Telepathic Letters

Cartas Telepaticas

Still from Telepathic Letters (2024)
Oldenburg Film Festival

VERDICT: Edgar Pera uses AI-generated imagery to envisage a meandering , hallucinatory conversation between the authors Fernando Pessoa and H.P. Lovecraft.

It its opening montage, the credits describe Telepathic Letters as ‘an unfinishable film by Edgar Pera.’

Indeed, the credits refer to it by version number, suggesting that this is work under constant construction and ends with a promise that it will be continued. This creates a base of shifting sand on which the film is built; it is theoretically morphing all the time, with the potential to be different each time you see it. It is a curious proposition for what is ostensibly an epistolary essay film, imagining a conversation between the modernist poet Fernando Pessoa (d. 1935) and the science fiction horror writer H.P. Lovecraft (d. 1937). However, this perhaps gives an indicator to the nature of Pera’s film, which uses their preserved words to forge new AI-facilitated dialogues between the two men’s psyches.

Arguably, these are two authors who have a kinship with the strange visual deviations that are innate in the process of making imagery with artificial intelligence. Where text prompts will make a variety of similar but surreally different images of the same thing, one can see a clear parallel to the heteronyms and pseudonyms employed by the two authors. Pera regularly fills the screen with a matrix of images, digressions on Pessoa and Lovecraft’s portraits, each one speaking as if different people. Indeed, by casting Keith Esher Davis as the voice both of the writers, Pessoa in a way recreates as if they are facets of one shapeshifting entity.

Pera revels in finding and forming these connections between the two men, between their outlooks, and between their words. At one point, Pessoa asserts that ‘our poems invent the universe, they do not reproduce it.’ Pera seems to hold a similar viewpoint, and enjoys his position as the playful creator, dreaming of various mash-ups of the writers’ works – he veers seamlessly between Lovecraft’s evocations of The Old Ones (the famous gods of his Cthulhu mythos) and the reflections in Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet. This is helped by passages in which the authors almost parrot one another. In one moment Pera is able to cut from Lovecraft telling Pessoa that he lives ‘in terror of not being misunderstood,’ to Pessoa responding: ‘I have always avoided being understood – to be understood is to prostitute oneself.’

These intentional opacity in their work again allows a great deal of licence to Pera in his creation of fantastic visuals to accompany these literary musings, and it is perhaps the visuals that will linger longest in the memories of enamoured audiences. As previously mentioned, Pera regularly chooses to present alternative versions of the same image tiled across the screen, drawing our attention to the odd variances between the AI generations, but also between the versions of the men. In other instances, short clips of the same thing follow one another, like time is slipping and being re-played, but each time slightly differently. At other points still, the images themselves mutate into one another, producing startling visions. It is a fascinating way to evoke the haunted and haunting nature of the words.

The use of AI is also likely to be the element of the film that garners it the most conversation. Pera has long incorporated cutting-edge technology into his filmmaking practice and, as an early adopter, the significant use of generative AI for Telepathic Letters feels like a natural progression. However, what is important here is how stylistically fitting  the imagery feels. Pera has found common ground not just between his two favourite authors, but also between them and the complexion of such digitally generated art. This is not the use of AI for its own sake, but its deployment in crafting a specific, uncanny and unforgettable visual language through which to present this phantasmagorical tete-a-tete from beyond the grave.

 Director, screenplay, editing: Edgar Pera
Cast: Keith Esher Davis, Barbara Lagido, Iris Cayatte, Victoria Guerra
Producer: Rodrigo Areias
Music: Artur Cyaneto
Sound: Pedro Gois
Production company: Bando a Parte
Venue: Oldenburg Film Festival
In English
69 minutes