‘Be Talking to Me’: The Omission of ‘Please’ and the Repetition of ‘No’ In 'Neverending Knifefight'

By Bruno Zogma

An exploration of psychological themes in Tadgett Laborwitz's underground film 'Neverending Knifefight' (2015) including friendship, loss, forgiveness, wokeness, and art.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: May 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781365932175

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‘Be Talking to Me’: The Omission of ‘Please’ and the Repetition of ‘No’ In 'Neverending Knifefight'

‘Be Talking to Me’: The Omission of ‘Please’ and the Repetition of ‘No’ in Neverending Knifefight

Bruno Zogma

Copyright

Copyright © 2017 by Resplendent Tree Productions

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

First Printing: May 2017

ISBN 978-1-365-93217-5

Resplendent Tree Productions

Boston, MA 02132-6050

United States of America

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Cover art: Deer and Angel by Bruno Zogma.

Ego

We have loves and hates so strong they give birth to themselves independently of their objects. The person we love or hate may die, disappear, or stop talking to us, and yet our love or hate for them may endure and strengthen. What do these forces do to us? Are our lives really about trying to recover wholeness, or was there never any wholeness to be gotten and no people to be loved and is it all an illusion?

Our analysis and our storytelling, too—are those illusions? Sometimes we come to it spontaneously and in a state of psychic flow, but other times we prepare excessively and have nothing to offer.

Story begins our lives. It has kinetic elements: You used force, you set limits to prevent others from hurting you, you lost what you thought you depended upon. It has non-kinetic elements: You learned to expand your circle of care; you learned to love yourself; you loved; you gave; you lived gently; you shared a meal; you gathered information; you let go. The story itself stands outside time, does not begin, cannot end. The achievement of Tadgett Laborwitz’s film Neverending Knifefight rests in its demonstration of this principle. Laborwitz takes the starring role in his own film with a character known to the audience simply as Tadgett, and Tadgett’s trajectory of full-spectrum growth has kinetic and non-kinetic elements. It is a boundless story as he himself is boundless.

When Manticore Studios produced the underground film in 2015, the filming sessions were mostly an excuse for Laborwitz to drink coffee and eat money, as he quipped in an interview with Arkham Frankly Quarterly Review a couple years later. In less official interviews, Laborwitz said the film was an opportunity to set myself on fire, or, to use his preferred abbreviation, SMOF, which indeed he appears to do dozens of times in the film.

Such modesty aside, how does the film teach us about the role of story?

It teaches us that the pursuit of a desiderata can be heaven, which is dealt with in Neverending Knifefight only through backward-looking hope; it can be hell, which is evoked in this film through the theme of fire; or it can be visionary, a highly structured art form, which the film itself is. The old shall dream dreams, and the youth shall see visions.

Every conscious being is a knower and a perceiver. When we see