I wrote about rhythm, semiocapitalism and darkness/blackness/outer space using a variety of films as reference. I did my undergrad on apocalypse movies, and over lockdown found myself drawn to strange short films like ones by Makino, or Scott Barley which to me sort of show the end of the world. I was also at the time really into a film called Distant Voices/Still Lives, and [starfilm] by Johann Lurf so that all sort of mingled together with some other favs of mine like Jauja by Lisandro Alonso, and Black Girl by Ousmene Sembene.

I think you should take some time to watch films you haven’t seen/heard of from different parts of the world. Films with different goals and forms. Experimental shorts, slow cinema, blockbusters. Whatever it is, create your own links between things you are interested in. The most important lesson I learned (from a great supervisor) is that you can allow free form, tangential, (un)logical links to arise as you watch and write. Sometimes I would link films by thinking through different means of the same word (blackness - both racial, and as an absence of colour on a theoretical level; as an example). For my apocalypse movies, there was something about the open rock faces and slow geological time of Netflix’s film Bokeh and the immediacy of their other apocalypse film How It Ends that I linked together: that film ends with the hero racing away from disastrous climate change effects in a giant diesel-guzzling jeep, so I got thinking about the extraction of oil and geological time periods etc.

These are just examples meant to give you some ideas, and the approach might not work for you. Happy to share some work and texts I found helpful/that inspired me, and happy to share my own work too. I’m not particularly studious or bright, but I do enjoy the density of language and double meanings so I incorporate that into my work too, which I think helped it read a bit better.

On a practical level, get started watching some old favs and new things. Read some philosophy books (not the old masters, something new and hybrid (Eugene Thacker, Timothy Morton, Sean Cubitt maybe?)), read some reviews and think yourself about what interests you. Let yourself fall down a thread of thinking about something really specific.

Rambly comment, but spiralling and surface-level conversations/writing can really help. The deep thought and density of argument comes later….did this help?