Saw Gangsterism (2025) tonight at a local cinema series. As a film, it is stuffed with philosophy, political theory, and cinematic references, fed to the viewer through glitchy editing, off-kilter camera angles, and flashes of the characters setting up shots. The characters grapple with the racism in the cinematic tradition and current film industry, overtly in the context of witnessing livestreamed genocide in Palestine. This will likely be the work I reference in the future when I talk about Brecht. The ways in which the film subverts traditional cinema techniques are part of a critique of settler colonialism, told through a loose plot of a canadian-filipino filmmaker whose white friend has been stealing his ideas for his own films that package these ideas into something fascistic.
It is always a relief to watch films that deal with the reality of the genocide in Gaza. The commentary on race and politics were interesting if sometimes difficult for me to parse, which felt funny to me as the characters were insisting that academia is the least worst institution and must be destroyed and that cinema is the medium of the masses because i found this film pretty inaccessible in many ways, like the looped dialogue or the flashing images which were starting to get overwhelming, but also much of the dialogue.
All this to say, I found aspects of this film interesting, but I suppose it would be most compelling and enjoyable to an audience convinced of the singular importance oc cinema as a medium, and I enjoy movies, but some aspects of this movie felt too āinsider baseballyā for me.
