There is a scene in French director Maurice Bonnot's 1954 gangster film Pas Douter du Chef! (Don't Question the Boss!) in which an entire precinct of police in the resort town of Deauville are found mysteriously murdered, seemingly by advanced weaponry never before seen by humankind. The scene is left utterly unexplained in the film, a cryptic loose end that is never tied up. Bonnot later reported, in a 1966 interview with Cahiers du Cinéma, that he did this deliberately, with the explicit intention that another director at some point, somewhere, would solve the mystery and make the film that explains this scene. And indeed, this did happen, 30 years later, in Mexican director Alfonso Guzmán's 1983 sci-fi thriller Estrellas Dentadas (Jagged Stars), the story of an intergalactic invasion by bear-like humanoids with unheard-of armaments: a film that features a precisely interlocking scene, in which the creatures use a device to travel back in time to the 1950s—for reasons that are unclear—where they lay siege to a police station in Deauville, France, ultimately killing everyone inside. The locality and layout of the precinct, and even the positioning of the bodies after the massacre, exactly match the depiction in Bonnot's noir.

A similar event was recorded a decade later. In Howie Berman's 1996 rom-com Ten New Messages, the best friend of Christine Keene's romantic lead, played by Holly McPherson, is abruptly gunned down outside a coffee shop midway through the film, in broad daylight, by a cigarette-smoking Japanese assassin in a louche white suit. Not only is the remainder of the film curiously uninterested in accounting for this sudden development, but McPherson's character is never mentioned again in any subsequent scene. The following year, the latest installment in Hideo Toyoshima's 13-part film series The Yakuza Files: Struggles Without Heroes or Pity, titled Code of Bloodshed, was released in Japan. In the film, there is a scene in which a yakuza capo in a white suit, played by Goro Eiga, takes a flight from Tokyo to San Diego, where Ten New Messages is set. Stepping out of a cab in a boutique shopping district, he walks two blocks to a coffee shop, smokes a cigarette, and fires four shots into the back of a brunette woman in a denim jacket—whose face is never shown, but whose hair style and wardrobe seem calculated to reproduce those of McPherson in Berman's comedy. The next time Eiga's character is seen, he is back in Tokyo; the interlude in San Diego is never referenced again in the film.
     Holly McPherson is not listed in the credits of Code of Bloodshed: in fact, the role of the San Diego woman is uncredited. Nor is Goro Eiga credited in Ten New Messages: but if the assassin in that film is not Eiga, he is at least a very convincing lookalike, for the two are all but identical. Instead, the role of "Murderer" is listed as belonging to one Mikio Takagi—but as the film blogger who first identified the connection between the two movies has pointed out, there is no known actor by this name and no other acting credits corresponding to this moniker (which, this blogger concludes, is "clearly an alias for Eiga himself"). As such, it is believed that Berman and Toyoshima had to have planned this stunt together, likely with Eiga's help, as some kind of obscure prank or artistic statement. To this day, however, neither director has publicly admitted to having coordinated with, or even met, the other: and neither can explain why their two films, released one year apart, should appear to intersect in this way.

These strange occurrences bear some resemblance to a more recent, and publicized, Hollywood incident. In 2015, Jerome L. Washington had helmed two successful Waveman films, reviving the ailing comic-book franchise, and was still on the hook to direct a third. According to reports, however, Washington wanted out of his contract, having grown tired of superhero movies and harboring ambitions of making an Oscar-worthy drama. Unfortunately for him, this was a fight that the studio execs would win: though they were willing, as a conciliatory gesture, to grant Washington an unprecedented level of creative control over the new film, and even gave him their blessing to push its genre boundaries further into "serious" dramatic territory, as long as the story was still a part of the Waveman universe. Despite these concessions, there was evidently still some lingering resentment on Washington's side: for his eventual answer was to create a spinoff movie centered around the character of Security Guard #3, who is killed in the first five minutes of the second Waveman film by the villainous armored cyborg Colonel Crabb. Rechristening the character with the name Raymond Watkins, Waveman 3: Frequency of Communication tells the story of Watkins's fraught relationship with his adopted son, Russ, the child of his alcoholic older brother who squandered the family inheritance and died, deeply in debt, in a failed robbery attempt on Russ's third birthday. The older brother, Charlie, had also slept with Raymond's wife shortly before they were married—a fact that she confesses to him in a hospital room while dying from lymphoma, one year prior to the time that the film takes place. Embittered and grieving, Raymond nurses a grudge against the son that he is forced to raise, until he notices the boy taking an interest in his old Ham radio set. Agreeing to teach Russ how to operate the set, Raymond comes to form an unlikely paternal bond with his brother's child, which culminates when he surprises Russ, on his thirteenth birthday, with his own registered call sign.
     Critics were guardedly positive on the film and there was even some modest Oscar buzz, but it was ultimately passed over by the Academy—a snub that most have attributed to the jarring effect created by the film's inevitable final scene, in which an armored motorcycle outfitted to resemble a giant crab claw crashes through the skylight of the bank where Raymond works a part-time security job, showering the customers with glass; when one of Raymond's colleagues attempts to pull the alarm, he finds his arm seized by a kind of metallic tentacle with a crab claw on the end that seems to originate in the motorcycle's cyborg rider, who quips in a robotic voice, "I guess everyone's feeling the pinch these days." Shortly afterward, Raymond is explosively decapitated by a rocket-propelled Crab-Bomb, and the screen fades to black on the cyborg colonel's laughing face: an ending that one critic (who apparently had never seen Waveman 2) described as "absolutely baffling," and another reviewer memorably termed "the most disturbing denouement in cinematic history."
     On the whole, the fan response was decidedly negative, with many noting that the character of Waveman himself appears on screen at no point in the film. Interestingly, however, there was a small subset of highly dedicated fans that was appreciative of the meticulous care that Washington had devoted to filling out the backstory of a minor character in the Waveman universe, going so far as to proclaim their support of the film to be the ultimate marker of a true superfan. For this reason, Raymond Watkins merch—including hats, t-shirts, and poseable action figures—now routinely sells for four figures on eBay.

This unusual case may perhaps be compared to an earlier episode in the annals of Hollywood lore. In 1978, the Italian director Luisa Vacondio released her first American-made film, Lights, Camera… Action!, a raunchy sex comedy of the type that had earned her an international reputation, about the romantic escapades of a naïve young actor in Naples. Early in the film, there is a memorable set piece in which the actor, played by Vacondio's longtime collaborator Gianni Gherardi, is unceremoniously dumped by his girlfriend while she is playing Mary and he is playing Joseph in a precepe vivente, or living nativity scene (it turns out she was sleeping with one of the Wise Men). The sequence ends with a shot of Gherardi's character standing at a bus stop in the rain, still in full Biblical costume, sobbing and raving at the sky as he is splashed by passing cars.
      Almost no one who saw the film was aware that this comic sequence harbored a curious intersection with one of Gherardi's earliest and most obscure cinematic roles, in the gritty social-realist drama Più Freddo Dell'Amore (Colder Than Love), shot on a shoestring budget in 1963 by the now-forgotten Italian director Pietro Masi: a mostly unwatched film in which Gherardi makes an extraordinarily brief appearance. Also set in Naples, this black-and-white drama tells the story of Lina, a prostitute who has been building an independent life for herself for the past three years while her boyfriend Enzo is in prison. Even so, she pines for his return. Her friends try to remind her of how abusive Enzo could be, advising her to take her savings and make a fresh start somewhere else, but Lina defends her man and insists that they'll be married. When Enzo is released shortly thereafter, Lina is waiting at the prison gates to meet him. Although he shows gratitude at first, and seems to be a changed man, he soon begins to revert to his violent ways, as he falls back in with his old gang of criminal associates. Gradually, her autonomy is whittled away. While Lina is working, he spends her savings on nights out with the gang. When the savings are gone, Enzo and his accomplices return to committing robberies, sometimes forcing Lina to play the getaway driver. His behavior becomes increasingly reckless and cruel. One day, a handsome police detective comes by Lina's apartment to ask for her assistance, but though she breaks down weeping, she refuses to say a word that will incriminate Enzo. Later that night, when he finds out that she has spoken to a cop, Enzo beats her.
      Then one evening, in the middle of a downpour, when she has just dropped Enzo off at the agreed-upon meeting place for that night's robbery and is circling the block to find a place to park and wait, Lina has a vision. As she passes down the street, a spectral figure swims up in the headlights, illuminated for only an instant in their blazing glare before being swallowed back into darkness. The man is bearded and clothed in anachronistic garb, in a drenched robe and keffiyeh, and holds a tall staff. He seems unaware of anything around him, his gaze fixed on the heavens; his sturdy features are transported by an otherworldly sorrow. The next instant, he's gone. Lina sits in shock behind the steering wheel. Cars honk behind her before she remembers to drive on. Looking agitated, she circles the block again, but the man is no longer there. When she finally finds a place to pull over, she sits unmoving for several minutes. Opening the glove box, she takes out an old rosary, and fingers the beads. Tears prick her eyes. Then she pulls back onto the road, and drives to a police station, where she tips off the officer on duty about the robbery in progress. She is later told that Enzo refused to surrender and was killed by the police. The ending of the film is ambivalent: Lina is tormented by guilt, but is free. The strange figure from Lina's vision is, of course, played by Gianni Gherardi. The costume he wears for the role exactly matches the one he wears at the beginning of Vacondio's comedy.
      Vacondio herself, when this connection was pointed out to her, professed to have never seen Colder Than Love: which is certainly plausible, though some commentators have doubted whether a director who had worked with Gherardi as closely as she had for over a decade would really be unfamiliar with any part of his past work. Others have suggested that the plot may have been told to her at some point, or she might have seen it and forgotten it—though this would not explain the deliberate precision with which the two costumes mirror each other, down to the texture of the false beards and the knots on the staffs. Nor does it explain why the man that Lina sees is also standing at a bus stop, on an identical-looking street, with the window of a pharmacy visible in the background: just as he is in Vacondio's film.

Another story: there are only two known films that have been set in the tiny German town of Ansdorf. The first was the Weimar-era silent film Der Magier (The Magician), directed by Franz Loos in 1922, about a sinister traveling illusionist who is able to manipulate, accuse, and ruin the lawful authorities of the village of Ansdorf using only the tricks and props of parlor magic—including hypnotism, mentalism, pickpocketing, cardsharping, secret compartments, a vanishing dice box, false handcuffs, and stage knives—ultimately getting himself elected mayor (the character has often been read as an early cinematic foreshadowing of Hitler). In the end, the illusionist is exposed and pursued into the mountains by the hero, backed by a mob of townsfolk, where he plummets into a waterfall to his death along with his suitcase of tricks. The second is Oskar Hahnemann's 2003 psychological thriller Fest des Saturn (Feast of Saturn), set in a post-apocalyptic near future, where a small community of survivors has taken refuge in Ansdorf after a pandemic has wiped out much of the human population. This traumatized band lives under the leadership of a man known as the Doctor, who controls a small quantity of vials of a potentially life-saving drug. Trouble begins when a foraging party returns from the mountains with a battered and rotting suitcase, found to contain a number of useful objects, including knives, handcuffs, playing cards, and an ornate dice box: the Doctor distributes these objects among his inner ring of loyalists, keeping the dice box for himself. Shortly afterward, the community begins to fall apart. A card game devolves into recriminations and violence after the players accuse each other of manipulating the deck. A raiding party that sets out for a nearby farm armed with the knives never returns. An imprisoned murderer escapes after slipping his handcuffs. Most disturbing of all, the Doctor finds, after placing the precious vials in the dice box for safe keeping, that when he reopens the box the vials have disappeared. The collective descent into paranoia and madness culminates when the Doctor is killed; a loyalist attempting to staunch his wounds finds herself unable to draw the handkerchief out of her pocket, which only grows longer and longer while changing colors.
     These mysterious events are never accounted for in the film.

None of these stories is precisely like what Turkish director Elif Özel has done in her new film, Kum Kitabı (The Book of Sand): but they are perhaps the true forebears of Özel's film, the proper context to appreciate what her new work means. Like these examples, The Book of Sand is a film that requires another film to explain itself—it posits another work, another code, that holds its key. But in its way, Özel's film is perhaps bolder than any of its predecessors.
     The Book of Sand is a quiet sort of film, about a twentysomething woman named Cemile (played by Yasemin Zeynep), who lives in a high-rise apartment complex in Istanbul. Through a series of aimless vignettes, we watch Cemile drift and putter through her post-graduate life: reading, smoking hookah with friends, texting with her ex, attempting to make a complicated dish involving eggplant, attempting to fix her clogged garbage disposal, carrying on an ambivalent flirtation with the young super of her building, drinking endless coffees, and working on her perhaps equally endless Turkish translation of the complete works of Jorge Luis Borges.
     All of this is spare, well observed, and plenty enjoyable (if you're a fan of Özel's brand of dry minimalism, which I am): but what makes this new film truly unforgettable is a single, fascinating scene that occurs about 45 minutes in. While hosting her friends (and the handsome super) for a dinner party in her apartment, Cemile excuses herself to go to the bathroom. Standing in front of the mirror, she considers her hair, then picks up her toothbrush, applies the paste, and begins brushing her teeth. The camera remains on her face. After a minute, she turns her head from the mirror, ever so slightly, and makes direct eye contact with the camera; the brushing is slow, deliberate, and strangely loud, as if something is off with the sound mixing. This continues for a full four minutes. Not once, during that time, does Cemile remove her gaze from the camera, or cease brushing. At the four-minute mark, she stops to spit. Just then, the shower curtain behind her is pulled back, revealing the super and a man apparently intended to represent Borges standing in her bathtub. Both are wearing baggy denim overalls and straw hats; the super holds a bale of bubble wrap, while Borges has a kind of shimmery wind chime. The lighting turns dreamy, soft-focus. Cemile smiles at the men, setting down her toothbrush. As she does so, a Claymation lobster appears on Borges's shoulder, clutching a buttery, glistening corn on the cob between its claws. The lobster hands the corn to Cemile, who begins to eat it with obvious pleasure, returning her gaze to the camera. Like the brushing, the eating sounds are unusually loud; beneath them, one can hear the tinkling of Borges gently blowing on the chimes, and the occasional, punctuating pop of the super sinking his fingers into the bubble wrap. All three characters (four, including the lobster) maintain sensuous, unbroken eye contact with the camera throughout the remainder of this performance, which lasts for a stunning 18 minutes and 41 seconds. At the end of that time, Cemile drops the cob into the trash, flips off the light, and exits the bathroom, rejoining her guests at the table, where they are still chatting exactly as before. No further reference to this incident appears in the film.
     Not surprisingly, the notorious "bathroom scene," as it has come to be known, has garnered a great deal of attention from critics, much of it far from positive. It has been derided as a nonsensical "dream sequence" (a label Özel rejects) and pilloried as an attention-seeking stunt. At the same time, online commentators have raced to identify the numerous influences legible in the scene, including vintage television commercials, Bollywood, soft porn, ASMR, the 1970s American "hicksploitation" genre, camgirls, children's shows, the "Weirdcore" internet aesthetic of the 2010s, and feminist video art. Özel herself acknowledges many of these influences: she asserts, however, that the scene is not about the past, but the future. In an interview with Sight & Sound, Özel declares that the bathroom scene is "not the same genre as the rest of the movie," and that it is, in fact, "a scene from a genre that doesn't exist yet." Thus, while it may be incomprehensible to audiences today, Özel's hope is that, at some point in the future, a body of films will be created in which the scene will belong and be immediately understood. Indeed, she views the scene as a kind of challenge, a dare to future filmmakers to invent this new work. As Özel explains, "Genre is a relay. It's a game of telephone. First I tell a story, then you tell a story, then someone else tells another story. Each one passes something on to the next. And that's what I'm trying to do with [the bathroom scene]: I'm holding out the baton, and I'm just hoping that it'll find someone with their hand out to take it."
     Ultimately, it is impossible for anyone currently living to evaluate or judge the artistic merit of the bathroom scene, for the audience that is equipped to appreciate it does not yet exist (and may never exist). In this way, we cannot really see the scene itself; all that we may witness is the gesture that it represents. But this, I would contend, is enough—enough to know what kind of film we have before us, and what kind of filmmaker Özel is. It is a gesture of radical openness to the other, inspired foolishness, and blind faith: a message in a bottle, set in motion towards the unknown world.

__

This story really springs from my love of movies (shout-out to my MUBI and Criterion Collection streaming subs, which I leaned on heavily while writing this piece!). All of the directors and films discussed in the story are, of course, fictitious—but many of them drew inspiration from real directors and real films, which I would enthusiastically recommend. Pas Douter du Chef!, for example, is based on the great 1950s French gangster movies of Jacques Becker and Jean-Pierre Melville, like Touchez Pas au Grisbi (Hands Off the Loot, 1954) and Bob le Flambeur (1956). The Yakuza Files: Struggles Without Heroes or Pity is a not-so-subtle homage to Kinji Fukasaku's brilliant and frenetic classic The Yakuza Papers: Battles Without Honor and Humanity (1973) and its many sequels and reboots (Fukasaku would make seven sequels in the next three years alone!). With Luisa Vacondio, meanwhile, I had in mind the heartbreaking, silly comedies of Lina Wertmüller, films like The Seduction of Mimi (1972) and Love and Anarchy (1973).

The best book I've encountered on genre is John Frow's Genre (2nd edition, Routledge, 2014). I think my fascination with genre as a concept goes back to my reading of this book.