About the Zines

The general idea

There's really not much to say—it is a miscellany of thoughts, ideas, memories, photographs, puzzles, and recipes that circle around in my mind at all times and create a constant feedback loop in which I am constantly swirling, treading, and drowning. But now I'm writing it down and selling it for money.

The history

This began as an outlet to sort of just throw a bunch of ideas at the wall and see if they stick. I posted on my Instagram story about how I wanted to start a new serial zine and check if anyone would actually want to read it if I did. I got a lot of positive feedback.

Up to the inception of the flagship issue, my preferred medium for producing zines had been a traditional printer-scanner d.i.y. style that was literally rough around the edges. I wanted to try something different where I went for something more professional (-looking). They're still goofy, unrefined, and kind of pointless. That's the goal, at least.

The future

I will keep making these for as long as my cerebral feedback loop persists, stopping only when I've run out of things to say, which will be never. Or I get too busy to maintain it, in which case though I could just slow down to a quarterly release every season.

I suppose the only two thing that could put a stop to this is if I get bored of it or people stop reading. I'm not bored yet, and it seems like you aren't yet either. So until then I'm open to feedback.

The general idea

Each issue focuses on a time and place, and then contains a selection of films with accompanying capsule reviews and funny little collages.

But note, these things aren't comprehensive. You can only fit so many movies in fourteen pages, and only so many words on a 2¾"✕4¼" sheet. They are also not representitive of the subject they focus on in any effective way.

Rather, each issue is a sampling of the widest range that the period has to offer—of genres, styles, and tones—while still being unified under the culture's distinct cinematic character. It's a tricky balancing act.

So each zine is not a destination in itself, but a means of traveling to some recent past in an unfamiliar place on the globe of world cinema. They don't come with directions or a map, but with vague arrows and evocative ten-dollar words. They aren't meant to guide you so much as they help you get lost. I hope they do nothing more than allow you entry, hence the name.

If the reader takes my suggestions and watches one or two of these films, I am glad. If through that film they take interest in the culture and age that birthed it, and decide to stay for a visit, I have succeeded.

The history

I started making these darling little leaflets the second I found a way to use my university's high end printers for free. 

It was the spring semester and I was taking a class on world cinema. The professor was great, he provided a wealth of national-historical context before narrowing in on the few films we'd see each week, and I had nothing better to do (nb. COVID-times) than watch as many movies as I could that had some relation or adjacency to the weekly topic. When the world was shut down, I was made to feel like a tourist.

This was the year of remote learning. The class was in-person, as were the screenings, which was a darkroom oasis at a time when all theaters were shuttered and moribund. So like I said, there was nothing better to do than spend all my time watching movies, and yet even that wasn't enough to mop up all the free time on my hands, so I decided to take up an endeavor I'd been contemplating for a while: d.i.y. zines. 

The optimism behind my dorm-room cottage industry was twofold: as fantasy, it was my way of traveling the world when world travel was lethal; as reality, it was a way of restoring the social ties that lockdown severed and creating new ones during the rigidly asocial Zoom Semesters. And at the end of the day, it was fun.

The future

The Passports will go on, but I can't predict its trajectory. Think of each issue as a one-way ticket.

For each time-and-place I select, I require myself to be familiarized enough with its films as to choose meaningfully from between them. That takes a lot of time, and it doesn't help that I have a nasty habit of picking eras whose films are insanely difficult to find. (Sorry.)

Still, I can't shield my slow productivity with the pretense of dilligent studiousness; I like to think that these immersions into various pockets of cinema history are comprehensive enough that I can see the curvature of an epoch's nuance, but I can never see the whole outline.

This is torment, because how can I discriminate Renoir's best when half his masterpieces aren't even restored? Am I excluding a hidden masterwork when I only pick from the tragically few Taiwanese films that got international releases? How do I pick any single Fassbinder from his monstrously prolific catalogue? (When it came down to it, I actually picked two.)

Then you think about actually writing these things. It's basically two tweets per page, and that's erring on the side of illegibly squished text. Add onto that the time it takes to make the image designs, format it, print it, then troubleshoot—suffice it to say, I'm draining ink cartridges before I even see a final spread.

The first two issues had quick turnarounds, with about a fortnight's worth of obsessive binging on those West German and Czechoslovak movies, immediately followed up by zealous writing, crazed formatting, lavish printing, and manic dissemination.

Then it took about a year to make the the third (post-martial Taiwan), and half that time was just spent hunting down whatever movies I could find. It took another semi-concurrent year for the fourth (pre-Vichy France) to see the light of day. I blackened a whole composition notebook drafting these two alone!

What changed? Well, once upon a time I had nothing better to do. Now I do.

That's not to devalue my beloved self-pubs. It's just how it is. Theaters have reopened, I can talk about movies with live human faces, and once again there's more to life than school and books and movies. I'm continuing with these, but production will be indefinitely sluggish.

For all their typos, white-out splotches, and literal rough edges, I love these things and I want to make more. I've got no shortage of ideas, and that's why I choose to focus my entire being on them. If they get put on the backburner now and then, its not out of neglect but love.

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