by Ken Paul Rosenthal © 2025
Hello Alan,
I hope this finds you and yours in good health.
Like your film, First Cousin Once Removed, the subject of the feature documentary I’ve been working on for the past 4.5 years is also a poet. And from the outset, I've been wanting to re-watch your film in order to re-access and reassess what I'd found so profoundly inspiring at its San Francisco premiere in 2013. What lingers from that screening to the present day was the intimate integration of audible typewriter keystrokes and carriage bells with your picture edits, and employing the moon as the letter 'o'—which I swore on the spot I'd someday appropriate in one configuration or another for one of my own films. And yet I was hesitant to dive back into your soulful opus before further developing the visual style for my current project. I could not risk feeling overly entranced and corralled by the very same formal elements and strategies that had so intoxicated me the first time I beheld your film.
Furthermore, based on your film’s core theme of memory loss, I feared becoming triggered due to my own fallow short-term memory which I’ve lived with for…well…for as long as I can remember! I don’t know if my 62 years of age or long-term COVID are the reasons why words increasingly linger at the tip of my tongue. But given how dramatically my grasp of language ebbs and flows these days, I suspect the issue is more one of an increasingly disengaged lifestyle rather than a deteriorating brain. I simply need to take more enlivening walks in the forest and spend less mind-numbing time online. To remove my fingers from the keyboards and squish my toes into the mud. If I’ve stopped pathologizing the state of my mental health, why not similarly rewrite the script on my capacity for memory? Rather than critique my frequent tendency to forget what I’d been pondering only moments before, I can chalk all this up to a practical inability to keep track of the well of sensitivities that ceaselessly saturate my porous imagination—like a sponge that can never be wrung out.
So, I'd been resisting the allure of First Cousing Once Removed for quite some time until recently adding the title to my genre-by-genre favorite films list. Curiosity refreshed, I finally rewatched it just prior to writing this note. Alan, this film—your film—is not only one of my all-time favorite docs, but truly one of my most cherished peices of cinema. It transcends genre. I daresay it transcends the medium of film itself. It achieves what I feel all great art fundamentally does: it offers the common citizen new language to enrich their experience as a human being, being human. Great art makes us feel larger than the boundaries of our flesh, so that when we leave the space in which we engaged the work and return to the extent world, we feel more intimately connected to a global sentience. The skillful tenderness with which you allowed your primary subject's phrases to hang in the air allowed me to recognize their double, if not multiply-layered meanings, as if he was speaking for both himself and me. In this film you pull off the ultimate sleight of hand in making the personal universal.
The following two quotes are posted above my editing bay:
"Art is not a reflection of reality. It is the reality of a reflection." – Jean Luc Goddard
and
"The crude real will not by itself yield truth." – Robert Bresson
...and to these I would add Werner Herzog's ethos about 'ecstatic truth'; that there is no such thing as objective truth so filmmakers are obliged to employ whatever aesthetic strategies best deepen their expression of what they see as ‘true’.
First Cousin Once Removed embodies all of the above. The sophistication of your filmmaking is utterly intoxicating. I was so awestruck as I watched, I kept making exclamatory sounds which prompted my partner to ask me what was going on from the other side of our home! And whereas a younger me may have been envious of you, or dismissive of my own creative prowess by comparison, today I feel inspired and empowered anew to transpose aspects of your film with a fresh eye in order to serve my current he/art.
Bless you, Alan Berliner and your miraculous movie manna.
Ken