Alex Fields

Experimental flower films for Valentine’s Day Send to your sweeties who love form-forward cinema

for those celebrating the weekend’s holiday (or those who just like flowers)

boxd.it/t2Fhe

Josephinenhütte white wine glass, my all time favorite glass

drinking Fritz Lang’s favorite Riesling tonight

Just learned that Aaron Paul is not the brother of Jake and Logan Paul

Next you’re gonna tell me that John Paul II ain’t their dad

I’ve already seen a number of very good films this year courtesy of the IFFR program. CHRONOVISOR is the best of them but also:

THE KILLING OF MEGHNAD (Avikunthak)
TYCOON (Zhang)
ALL YOU NEED TO MAKE A MOVIE IS A GUN (Sein)
XTENDED RELEASE (Solondz)
FOR ONCE I DREAMED OF YOU (Solar)

Happy fifth birthday to my dog Waylon and happy twenty-fifth birthday to the song “Drops of Jupiter” by Train

ICE agents aren’t law enforcement who make mistakes or cross lines. They’re fascist thugs whose entire purpose is violence against racial and political enemies

Yeah, not gonna name the responsible party but distributor didn’t tell her. Which I get not communicating about every single rental but Rotterdam? Lol

Racism, safety for kids and migrant workers, the right of people to be in public without being assaulted by brownshirts, are all very obviously union issues

Solidarity with the strikers in Minnesota, and may we all rise to the occasion when the time comes (which it will soon, if it hasn’t already)

I asked an artist about a screener for her film at IFFR and she told me that’s how she found out her film is screening at IFFR

Morgenkreis (Basma Alsharif, 2025) I’ve been a fan of Basma Alsharif’s work since I saw her first film, We Began By Measuring Distance, however many years ago.

You can also read my review of Morgenkreis here: notreconciled.substack.com/p/morgenkrei...

Film Show 059: Basma al-Sharif An interview with the Palestinian filmmaker about the complexity of spreading violent images, capturing displacement in art through form and presentation, and the shame that comes with giving up

I was very happy to interview Palestinian film and video artist Basma al-Sharif, who has been one of my favorite contemporary avant-garde artists for about as long as I’ve followed this stuff, and who made one of my favorite films of 2025, Morgenkreis

toneglow.substack.com/p/film-show-...

Apparently my slightly silly and fully shameless effort to get people to watch some avant garde films was the second most popular list on Letterboxd of 2025

A filmmaker friend sent an email introducing me to another filmmaker as “one of the most important contemptible critics of experimental film”

He blames autocorrect but I may add it to my byline…I would not have called myself either important or contemptible but if it’s a package deal, I’ll take it

In response to mass popular demand I’ve resumed my project of listing the best country albums by decade

The best country albums of the 1980s:

Reasonable people can disagree about which states or political programs count as socialist or democratic, but the bottom line is there can be no stable form of socialism or democracy anywhere in the world until the American empire is dismantled

My favorite films of 2025 Cheers to opacity, anachronism, interruption, and the impossible thought of revolution.

Cheers to opacity, anachronism, interruption, and the impossible thought of revolution.

My favorite films of 2025, and a few words on each:

notreconciled.substack.com/p/my-favorit...

turning the windshield wiper speed up when a heavier song comes on and thinking, yeah I can still hang

Images of Time: An Interview with Shinya Isobe - Ultra Dogme Alex Fields speaks with Shinya Isobe about the gradual development of his experimental approach, time and cinema, the dynamic presence of sound in his work, and more.

I interviewed Japanese avant garde filmmaker Shinya Isobe for Ultra Dogme.

You can watch four of his films on their Patreon for the next week if you subscribe

ultradogme.com/2025/12/22/s...

RIP Joe Ely, flatlander, honky tonker, and piano key clicker. This is one of my favorite albums of all time.

An updated version of my avant-garde Christmas movies list, with twenty films and videos and downloadable files for eighteen of them

I had assumed that the psychedelic horse sequence in Basma al-Sharif’s DEEP SLEEP (left) was quoting Malcolm Le Grice’s BERLIN HORSE (right) but she just told me it was created entirely by accident when her super 8 camera caught fire with that roll inside

Gwenifer Raymond’s third LP is one of the very best albums of the year. She recalls why Fahey’s style was dubbed “American primitive” in the first place—that mysterious, ancient-feeling, string-rattling tension shared by country blues, mountain folk, and Hindustani classical

Been catching up on a bunch of this year’s Americana/alt country songwriter albums. Anna Tivel is the best of them, SG Goodman and Greg Freeman also good, Lily Seabird pretty decent. Kelsey Waldon and Sunny Sweeney do the job if you want straight country

I haven’t

I’m not finished with it but, good book I think

Today “a concept that was generated ex post facto has become part of a worldwide mass memory; a dream image of bygone glamour, it represses as much history as it recalls, usually in the service of cinephilia and commodification.” Rest of the book traces that history in various ways

Film noir was “a kind of modernism in the popular cinema: it used unorthodox narration; it resisted sentiment and censorship; it reveled in the ‘social fantastic’; it demonstrated the ambiguity of human motives; and it made commodity culture seem like a wasteland.”

drugs ain’t it

How do I do that when Spaces isn’t available