Crestone
Art: the film Crestone
Experienced: on Blu-ray, bought from Vinegar Syndrome’s website
Crestone is another film I got from Vinegar Syndrome, made by one of their partner labels. The film follows a group of Soundcloud rappers living in the desert of Crestone, Colorado, attempting to forge their own little self-sustaining village away from the world. The filmmaker, who was friends with many of them when they were kids, records their lives in a blurring of reality and fiction as a wildfire that is implied to have destroyed the rest of the world descends upon the group. The film credits each actor as themselves, and pulls from the actors' real social media posts, so there clearly is some truth at play here. But the film also credits the director as a co-writer on the film, making it clear that it was, to some extent, scripted.
But you don't necessarily need to check the credits to figure that out. The film lets you in on the fact that it's a movie. At multiple points, there will be shots of the director syncing the audio and video or directing the actors in ways that make it clear that this is staged. And just after a period where this meta-textual element is absent for a while, the director--who also narrates the film--comments on the fact that it's just a movie, distinct form their Real Lives. The film doesn't let you go too long without reminding you that it is, in fact, staged.
This meta-textual element is just one part of the film's strange tapestry of tones and aesthetics. The film can alternate between ethereal musings over smooth drone footage to stark and messy flash photography to documentary footage of guys smoking weed to Instagram posts. I wouldn't say these elements flow together seamlessly, but their juxtaposition is certainly evocative... though of what, I'm not entirely sure. Perhaps the Soundcloud rap scene itself? I couldn't say for sure, given that it's not a scene I'm a part of--or even very much aware of, for that matter, beyond the near meme-status of rappers dropping their Soundcloud links under Tweets that could even mildly be considered "hits" during the pandemic.
Speaking of the pandemic, the film feels oddly prescient with its themes of apocalypse and isolation, as well as its focus on this strange little subculture, given that it came out in 2020. Made right before the pandemic even began, it would feel right at home in the brief cinematic canon of "pandemic cinema". I imagine it felt even stranger when the film first came out. In retrospect, this film almost feels like it was an omen, a pale horseman covered in tattoos and the stench of weed.
The film has a great deal of respect for the Soundcloud rappers it focuses on, despite the director's acknowledgement of their laissez-faire attitude and disconnect from reality. The director's final monologue, filmed over footage of a bedroom the gang had just raided for supplies, remarks wistfully on the group as something beautiful. She speaks about evolution, but it's not so much that these Soundcloud rappers are the next evolution of humanity, but that there is a certain sadness that they won't be the next evolution. There's something hopeful about this utopia these folks have tried to build, even as we have watched the cracks within it form.
This group, this vision, this era will pass, the film seems to acknowledge. These people and their strange, messy, beautiful dream are but a fleeting moment in time, a path not taken--a path we do not have it within us to take, at least, not now. The day and age of the Soundcloud rapper was just about to get a boost during the pandemic, but that was just a fluke in the decline of this strange world. Even in the midst of the Soundcloud rapper's era, it seems, the director was already writing its eulogy.
Perhaps the film's eclectic mix of styles, aesthetics, tones, and techniques is, itself, a reflection of this strange world, an evolution that we are not yet ready for. The film, like the rappers whose story it tells, is a reality putting on a performance so ingrained that it becomes truth. There is no line between performance and self. Only this liminal space in between.
I still don't know what that scene in the cave was about, though. That shit was wack.