These films make no sense together.

Or perhaps, they only make sense together. They defy all logics by which we are taught (and teach) to categorize: national cinemas, the auteur, genre, periodization, modern/postmodern, resistant/conformist, socialist/capitalist, center/periphery. And yet in their very eccentricity, they reflect something highly contemporary: how films circulate today, how they mix, how they’re largely available if you are only willing to look. Afterall, we all found them somewhere: digital, streaming. In response to the overabundance and accessibility of film in the streaming era, Nicholas Rombes proposes constraint as a new method of film analysis. His constraint, a prompt for writing: cue a film and pause it as a still image at 10, 40, and 70 minutes into the film. Our constraint, a prompt for collective screening: a single word, antagonism, and what it intuitively suggests. Nine people, separately and together, pick a film vis a vis antagonism, watch it and discuss.

I have no particular interest in my selected film, Basic Instinct as a discrete film object. Rather, it interests me only in response to the series and to the prompt. The next to last selection of a series, then still an open set. I picked it as an antagonism en acte: exhausted by the demands of the idiosyncratic, the new, the different, the obscure, the far-flung. I can’t compete there ever within this group or often, elsewhere. Where I could compete in this case, was to insist on all things typically verboten in TSG: on the popular, Hollywood, the rewatch, seeing it again for the first time. That you might not know your meme as well you think. And so, we watched Basic Instinct under a constraint that offered new affordances. We were surprised to learn that both Killing Mad Dogs and Basic Instinct featured women-novelist protagonists, a surprise that made us wonder how novel form interceded with film form, similarly and differently in each case, and that both films featured cool shit done with cars. We were less surprised that all the films featuring women found women negotiating sex for power (a fundamental condition of our gendered antagonism). Across the series we thought and located the following antagonisms, many of them familiar but constraint primes the attention anew: form and content, sound and image, spectacle and narrative, presentation and representation, absorption and theatricality, duration and compression, movement and stillness, action and stasis, sex and violence, law and corruption, construction and exploitation, freedom and capture. We wondered if facing the camera and the pseudo-documentary form could still distantiate. If political cinema was obscene in a time of political crisis. We saw two directors die during the time of the series, Peter Watkins and Bahram Beyzai. Mostly, we challenged the algorithm and its predilection for prediction: we told Letterboxd that Punishment Park was trending, that Vada Chennai was popular with friends. Just like this week, we told them that an obscure early Giallo, Giulio Questi’s Death Laid an Egg was what we were watching. And this month, we made Keoma a meme and appointed Elizabeth Taylor an Italian film star. Rarer still, we made Mondays the best day of the week—working the contradiction of a non-antagonistic antagonism.