by Stephen Kuster
Isiah Medina’s fifth feature, Gangsterism (2025), is brimming with ideas. Typical of the Canadian experimental filmmaker’s work, the majority of the film’s runtime is devoted to conversations, thick with theory and citation, while cuts forge associations within and across these dialogic scenes. Yet, like its predecessor, He Thought He Died (2023), a heist film set in an Ontario art museum, Gangsterism is not without narrative, however loose it may be.
Medina’s film centers on Clem (Marc Bacolol), who is both filmmaker and gangster. Its diffuse narrative follows Clem’s attempts at collecting outstanding debts to finance his next film while searching for the leaker posting his films online. Surrounding Clem is a crew of filmmakers-cum-conspirators, most notably Ez (Kalil Haddad), March (Charlotte Zhang), and Nico (Jonalyn Aguilar). From this premise, the film establishes its central theoretical occupations, which originate in cinema before expanding out to philosophy, colonialism, and world history. Gangsterism thus functions as a cinematic analogue to the novel of ideas. As in the polyphonic novels of Thomas Mann and Fyodor Dostoevsky, Gangsterism instantiates its ideas through the film’s various personae, whose encounters become sites of intellectual collision.
Take, for instance, a scene shared between Ez and March. Seated in a cramped closet, filled with assorted film equipment, they speak of film history, refracted from the present. “I don’t want to get used to livestreaming genocide,” says March. From Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, the conversation turns to cinema, particularly D.W. Griffith’s crosscutting and its role in distancing viewers from history’s unfolding. Ez asserts, “Meta wants you to look at the world through the eyes of Griffith.” As the discussion intertwines cinema and history, the film cuts frenetically between the two speakers, various objects, and fragments of other scenes. The scene culminates in Ez’s declaration, “I’d rather speak and offend not with content, but with grammar. I am grammar.” In Gangsterism’s montage of ideas, thought cannot be fixed to any one line of dialogue. Instead, to follow Ez’s provocation, thought emerges from the film’s grammar. Thought resides in the cut.
This insistence on the cut animates Medina’s recent article, “Cut is a Form of Thinking” (2025), published in Crisis and Critique as part of an issue on Alain Badiou. Although the essay appeared after Gangsterism’s world premiere in Toronto, it has become central to the film’s circulation. Screenings in Zurich, Chicago, and New York have been accompanied by artist lectures, in which Medina recounts the essay’s key arguments.
In “Cut is a Form of Thinking,” Medina proposes the cinematic cut as a nonlinguistic form of philosophical thought. Understood in these terms, the cut is irreducible to a technique that links two pre-existing frames. Rather, the cut is evental. It at once interrupts the continuity of the given and generates the new in its wake. Much like Gangsterism, the essay rereads the history of cinema through Badiou’s set theory, alighting on seminal moments in montage theory, spanning early cinema, Soviet montage, and Jean-Luc Godard’s jump cut. At stake in Medina’s account of the cut is the possibility of that which does not yet exist.
Following the film’s premiere at Onion City Experimental Film Festival, I spoke with Medina over Zoom. Moving between his essay and film, our conversation explored the variegated promises of the cut.
Stephen Kuster: I’m interested in how your essay, “Cut is a Form of Thinking,” began. On one level, how did the essay itself come about? On another level, you open the piece with the proposition that thought exists before philosophy, such that philosophy is a retroactive process to thought. What was the thinking that enabled the writing of this essay? Was it your filmmaking?
Isiah Medina: I’ve had these thoughts for a long time. In my teenage years, I had the idea that what cinema is doing is very close to philosophy, in terms of taking material outside of itself and forming a montage. I talk about it in the article that [I wrote] when I was making Semi Auto Colors (2010), I had filmstrips in my hand and thought, “Oh my gosh, this looks like a particular diagram I was looking at.” Maybe around [the age of] 19, I started connecting it with set theory, with infinities of different sizes.
I was also into Badiou at the time. When I was in grade 10, I read Being and Event. I got into Badiou because when I was a kid, my mom’s boyfriend at the time had a book by Gajo Petrović, the Yugoslavian Marxist. I was in eighth grade, or maybe seventh. Reading the book, I was like, “Okay, what’s this dialectical materialism this guy keeps talking about?” I went to the library and found a book that had a chapter called “On Materialist Dialectics.” It was Althusser’s For Marx. I kept reading that book until it made sense. From there, I realized that Badiou was a student of Althusser, and I should check out what he’s about.
When I was making Gangsterism (2025), [my producer] Kelley [Dong] said, “You need a break.” It was back-to-back with Night is Limpid (2022) and He Thought He Died (2023). I took a break, reading novels in the park. I then started shooting my next film, a romcom, in Los Angeles and France. When I got back from France, it came to me that I should go back to this infinity stuff [i] because I went away from it for a long time.
When I was making Inventing the Future, I was trying to explore a different philosophy than the one I’m naturally predisposed to. Because 88:88 (2015) was about poverty, I wanted to think about state politics and scale up with Inventing the Future, which entailed a change in what I was studying. I was looking at the Kant-Hegel relationship and at Wilfrid Sellars and Robert Brandom. The type of politics I was thinking through with Inventing the Future was policy, about having a new policy. You unfortunately need to use language to explain policy. While making Inventing the Future, Badiou’s The Immanence of Truths came out, but I knew I couldn’t switch tracks. I had to finish this more finite thought.
By working through all of that, I was able to return to the things that are close to me: Badiou, Godard, infinity, and this other type of cinema. I went even harder into being against language. Taking the turn against the state politics was also definitely related to seeing the genocide in Gaza. There has to be something beyond Hegel. We can’t stay here within the first infinity.
At one point, my friend Frank Ruda, who’s the editor of Crisis and Critique, said, “We’re doing a Badiou issue. Would you want to be part of it?” I said that I’d love to. I’ve written some film criticism. In interviews, I’ve given bits of my ontology here and there. It’s been peppered in over the last decade, but I’ve never sat down to write it all. I started writing more concretely, but I had to do it after I finished Gangsterism. That’s important. Cinema has to come first. I have to make a movie first. I can’t just be theorizing. I had to make all the films I had made up to this point, the shorts and the features. When I’m writing, it’s not me scratching my chin or something. It’s after being on set, editing, and thinking about it.
Throughout the history of montage theory, there has been not only an emphasis on film form but also on the spectator. For instance, Eisenstein was particularly concerned with the spectator in his efforts to produce class consciousness. If the cut is a form of thinking, is this thinking within the film itself? Or is it that thought is produced in the spectator? What is the relationship between the cut and the spectator?
Honestly, I never think of the spectator. [Laughs] I’m against thinking about it. I think it’s a weird finite limitation because I’m a spectator. If I can think something via the cut, then why should I assume that everyone else can’t? In mathematics, if at least one other person can see and understand what you wrote, that’s enough. You don’t have to make sure 10 billion people do. Even an artist doesn’t necessarily need anyone. A painter doesn’t necessarily need to show it to anyone. They could just enjoy painting.
I can’t assume a given spectator, the same across the world, one that pre-exists watching the movie. That’s why I like going to the movies. It’s not always that good, but I go into the cinema, hoping that it will change my life. Otherwise, I wouldn’t go. When I was watching The Devil Wears Prada 2, I was hoping for something.
It’s like what François Truffaut was writing about with Politique des Auteurs. He was inventing the audience with the criticism. It’s not that he thought the audience already watched movies in this manner. Truffaut is saying, “This is how I see cinema. If you read this, you might be able to see it in this manner.” You have to theorize what it means to take in the picture. A lot of criticism assumes what the spectator wants. Assuming that in advance is finitizing because it correlates movie watching to the mind that the cinema itself is supposed to transform. It’s supposed to show us a form of transformation. Let’s see how change is possible, and we’ll find that the finitude of the spectator is contained in a larger logical space of infinity: the cut. It’s the same as saying that we don’t start with the frame. If I start with the frame, then maybe I’ll worry about the frame of the spectator, but I’m interested in the cut.
I’m almost assuming everyone’s a director, or everyone’s an editor. Every day, someone’s shooting with their phone, maybe re-cropping the photo, resizing it. It’s not even a theoretical point. People are trying to find a way to mise-en-scène and montage their lives. I’m almost assuming everyone who watches my films makes movies, whether it’s a public or private movie. Maybe they’re shooting their vacation, but they’re making a movie. Assuming that, all the stuff about cutting, as I imagine it, might be rather intuitive for whoever watches my movies.
Going back to Truffaut’s idea, wherein he’s inventing the audience through his criticism, it is that the spectator emerges precisely in the encounter with his writing, or in your case, the film. The cut produces the spectator.
Yeah, because Truffaut was a spectator of Hitchcock and Hawks. There is something in the cuts, in the framing, that put enormous pressure on the language he was using. That’s what criticism should be. Criticism is an experiment with language to be where it usually cannot be. You read it, and it expands how you see what you’re about to see. Part of criticism is trying to do that type of work. It’s a way into seeing, but it is a way into seeing that doesn’t yet exist. Someone came back into the cave. Someone went outside the cave and saw Hitchcock and came back to tell you to the best of their capacity.
In the introduction to the English copy of Godard’s film criticism, it says something like it’s hard to know what Godard’s talking about when he’s talking about these films. But once you see his films, you get what he’s talking about. It’s like talking without a referent, because the referent is yet to be. There’s a retroactivity because the reference is the film he’s dreaming of making, a part of reality that didn’t exist yet.
The other idea with criticism is that reality is incomplete. If it were complete, I wouldn’t have to write. But because reality is incomplete, I have to write about what I don’t see. To make sure criticism doesn’t become too empirical, you have to make some axioms to make other things appear to you.
Staying with the necessity of invention, a central concern of the essay is the necessity of affirmation. It’s not enough to negate what already exists. In that opposition, there’s the risk of reification, whereas affirmation can enable the new. This is a question that is shared with Gangsterism: how should one work with pre-existing structures, including the school, the state, and the various arms of the film industry? In the film, a variety of positions are given, whether one can be both inside and outside, or if one should be outside and destroy the existing. How are you thinking through these different positions?
In Inventing the Future, the idea was: how do you work inside? I needed a grant for Inventing the Future for it to be concretely about what it’s about. If I couldn’t get state funding for a movie about the state, then we’re not going to be able to make the picture. There’s a concrete movement of inside-outside. I’m always trying to figure that movement out. With each film, I’m readjusting the inside-outside relation.
It depends on each concrete situation where you’re going to stand. But I think there is a minimal outsideness that has to be thought. If we reduce everything to the inside, we’re back to Hegel, which I’m against. We need an outside that’s non-identical to itself because if there were only one outside, then you would only need one infinity. If there are infinite outsides, then we have to think that. For film, the cut is a peak of the outside. To me, the cut is that flicker of the sun that makes its way back into the cave. Even though it’s the smallest nothing, the cut is a brief moment where you can glimpse the direction of the sun coming through.
On a philosophical level, I like it when Mao talks about affirmation and negation as a pair. It’s a serious question that affects world history. If someone’s running the country and has a particular dialectical position, it will have effects. If someone’s saying that there’s no negation of negation, then they might run the nation differently. That is important to me, but it’s equally important not to have pure affirmation either.
You’re affirming something that doesn’t exist yet. We’re not affirming what exists. We’re affirming something that’s struggling to exist, so you have to name it. You act as if it’s already here. It compels you to invent a new form of negation as well because you have to defend the affirmation.
When falling in love, you shouldn’t start with negation. It’d be weird. [Laughs] You should affirm this new possibility with someone. How do you start with affirmation? You meet a lot of people who walk into things ready to negate. There has to be a way to do that without it being like an empty positivism. Affirming what doesn’t exist is fighting to make it exist.
I’ve been critiqued for not having enough opposition in my films. But what’s the opposite of opposites? Probably sameness, which has its own struggle to think itself. If we always think via difference, we do not think about what’s different from difference, which could be an identity without identity. It’s too easy to just keep finding the opposite picture. Some people think I’m not doing this Serge Daney, Godard bullshit enough. If I show one picture, I should show the opposite right away. But how do I know it’s the opposite? Sometimes you get closer by trying to think what’s the same and then finding that there’s a non-same in the same. The idea that you could choose the opposite immediately is false. Also, I don’t think choosing the opposite is the strongest form of negation every single time. If a thing and its opposite exist in the same space, that’s a rather weak form of negation. People often reduce montage to one form of negation, which is opposites. There are other ways to think of negation and montage.
Axioms create that space of possibility. When I’m making certain cuts in the movie, I get excited. I can slowly see a different continuity that’s not simply continuity editing. It is a fight to find a new continuity, a different continuum. That’s a different type of affirmation. Traditional continuity is affirming what exists. Finding a form of continuity that continually reaffirms what is inexistent is what I’m most interested in for cinema.
On some level, what is at stake in the cut is relation or association, which is also a political question–the enabling or the suppressing of relation. One of the most striking moments in the essay is when you’re reading Griffith’s crosscutting as a fracturing of relation, in which parallel scenes are thought to be separate. You connect this to the contemporary through the ways in which Instagram both shows and keeps us separate from the genocide in Gaza. Could you elaborate on the political stakes of the cut?
In terms of politics, first, we have to think of the cut. We have to think of it freed from being determined by science, politics, love, or art. Almost by accident, we find out the relations to other things. Obviously, it’s impossible on some level. When I’m shooting something, I’m shooting something. If I’m shooting two people, I’m shooting the sun. Maybe they’re walking. Suddenly, I have to think about love. If they’re walking, what world do they live in? Politics comes in. But I have to try to think the cut, so I don’t get externally determined by these conditions. Thinking the cut will also help me think about these conditions. If I think about politics first, I’ll probably do a bad job at politics.
The language of politics is not going to speak to me in cuts immediately. Politics has to speak its own thought autonomously. I can be inspired by it. But it’s very important to me that I do so from the perspective of a filmmaker, because it’s my everyday life. Filmmaking is what I do with most of my day. You have to start from cinema while knowing it’s absolutely conditioned by these other things.
If you’re parallel cutting like in The Birth of a Nation (1915), it will give the idea that the world is separate. The world is radically separate and segregated. But with Eisenstein’s intellectual montage, you find a new relation to thinking the world through the density of association. Marx talked about the free association of person to person, human to human. You think that association between cuts, not frames. Frames, again, get finite. When you think of yourself as part of the masses, it’s not from your social identity. The mass is a place where you’re unbound from your initial identity. You get out of your frame and join the cut. With a jump cut, there’s always a point where you can cut. No matter what’s going on in life, if you’re stuck in a world of continuity, there’s a jump cut somewhere. You just have to look closely.
The fact that we’ve historically seen different forms of cutting means there are other forms we shall encounter in the future. It’s funny. You go to film school. Everyone’s telling you it’s all been done, but mathematics is allowed to keep inventing shit. With cinema, it’s finished already. It’s exciting to know that when I go to the cinema, maybe I’ll see a new form of subjectivity that I could identify with. I have a joke that I don’t identify with who’s on screen or someone who looks like me. The person who looks like me the most is the cut. I try to identify with the cut.
Also, these pre-existing cuts may not be adequate anymore because the historical circumstances have changed radically since Eisenstein’s October (1927). That means we’re going to have to invent other forms of cutting. Or else we’re not going to see anything around us.
To shift back to Gangsterism, the film raises questions about race in relation to colonialism. There’s, for instance, a taking to task of white thinkers for their racism, as well as a beautiful scene in which people collectively shred Hegel’s texts. At the same time, colonialism still haunts relations between people of color. How are you trying to think through race and colonialism in the film?
In the film, there’s also a lot of talk about Griffith’s Broken Blossoms (1919) and the “Yellow Man.” That’s why I emphasize that when you watch a movie, try to relate to the cut. Next thing you know, if you’re not identifying with the cut, maybe you start identifying with the “Yellow Man” or whoever is on screen, with the limitations of what is on screen. What’s on screen will always be historically limited.
I hold onto the fact that race isn’t real, but racism is. It’s again related to the cut. I’m closer to a cut, but every day I’ll be framed. My existence in the world will be framed. That’s also the relationship to sync sound. With sync sound, your voice is your voice, and these words can only come out of you. It’s the same with the passport, which is another form of the close-up. The state’s trying to sync you up to your passport. It doesn’t want desynchronization.
When you think of the colonial question, it’s who’s trying to sync me up to what, to say what. That’s why the sync sound thing isn’t a fun little game. You’re forced to sync to something that you may not want to be interpellated to. All forms in the cinema regarding frames and sync sound are deeply related to what it means to be racialized or be colonized. That’s why you have to think the cut, to make synchronization wither away.
I’m wondering how race intersects with the film’s figure of the gangster. Racialization, along with class, coincides with criminalization. What does the figure of the gangster enable for the film? What is the difference between a gangster and a criminal? There seems to be some level of organization or collectivity in the former. At one point, the film also suggests that the nation is a gang that attempts to enlist us into its crimes.
I remember growing up, gangster was a positive term, “Oh, that’s so gangster.” It was never a bad thing. There’s will and freedom in not listening to the law. Kubrick makes that distinction. He said artists and criminals are the same because they both don’t accept reality for what it is. Back to the question of the outside, there’s a freedom of being outside that is related to the idea of the gangster.
The gangster also has the ability to talk a certain way. Often, it is not the official way to use a language. Slang is a different way of approaching grammar. Even Wittgenstein said that all thinking is against grammar. If there’s a grammar of living in a genocidal realist capitalist world, it is a question of how to speak or think outside that grammar.
The difficulty, however, is that if the nation’s also a gang, are you repeating this form? It’s about naming that indiscernibility, thinking from there, and trying to separate it. So much thinking is that. There are two forms in some sense. There’s thinking, where there are two things that seem absolutely different, and you make a gamble to say they’re the same. The other is that I think these two things are the same, but I could differentiate them, creating some autonomy in thinking about them. If all action is reduced to an effect of the state, then I probably can’t do anything. I always hated reading stuff like that. How many more times am I going to read about the impossibility of affirmation or resistance? I don’t find that interesting. I find it boring when I meet people who are pessimists.
I was talking with someone recently about this. I’m not white. I don’t have the time to be a pessimist. I have to think that other things are possible. There’s something about the figure of the gangster that says that you don’t have to work that way. It’s an anti-work thing with the gangster, which I always love. There’s a link between Inventing the Future and Gangsterism in that I just don’t want to go to work. That’s why people like watching this stuff. It’s like, “Wow, someone who doesn’t have to work.” It’s interesting that the real dream is not to work. It’s like how Frederic Jameson was talking about the heist movie as one of the only utopian things in American culture. Everyone has their own idiosyncratic way of working, but if you get them all together, they could take the money in this beautiful way. That’s similar to the gangster. There’s this idea that you don’t have a boss, and yet, you’re still working collectively.
I was asked in a different interview about Abel Ferrara because Ferrara was saying he’ll take money from anywhere because he gets to make a picture. But I think that’s dangerous. I think you shouldn’t be like, “Well, it’s all dirty.” Where does it stop? At that point, I should make Avatar 4. That’s a totalizing gesture that isn’t concrete enough. “Well, it’s all dirty. I could just do this.”
Oftentimes, you hear this trite saying that there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, which, while true, can install a half-hearted excuse.
At the same time, BDS has been working. Which one is it? It’s cheap cynicism regarding what we’re able to do, that capitalism is impossible to break out of. It comes back to infinity. It reveals a rather shallow concept of infinity, one big infinity called capitalism. But if there are infinite infinities, then we’ll find other forms of living and other forms of action. That’s what happens when you don’t reduce yourself to only one form of infinity.
It goes back to the idea that there’s not only one form of negation. If you think there’s only one form of negation, one form of infinity, then you could say that these things are all the same. I don’t have to discern between them.
Art’s one of the few places where you’re not supposed to compromise. It’s the only thing that’s interesting about it. You’re telling me all these artists, what’s really interesting about them, is that they know how to compromise. That’s why I hate Hegelians. They’re always trying to find a way to put us on our knees. The reason why we like art is that there are some historical examples of people who didn’t compromise. If you compromise, you’re a coward. We know for all time that you suck. We’ll always remember who stood on what side and who chose the other side for convenience. We like Godard because he had that Dziga Vertov period. He’s a bourgeois man from a pro-Vichy family. He didn’t have to do that.
Let’s not brush everything with the same infinity or the same form of negation. Every leftist film should show one picture and show its opposite. That’s one thing. All this money is the same anyway. There are all these self-defeating attitudes towards the possibility of a new thought. What does this all come down to? All of this comes down to saying that you’re finite. “Stop there. You’ll never have a new thought. It’s not possible.” But I’m for infinity and for the cut. New affirmations can be made. New cuts can be new axioms.
The film ends with a title card saying, “Intermission.” What does the intermission imply about the “status” of the artwork? Is the intermission another cut?
We talk a lot about finished and unfinished. I always like to point out that Capital wasn’t finished, but it still changed the world. Let’s not get too caught up in making these perfect finished products. To have the incompleteness as part of the film is something I’m interested in because so much of the great works of art toe the line of what’s complete and incomplete.
Always redefining the difference between finished and unfinished is also what makes art thinkable. It’s a question of an object having closure with itself, of what form of closure it will take. Infinity is a form of closure. In fact, infinity is not a form of openness. It encloses the previous infinities within it. It makes a sharp decision about things ending. It’s finitude that’s endlessly open, repetitive, and continuous. It’s about how to find a different form of closure to continue.
If you go to a play and there’s an intermission, you don’t have to come back. It’s a chance to leave. If you do come back, you made a decision to keep thinking with this thing. It gives a chance for the spectator to make a decision. Even better that there’s nothing after the intermission. Are you going to come back? I don’t necessarily mean coming back to watch my film. Will you come back to this thought?
This is like going to a protest. The day comes to an end, and everyone separates. We’re all walking in a group and slowly splitting off. It has that intermission quality. If you come back, it’s like coming back to the play after the intermission, saying, “Let’s do this again. I like thinking with all these people.”
[i] Medina’s insistence on infinity extends from Badiou’s use of set theory. In set theory, the simplest form of infinity can at first be thought in relation to succession. From the void, ∅, we begin counting: {∅, 1, 2, 3 …}. However, for Badiou and for Medina, infinity is not synonymous with endlessly extending this repetition. Instead, infinity requires the first infinite ordinal, ω, which cannot be reached by counting. Interruptive, ω is introduced axiomatically, at once breaking with repetition and enclosing the preceding succession. In “Cut is a Form of Thinking,” Medina likens the interruption of ω to the cinematic cut, which breaks from and recollects the finite repetition of prior frames. Crucially, infinity in Badiou’s and Medina’s thinking opens and affirms the possibility of the new. Evental, the cut of infinity disrupts the continuity or repetition of the given, which would be a perpetual counting, and enables the creation of new, further infinities.
Stephen Kuster is a PhD student in Screen Cultures at Northwestern University. His research turns to documentary, experimental, and avant-garde film to plumb the relationship between cinema and the world.
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