When people think of movies (sequences of images which, due to persistence of vision, appear to move) there are two options that usually come to mind. One is cinema, film as an industrial product. The stuff that has been being done for over a hundred years now. The stuff cranked out by the Hollywood studios, Netflix, Disney, Amazon etc… It is born of concern with things like box office receipts, viewer numbers,  stars, test audiences, plot, character development, story arc, commercial viability, buzz, sex, violence, and all the usual. The guys making it are sticklers about things like having a beginning middle and end. They want it to “make sense”.  They want a convincing pitch. A convincing pitch is reassuring. They make storyboards and pretty much never go and shoot something without a plan, or on a whim or for no particular reason. They don’t generally revel in discovery, embrace uncertainty or cultivate confusion. It’s business at its dreariest most businesslike.

The other options like Youtube and TikTok appear to be primarily concerned with marketing and narcissism. Or narcissistic marketing. Or something. Artless and uninteresting. Primarily about “like me”, heart me, follow me, adore me, make my numbers grow, look at me, etc…

A developing possibility is the gaming world, which seems to really have a thing for “cinema”, but they have quite a ways to go.

In the world of writers there are novelists and prose writers, telephone book writers (recently extinct) tabloid writers, and disinformationists  (thriving). But there are also poets. Poets  do not insist that it “make sense” and have a beginning, middle and end.

In music there are composers and symphonies and big bands. There are pop groups and blues and folkies. But there are also jazz players who are above all else about improvisation. Jazz players do not insist on making sense. They coexist with uncertainty and occasionally cultivate confusion.

There is an undeniable affinity between jazz and poetry.

There are filmmakers, moving image artists who insist on continuing  without beginning middle or end. Most, if not all, of whom you’ve never heard. But they persist nonetheless in not making sense, embracing confusion and cultivating uncertainty.