin with (that part was planned for the second half of this essay). But this year, I decided to cap this essay off as is and to post it onto my website as I originally intended. I’ve done some edits to it, of course, with the help of some friends and family giving much-needed feedback and support, but the concepts, ideas and structure are the same as I had originally written them four years ago. I’ve added a few extra paragraphs to make the whole thing a little more cohesive, but I’ve kept the key points mainly untouched.

I will build on all of this again. I will soon make an Anti-Film, the way I see it can be done. And I will write more about the concept overall with everything I’ve learnt since then. I will do this because, as I wrote all those years ago, “to venture out in a sea of cinema unhinged so that we may finally be able to try and get further". I hope you enjoy reading the original piece. 

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Notes On The Anti-Film: A Call to Action (2021) - Edited June 2025

Written by Kyle Borg

The Anti-Film is pro-film language. We know already that images and sounds which combine during the editing process can, out of their relation to one another, create meaning: if that is to form a narrative for the viewer to follow; using symbolism - both pictorially and audibly - to convey the inner world of a character and theme; or, to help impress an overarching idea. On occasion, a film will weave in musical accompaniment to guide the emotional and intellectual processes for a given scene. But it may also utilise the wide array of frequencies and audio possibilities separate from music for the same purposes. Though what we experience as viewers is the raw information that is given to us. It is in the viewer’s mind that the narrative or idea truly unfolds, if at all. The full range of recourses available to a filmmaker to guide the viewer through their design must be championed, and the objective to reset and reshape what has come before is now a necessity in doing so. The name itself - “The Anti-Film” - comes from a rejection of the norms we have come to associate with film as a piece of media. The packaging for which familiar stories are told. The goal for this agenda is to create pieces of art that work closer to the medium’s original and more primitive components; the ones that are unique to film and its foundational achievements. The big difference between an Anti-Film and a commercial project you may catch at your local IMAX today is form and intent. 

Cinema quickly adapted to become a way of telling stories in the same ilk as a traditional novel or play might. Placing a continuous story through a series of (un)expected narrative and emotional beats. This has undeniably been the case for most of cinema’s lifespan. An Anti-Film relies on the individual thought and pathetic capabilities of the viewer to tell the story and to invoke pathos, utilising montage, sound and image associations to trigger further subconscious engagement in the viewer’s mind. In a way, the goal of all Anti-Films is to tell a story no other art form can tell or even adapt from - in an ideal state, practically tailored for a single viewer. Hopefully, these works will translate more universally, but I believe it’s good to narrow the aim to get closer to achieving their creative purposes.

Film generally runs at sixteen to thirty frames per second at the usually accepted speeds for true-to-life cinematography, with twenty-four frames per second being the more standard and accepted frame rate in the modern Western world. In film, that’s potentially twenty-four paintings, photographs, and therefore individual stories to be packed into a single second! Of course, you would be pushed to fully appreciate all that is there to offer in that second. The extent to which one spends time to appreciate a piece of work adds great value to the piece itself, but the sentiment of many great visual works and achievements being incorporated in film within only that second should be acknowledged. No other art form can do that apart from the visual medium of film and digital video. 

It is the cutting between and the selective ordering of frames that makes the visual aspect of this art form stand out from a selective collage of an artist’s oeuvre. The art of cutting and the theory of montage set cinema apart due to its malleability: anything can be arranged in whatever order and measured for whatever reason. Each unique arrangement will likely elicit a different response, no matter how marginal the change, and each unique arrangement has the potential of producing different meanings. Anyone who has enjoyed, read and watched the works of film pioneer Sergei Eisenstein would likely agree. This is the early basis of film theory and the study of the medium of film as a wanting-to-be-accepted art form.

Add motion and camera movement alongside editing technique; involve the vast visual iconography popularised by other art forms (or from the history of film itself), and we have the possibility of near ultimate creative freedom within the confines of not only the projected or digital space, but bordering within the edges of culture and nature. So, why don’t we use it? 

An example of a film that almost captures the essence of this is The Image Book (Godard, 2018). Of course, not entirely, though it is one of the only works that I’ve watched that actively pushes the medium closer towards the Anti-Film’s overarching goal – to be something only film can be. Given the fact that this was not made to be an Anti-Film, it is not without its drawbacks in its - feasibly unconscious - attempt at aiming at this goal. In parts, it is still overly interested in telling us a conscious story about our history and past, and the modern-day world. These documentary-esque moments, though poetic and abstract much of the time, are told with connecting tissue that we can vaguely trace with the tip of our finger outstretched on a noticeable factual timeline. However, between the shots and the peculiar cutting, larger pictures form in places where other works struggle to produce any blossom. 

As the viewer, it is us that is granted the freedom to connect images and sounds in our heads that are at first glance wholly unrelated. We do this using our own experience of life and our own experience consuming an array of content. One moment that struck me while watching The Image Book for the first time was Godard’s connecting narration mentioning a “shark” whilst poetically describing a real-life event - “or a shark on his way to cooler waters”- with other visuals seen previously in the film. The word “shark” triggered, for me, a remembrance of a brief shot of a shark painted on the tip of a World War II aircraft and then a jolting cut to a select few seconds of a shark attacking the boat from the climax of Jaws (Spielberg, 1975). 

For Godard’s text, I was able to relate the use of the word to the feeling of manufactured fear. The one told in a fictional story, and the kind that is used as a fierce decoration to intimidate an opponent, the shark as a self-manufactured persona to strike terror and to create a mythic distance to someone’s character, through the vehicle of a WWII Spitfire plane. This more real-world use of the shark on the side of the Spitfire, which for me exemplifies this fear, is equally manufactured in fictional shark attacks in Jaws, albeit another kind of manufacturing of fear, through the horror genre or “monster movie” which can be experienced in a movie theatre or - more likely today, unfortunately - your couch at home. This connection could be pieced together in a viewer’s mind to create their own emotional and thematic meaning.  Or it might not. The power is given to the viewer; Godard just had to arrange the pictures and audio bites.  

Nonetheless, I argue that the connection is there to be made. It is left to us as viewers to make it if we wish to. Such is the case with many of the great narrative achievements that utilise the audience’s subconscious in art cinema or even the audio-visual arts. No one experience of a film is exactly the same - if so, there would be little point for film criticism as a scholarly endeavour. This is important to acknowledge. Nevertheless, there is an argument that a language can be formed by what we can all agree on as having meaning. Certain images can have wide associations for large groups of people and subcultures. Knowledge of these associations is all it takes to make wider connections and further engross the viewing experience. When it comes to the Anti-Film - to spin English Philosopher Francis Bacon’s famous remark in a different context - knowledge itself is power. 

Utilising the Language of Film

Film is young and, therefore, its language is too - but there is something undeniably forming, and it is already being wielded without being grammatically challenged by the average movie-goer. Once a vague language is understood and established by a culture or society, it can be learnt and developed by those who come after. 

The more you know, the more you will connect with the Anti-Film - even the elements the artist may not have intended to connect when making the piece of work could form fresh and unique interpretations for a viewer. This aligns with the key argument around the ‘Death of the Author’, popularised by theorist Roland Barthes, amongst some of his other theories. Though by putting the light on the viewer and allowing the artist to mould an emotionally attentive piece, these interpretations are opened up to become actively welcomed – and, hopefully, this richness of thought going through the viewer will enhance a stimulating experience. 

Nonetheless, the artist will always have a reason to cut two pieces of clips or audio tracks together; either for a practical purpose - simply to aid the telling of a story - or in an attempt to create meaning. They may decide to have two elements be synchronised or non-synchronised, and they will need a rationale for that as well. The whole piece should have a purpose: a wisdom, a moral or philosophical belief that is attempted to be conveyed rather consciously by the artist. Sometimes, it can be something unable to be written. Something that is to be felt. A feeling or thought conveyed in the only way possible: through the art of filmmaking – the organised cutting together of audio and visual. This search for truth and meaning in art is a myth worth chasing.

I can also see how this purpose can belong to a decision of approach personal to the maker. They may not be able to explain why it’s the right choice in rational words, but there’s truth and meaning in their process of deciding upon a creative choice. An artist’s instinct, perhaps, drawn out from personal life experiences. Like a writer deciding on the right words, or a painter allowing room for the chaos as they splash paint on canvas. The madness of method beholds the point. 

These creative freedoms are readily available to a filmmaker working to build on and formalise a language within the art form of the Anti-Film. Though I do understand a natural trepidation with pursuing this as an ideal. “To formalise” is hardly synonymous with “to rebel”, and the conceit of the movement could be easily twisted in a way to be subject it to wrongful taunts of inherent authoritarianism. Fundamentally, however, I do not believe that the rigidity of pursuing a creative purpose and thinking about attributing meaning to each compositional detail of a work will lead to us to chasing our own tails in producing creative work – as we seem to be doing today - I see this as an upcoming step of mastering the content of film and conceiving future engagement with compelling cinema. This is the pursuit of the addition of a layer of basic language comprehension (a common film literacy) on everything that has been built before through this very medium, and a gigantic push to educate the viewership of this language in order for the films to convey more than they currently are doing. It’s evolutionary, built on cinema’s past. 

We’ve seen these attempts to evolve before. 

This is the power of the motion picture when wielded by the likes of Ingmar Bergman during the opening sequence of Persona (Bergman, 1966). The psychological magic that comes from cutting two images together that the likes of Lev Kuleshov or Sergei Eisenstein summarised and popularised all those years ago during the beginning of Soviet socialist film realism: meaning can be created by association, and that association is brought by the audience, otherwise, there would be no meaning to divulge.

Bergman knew this impeccably. The image of a tarantula crawling across the surface of the screen, a cut to a white screen for a few seconds, then cutting to a sheep bleeding from its throat by a farmer’s hand. There is an inescapable fear that is present in both shots. The common fear of arachnids and our inability to run from or kill the creature, due to the possibility that it may do something to us first. And this fear seen in the eyes of the sheep facing imminent death, mirroring our fear of mortality. Or perhaps the creature’s eyes convey a helpless betrayal by its owner. This arguably further mirrors the viewer’s feeling of betrayal by a filmmaker who is putting them through something uncomfortable to witness. The flickering sound of a film projector, pointing the cutting judgmental gaze at the projectionist, or perhaps Bergman himself. The one with the power over those in the room witnessing the projection, and his extraordinary ability to show them anything that can be made and captured. 

There is power that comes from the associations we make in cinema; Eisenstein’s theory of montage relies so heavily on pre-existing associations, and so does the Kuleshov effect. Bergman, arguably one of European cinema’s most renowned filmmakers, plays with what is primal in humanity to reach his emotional goals in the opening of Persona. His wielding of the uncanny is instrumental to the atmosphere and tone necessary to engaging with the strong emotions he’s interested in. 

Without our own understanding that a woman positioned seductively on camera has the potential to entice lustful thoughts in spectators, the thought to bestow meaning on the subsequent shot of a close-up of a still-faced man would never occur. Likewise, a shot of a coffin would only bring that association of sadness to the same still-faced man if we ourselves didn’t associate death with sadness, etc. This is, of course, the Kuleshov Effect, but its relevance to our understanding of film language and image association is essential in highlighting that the key component is the viewer themselves. 

In the cinema of the past ten years, an understanding has come about that the pre-conceived associations that a viewer has brought into a film can be manipulated by a screenwriter or a filmmaker. This has been wielded with chilling results. Sci-fi film Arrival (Villeneuve, 2016) comes to mind. It utilises our expectations of receiving a story linearly to alter the way we perceive the inner emotional conflicts of the story’s protagonist, drawing us closer to her inner world based on something that, in the narrative timeline that we are engaged in, has not happened yet. Without the usual, clear signifiers that the film’s opening moments exist in another point in time, our perception of the rest of the film is askew. This awareness and flip of traditional film and story language fits thematically with the sci-fi narrative of a linguist needing to see things differently to understand an alien language, but it is also further proof that this common language in consuming stories through audio and visual means does already exists, and can be used to tell a story subconsciously, without it being wholly representative of what is actually being portrayed on screen.

Something to note, however, is that for a language to quickly build, contradictions to the viewer’s expectations should come much after the reinforcement of those expectations and their solidifying into the language of the Anti-Film. There are still many gaps, and foundations are yet to be laid, let alone widely understood by the film-going audience.  

The Next Stages

These are the fundamentals of cinema associations, yet we have never seemed to have popularly transcended its base stages. This might be because of two reasons: 

1. These fundamentals, being the tools necessary to effectively tell stories using film language and cutting techniques, are the baseline of what we need to convey meaning in the way other art forms might, so there is no sufficient need or want to go further. 

2. Or, we cannot go any further. The time since early film theory established the way things will be in the future has set us stuck on the path we are on, and the popularity of film in mass culture has stopped us from bringing more to the art of cinema, because there is no more to bring - the dye has been cast and has been set on the fabric of film viewership and has permanently immobilised film language. 

This second reason may indicate that as long as film is popular, there is no more to be brought from it because the rules have already been laid out and accepted. Any attempt to go actively against the grain will be viewed simply as a fad. A fickleness that does not exist in a mass audience that demands their invitation to the party. 

As unlikely as this sounds to me today, this is a possibility. More associations can, of course, be made that cinema has been used as a reflector of the current world, but in terms of its magic, it is employing the same refined bag of tricks. Only stories are to elevate it to something further. The concern is that few attempts are knocking on that door to try and break new ground. The filmmakers have accepted the tricks with open arms and will use the reliable magic that has worked for over a century. 

New technologies and techniques are brought in over time, though do they challenge to progress the current status quo of film language? These big-money inventions, like the pioneering developments in performance capture technology advanced through the production of Avatar (James Cameron, 2009) and its sequel, are all exclusively made for the film industry. Financed by large conglomerate studios, to aid in telling traditional stories - stories already accepted by the masses. The mono-myth in colourful disguise. Everytime. I wonder why the limits are not pushed outside the video art world and into the world of cinema. For eyes in a cinema, not art galleries. With some rational pondering that will eventually lead me through the maze of commercialism and the importance of capital comfort, I may begin to understand why, in that narrow, short-sighted perspective. But I’ll go back again to wondering about the lost potential if we were not to take on this exercise. 

Why can’t the technologies be maxed out to a hundred per cent? Aim to burn the eyes of those who are watching with unforgettable images and body-altering sounds. Not the same old landscapes as seen before, formed in the same ways we have become familiar and comfortable with. Not the same strings to be pulled to conduct the familiar tear in the eye. 

We build on what exists, much like the world outside creativity, but when we venture on the far outer rim of creativity, it is always done with caution. We never want to go too far so that we alienate our audience; to not want to take them too far out to the unfamiliar, away from our collective safe place, away from the standards of mass consumerist culture. 

There is an audience for the option to venture out. We are curious creatures on a spinning world. Simply making and promoting a film that is an “exercise in poor taste” and watching John Walters’ career skyrocket years later in a niche counter-culture held within the confines of cinematic entertainment. It might be a gimmick or a fad for a time, but so was the moving picture initially. I unfairly equate it to the goal of going to space, which was only possible through the knowledge of specific factors and the further grasping of the ingredients that will help us get there. For the space race, the goal was to test safely, and to never fail when humans are put on rocketships, as should be when personal safety is involved – but why does creativity need to be as restricted? Of course, I’m not saying to produce something unsafe for the viewer or filmmakers. Most certainly not. But push the limits and open yourself up for failure to establish more research and to find new ground.

Allow me the option to venture out in a sea of cinema unhinged so that we may finally be able to try and get further. How might we do this? The Anti-Film is my sole proposition. Now that you know the overall intention of the Anti-Film, you may help me fully realise this near-impossible vision; for only then, we might all start thinking critically and proactively about film’s future.