The last movie I saw in theaters before the pandemic was Vitalina Varela by Pedro Costa, on February 26, 2020. I took two pages of notes while watching. When I checked to see what I’d made of the movie, I saw that I’d written sentence after sentence on top of one another, producing a mostly illegible tangle of language. Resolved so far as possible from near-abstraction into words, my recorded thoughts on Vitalina Varela are as follows:

Procession

I film,
Early soldiers molten, to where ghosts ghosts
of town
Fro ntal shots, like portraits.
Characters waiting, washing,
standing
Likea Greek chorus
their heads turned down
—the welcoming crew

Often
Logorrhea
Something — Ventura’s glinting babbling. the
darkness
Not senseless pupils, but a leather jacket like Beckett’s
Not I or Play. a discombobulated
reconstruction of events
One of de Cooch’s interiors, but
Dilapidated, darkened. Angular
diagonal rooms, alleyways —
Cabinet not of a stories Caligari
photos?

Because they don’t communicate
duration
the
Ebneverstion-tongue, tongue, onsy utter casuals no
To wanted, pornlegal, 140 I stoll yestry cudgel
“I’ll die”