How many people worked on Coin Celleil ? How was it all coordinated and organized?

I divided the original film into 50 sections and then DM’d a lot of people, mostly meme pages I fucked with or filmmakers/video artists I know personally, and lots of good friends of course. Once I had 50 accounts signed on I started a big group chat and made a spreadsheet on Google Docs and put everyone’s information in there. The plan was to post a scene everyday, but about half of the original crew would eventually drop out (usually at the last minute), and so I’d replace them with someone from my ever-changing list of backup accounts. There were a lot of really brilliant and funny people from the initial lineup who failed to get their submissions in, but there also ended up being a lot of really genius stuff from the people who hopped in later, so I’m not mad at all. It was more or less half a year of me harassing strangers on my phone every day until we had a finished feature film.

When you say the original film, you mean Sans Soleil , yeah?

Yeah, Sans Soleil, written by Sandor Krasna and directed by Christian Hippolyte François Georges Bouche-Villeneuve.

Why did you choose that film? Besides the pun.

It’s a movie that I’ve loved since I was very young, and it’s also a very prescient text for the shitposter in the “from now on I will post meaningful images only” sense. We had spent about half a year on coincell posting about the Knicks, and when we were finished with that we were either going to stop posting altogether or commit to a new long-form bit. We’d organically started to pepper Sans Soleil references into some of the memes, and so me and one of the other admins thought it would be funny if we posted every single frame of the film in order, but then we determined that it would be much less of a headache to just remake the whole movie from scratch. It’s like a really baroque shitpost and the pun in the title wrote itself.

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There are a lot of collaborators, but you seem to be the main orchestrator or director, both of the accounts and the film. Would you say that’s accurate?

Maybe, but lingering on that too much doesn’t help. Each scene in the movie has its own individual director who was free to do whatever they wanted with their time slot as long as they respected a few universal rules, with the downside of that being that it ended up feeling kind of like an anthology film. As for the meme page, it’s a multi-admin shitposting operation. A goal for both sides of things is to diffuse authorship as widely as possible, so maybe there’s a secretary role in there somewhere to make sure things stay horizontal and that people aren’t just posting stale garbage and disrespecting everybody else and the viewer. This is more Leninist than anarchist I think, but we don’t have fixed rules or roles or anything. Cornelius Cardew and the Scratch Orchestra are a good source of inspiration for this kind of spontaneous-but-structured and amateur-friendly autonomous art-making; it would be cool to do something like The Great Learning but with images.

I had a moment of despotism once when I deleted a video of a raccoon eating a grape. I used to get pissed off when admins posted selfies.

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