The Madame Psychosis show (Film and Optics)
If there’s one even remotely consistent theme it’s maybe film and film-cartridges. Early and (mostly Italian) neorealist and (mostly German) expressionist celluloid film. Never New Wave. Thumbs-up on Peterson/Broughton and Dali/Buñuel and -down on Deren/Hammid. Passionate about Antonioni’s slower stuff and some Russian guy named Tarkovsky. Sometimes Ozu and Bresson. Odd affection for the hoary dramaturgy of one Sir Herbert Tree. Bizarre Kaelesque admiration for goremeisters Peckinpah, De Palma, Tarantino. Positively poisonous on the subject of Fellini’s 8½. Exceptionally conversant w/an online forum avant-garde celluloid and avant- and après-garde digital cartridges, anticonfluential cinema, Brutalism, Found Drama, etc.
Context
Madame Psychosis's on-air canon: the book's resident film theorist laid out taste by taste, ending squarely inside JOI's own genre-space (anticonfluentialism, Found Drama — the endnote hanging off "anticonfluential cinema," n.61, defines the movement with JOI in its contributor list and doubles as the novel's self-description). The show's "one even remotely consistent theme" is this anthology's theme.