Yesterday one of the most bizarre coincidences in the entirety of my life occurred. Mid-afternoon, while scanning my social media, I came to a link about a video and photo upscaling software that is based on AI called Gigapixel AI. The article leads with old film footage from the Lumière brothers’ 1896 movie “Arrival of a Train At La Ciotat.” It then goes on to give other examples of how this software has improved other types of images. I thought nothing more of any of this and continued on with my day.
Later in the evening, I was going through some of my books, looking for what I might take with me on an upcoming extended trip, and was considering Cyclonopedia by Reza Negarestani and Fanged Noumena by Nick Land. The problem was that I couldn’t find the Negarestani book as the title was escaping me, so I went to Amazon to look up my old order as I also hadn’t memorized the author’s name. Along with the book’s information, I saw some of the suggestions that Amazon makes, including The Melancholy of Resistance by Laszlo Krasznahorkai. Reading the description, I knew I was very familiar with the story. The line in the description that talked about a circus putting the stuffed body of a whale on display in a small Hungarian town was the clue. This had to be related to Bela Tarr’s film titled Werckmeister Harmonies.
After checking on Bela Tarr’s career, I got to wondering about what Srđan Spasojević has been up to since making his controversial movie A Serbian Film. Two years after his rise to infamy, he directed a short horror film that was included in a compilation of shorts titled The ABCs of Death. The premise of The ABCs of Death was that 26 directors were assigned a letter of the alphabet each and then made a short film based on their letter assignment. Srđan was given the letter R, and I found that the compilation was up on Amazon Prime for rent, so I grabbed it to watch immediately.
At an hour and fifteen minutes into the film moving alphabetically, we come to “R is for Removed,” and not 15 seconds into this segment, the camera cuts to a TV screen which is displaying an old black & white film clip that looks familiar. OMG, that’s Arrival of a Train At La Ciotat by the Lumière brothers!
Just six hours before, I watched this 124-year-old film clip of the train pulling into the station that had been used to demonstrate some new software, and now, shortly before I’m about to go to bed in some random movie is the footage being used by an obscure director in a b-movie that I just happened to actually pay for. Then you have to consider that I only rent a few films a year these days. So what are the infinitesimally small odds of something like this happening?
I’m genuinely perplexed by this peculiar coincidence and feel like the universe somehow nudged me, but for what reason or how to interpret this, I have no idea.