In the remaining days between now and Christmas you can get onto Vimeo and stream a 65-minute film which covers capitalism, social media, Drum & Bass, rave cutlure, hauntology, hyperstition, Felixstowe, M.R. James, and depression. The film is titled: We Are Making A Film About Mark Fisher (2025). Few academic lives could draw together such a disparate array of themes.
WAMAFAMF (can I call it that!?) is the work of artists Simon Poulter and Sophie Mellor, also known as Close and Remote. It is a documentary containing a fictional conceit in which a guide dubbed Professor Parker finds a mystic flute, which kind of summons all subsequent footage. But his presence here seems unimportant, unless you are already a fan of ghost stories. Additional elements that conjure the late Mark Fisher include atmospheric footage of relentless surf on pebbles (relatable here in Brighton) and the mysteriously blazing lights of a seaport by night.
Mark Fisher is best known for the book Capitalist Realism, about life within an ideological system with no visible exit. Except that Fisher, who was public about his experience of depression, took his life in 2017, before he could see the left wing resurgence and pushback against fascism that is characterising the 2020s; athough that statement might, I realise, be an example of hyperstition: the common (media- and social media-) practice of hyping something wished for into being.
Fisher’s ideas are somewhat out of my purlieu. I still don’t understand Deleuze and Guatarri. And though I think I once understood some of Georges Bataille, and some of philosopher Nick Land’s spin off book Thirst For Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, I now wish I hadn’t gone there. Was it inevitable I would fall prey to Bataille’s ‘syphilis of the mind,’ as it has been called? As an undergraduate at the University of Warwick, my time overlapped with that of Fisher, who was doing his PhD there, and Land, who was a rockstar lecturer. Both were in a completely different department.
So perhaps I just read about Fisher, Land and the notorious Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) in i-D magazine. More recently I read about them in Simon Reynolds’ excellent piece on the Energy Flash blog. Now I feel like I get the picture. But the brew of occultism, rave visuals, eclectic pop culture references and brooding computerised music is not for me. Until now, until seeing this film, perhaps.
Thanks to some personable interview footage and a midweek screening at the University of Sussex, where director Poulter told us the Q&A was very much part of the film, WAMAFAMF puts Fisher within reach — whether or not you’ve ever been a cyberpunk, a psychogeographer, a pirate radio fan or a (shudder) accelerationist. Mark Fisher comes across as an individual who was channelling all those things but who remained human: a much vaunted theorist with a reputation that has grown since his death, and as a well published writer who gave the world a prolific blog.
Close and Remote have brought their subject nearer, less remote, and the film is a fascinating tribute which is expanding, getting made over, with each viewing. It’s like a virus, I guess. But a good one, like the double rainbow guy, rather than syphilis.
The film is available, via Vimeo, for £6.38, between 8 and 24 December 2025.
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