Recent AI Works by Damon Packard (Patreon)

The films of Damon Packard are an acquired taste, to put it mildly. Although he is far too sophisticated to be relegated to the "outsider art" category, Packard does display a maniacal, self-contained DIY approach and an aesthetic defined by a view of cinematic history as essentially "browless." Spielberg, Lucas, and Carpenter populate his projects, along with a fascination with high-gloss 80s genre cheapies from The Movie Channel, and a sincere appreciation of high formalist film culture that pops up in the most unexpected places. (Not sure if this is common knowledge, but Packard has made money over the years cutting trailers for Criterion / Janus and other boutique labels.)

I still remember being at NYFF's Views from the Avant-Garde in 2007, when the great Mark McElhatten programmed Packard's SpaceDisco One, the maestro's glittering mashup of 1984 and Logan's Run. The New York film intelligentsia walked out in droves, while for a few of us it seemed like a perfectly logical inclusion. With Packard's fixation on pop trash, cult imagery, and his frequent flirtation with dangerous or transgressive material, he shares a lot of creative DNA with the late Kenneth Anger, whose own films would probably be roundly dismissed if they premiered today.

In recent weeks, Packard has uploaded a whole batch of new films to his YouTube channel. Although they are all quite different, they share a few key elements. For one thing, Packard is creating moving images using Artificial Intelligence programs. All the disturbing, uncanny-valley effects that we find ourselves debating about AI creations -- the plasticky skin, the stereotyping and homogeneity of the human figures, the misplaced facial features or multiple digits -- are all being actively employed by Packard. It is difficult to say whether he is importing AI into his perverse, psychotronic world, or the two have just turned out to be a perfect match. In either case, Packard is making offputtingly Surrealist films that attack the history of cinema (and cinematic exhibition) from several angles.

The best of the lost is definitely The Man Who Couldn't Miss Screenings, a shrill movie-nerd lament that turns the smelliest, most obsessive traits of the urban cinephile into next-level pathology. "Comfortably Numb" plays in its entirety as a lumpy, balding film freak panics that he is "missing all the screenings." ("It's 35mm! They haven't shown these films for fifty years!") On the one hand, the film's depiction of the nerds' "Chinese wives" is unavoidably cartoonish and possibly racist. At the same time, the multiple iterations of "LA movie nerd" in the film (neck beards, too-tight t-shirts, thick gut, gooners' stare) are just as stereotyped as the Asian women. And while one cannot entirely compare the two, based on the race-and-gender power differential, Packard is in part showing just how an impersonal AI system sees us, or sees our image-culture. Besides, these angry, screaming women ("All you talk about is go to screening!") represent the flip-side of nerd culture's weeaboo fetishization, from anime geeks to Tarantino. Then again, Packard displays his own private brand of geekdom, providing what must be the first piece of film discourse to ever address both Béla Tarr and Albert Pyun.

In terms of quality and ideas explored, two other works follow close behind The Man Who. The Sleeping Audience, which also incorporates some racially dodgy material, once again shows what AI will produce when tasked to concoct non-white bodies. A mostly Black audience at an AMC is regaled with slow, intensive supernovas and nuclear explosions. Although in some ways Audience appears to be Packard's response to Oppenheimer, there's also a hint of Malick in the film-within-the-film's bombastic music of the spheres. The sleeping audience is more than just bored. They are narcotized, patched into the shittiest Matrix, lured by the promise of intelligent entertainment and melted into an undifferentiated mass. I'm not sure whether Packard is familiar with Michael Snow's sculpture The Audience, but the similarities are notable.

More modest in its aims while epic in its vernacular,  AMC Theaters - 1200 AD offers a riff on the infamous Nicole Kidman ads. Packard has produced a composite "Nicole Kidman," based on images from across her career, along with other actresses and the usual generic AI blondes. She haunts the streets and theater aisles as a hooded Game of Thrones princess warrior, as we are taken back to a hypothetical (?) AMC multiplex from the medieval period. Emaciated men and shackles serfs trudge into the cinema, looking suitably grim and miserable. And like many of the films this resembles (Andrei Rublev, Hard to Be a God), the guys slitting their own throats seem to be having the most fun.

In retrospect, Packard's last feature, 2018's Fatal Pulse, hinted at this new direction. A future / past Los Angeles doomscape in which William Friedkin struggles against a soulless, rapacious film industry, the film was partly cobbled together from insert shots and atmospheres from the assembly line of 1980s erotic thrillers. Like those Cannon cheapies, AI has a set of parameters and is all too content to repeat itself ad infinitum. Presuming Packard's next feature will be AI-driven, I suspect it will seem quite familiar, while also looking like nothing we've ever seen before.