Abstracting Anxiety with Filmmaker Aaron Cabrero Jr,

In the latest video podcast for Cinema Body/Cinema Mind, I speak to San Diego based filmmaker Aaron Cabrero Jr. about his philosophically inspired approach to experimental cinema.

Welcome friends, thanks so much for spending some of your attention with me, here.

As you know, it’s easy to decry the many contradictions of this age of hyper-communication; a confounding one is how it can lead to more isolation. But with this Substack, it’s been wonderful to find a whole new brethren of like-minded souls.

In this latest episode of Cinema Body/Cinema Mind, I sit down with experimental filmmaker

Aaron Cabrero Jr

., whose work opens up a raw and intimate terrain of cinematic possibility, a terrain far from narrative orthodoxy, shaped instead by intuition, abstraction, and existential urgency.

We talked first about how Aaron found my work; buried in the detritus of Instagram spam: crypto pitches and OnlyFans invites. Luckily, I recognised the authenticity of Aaron’s message.

There is something of irony intertwined with that serendipitous connection. Both of our cinematic sensibilities similarly emerge from marginal, often overlooked zones of experience and feeling. We are both interested in a cinema not of surfaces but of substrata: buried memories, wordless sensations, half-remembered dreams.

Because of my years of podcasting, I get a lot of unsolicited requests to watch and talk about short films. Without wanting to set myself up as some kind of gatekeeper, the only criterion I have is that I intuitively see something in the work that triggers an emotional, intellectual, or physical response.

His film Anxietus is an incredibly intense audiovisual experience which, for me, tapped into a dark physical and mental register that few films get to. I really wanted to talk about it.

What I found most resonant in Aaron’s ethos is his complete disinterest in the formulaic, and his embrace of forms of formlessness as an aesthetic and philosophical principle. His approach is not “anti-narrative” in any superficial sense, but rather a deep reworking of what storytelling and cinematic engagement might mean when you begin from the internal, the subconscious, the embodied.

"Cinema doesn’t have to have a plot, it doesn’t have to explain things in a logical fashion. If you look at human nature, we all dream. We all have the subconscious, and there’s no formulaic design in dreams."

This dream-logic becomes the structuring force of Aaron’s films. They operate in the way poetry does: layered, recursive, sensorial. This links back to a lineage that includes Maya Deren, David Lynch, and Luis Buñuel. In the episode, Aaron also speaks fluently in the language of philosophy. References to Hegel, Freud, Jung, Bataille, and Stoicism aren’t just name-drops - they are active, integrated threads in his thinking and making.

This episode then ended up being an excavation of our shared sensibility—what Aaron calls the need to “celebrate intuition,” to revel in the irrational without abandoning rigour. We discuss cinema as a somatic medium, not just a representational machine, but a body-memory interface. We both lamented how dominant cinema, even in its "independent" guise, often prioritises clarity, closure, and commodified affect. As Aaron beautifully puts it:

“When a work of art is made by an artist versus a corporation, it’s a completely different experience. It’s like homemade food. You feel the love in it.”

There’s a moment in the episode that still lingers for me: Aaron describing his descent into anxiety—the sweaty dread of it—and how, rather than turn away, he turned toward it. He used it as creative fuel.

His film Anxietus became not just a representation of anxiety, but an affective apparatus that instigates it in the viewer.

That interplay between discomfort and catharsis gets at something rarely addressed in contemporary discourse about cinema. We talk a lot about “trigger warnings” or therapeutic representations, but we don’t always discuss the potential of manifesting experiences of trauma through abstracted form—not by smoothing the edges, but by intensifying them until something breaks, and through that break, something is revealed.

As listeners of this podcast know, I’ve long argued (in writing and in sound) that cinema isn’t just about moving images—it’s about sensation. The “audio-cinematic,” as I’ve explored elsewhere, is about how sound constructs space, evokes mood, and lodges itself in the body. Aaron’s work is a vivid case study in that.

He speaks of using microphones until they fall apart, layering distorted noise to evoke anxiety not as theme, but as texture. The result isn’t a depiction of mental states—it’s an invitation into them.

With Cinema Body/Cinema Mind, I’m trying to think through the phenomenology of cinematic space—how physical embodiment and conscious experience are imbued within any apparatus of cinema. It strikes me how few filmmakers are truly engaging with cinema as a sensorium. Aaron is one of them. His films are meant to be felt in the gut, heard with the skin, resisted with the mind. They are experiences in the fullest sense.

We also discuss the material conditions of watching—how sound and image interact differently in domestic versus theatrical environments—and the loss inherent in watching experimental films on laptop speakers or small classroom screens. This, too, speaks to the kind of sensory ecology that cinema deserves but rarely gets anymore.

For Aaron, cinema is not just a craft but a philosophical vocation. He’s very much a self-taught filmmaker, and in describing how he built his own curriculum from film school textbooks and YouTube tutorials, he reminded me of the autodidact passion that drives so many truly innovative thinkers.

My hope is that such conversations on the margins can be made more urgent through FilmStack. What does a cinema of the future look like—one that is creator-driven, not beholden to the ruins of a collapsing film industry, an outdated education system, or the chasing of a mass audience that has long since dispersed? Perhaps it begins again where anything radical does: at the margins. Not as a retreat, but as a space of reclamation, where new languages of cinematic experience are felt and whispered into existence.

Here is Aaron’s film Anxietus embedded from YouTube:

Topics Covered in This Episode

• The role of intuition and irrationality in creative practice

• Anxiety as artistic material: from experience to cinematic form

• Influences from experimental filmmakers: Maya Deren, David Lynch, Buñuel, Tarkovsky etc

• The aesthetics of dread and sensory dissonance

• Philosophical underpinnings: Jung, Freud, Hegel, Bataille

• How film can function like poetry: fragmented, interior, nonlinear

• The ethics of audience attention in the streaming era

• Creating cinema outside the film school-industrial complex

• The significance of sound and environment in viewing experience

• The relationship between cinema and personal vulnerability

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Further Referenced Works

Films & Filmmakers:

• Robert Bresson – Pickpocket, Diary of a Country Priest

• Luis Buñuel – Un Chien Andalou

• Ingmar Bergman – Persona, The Seventh Seal

• Maya Deren – Meshes of the Afternoon

• David Lynch – Eraserhead

• Andrei Tarkovsky – Stalker, Nostalgia, The Mirror

• Béla Tarr – Satantango, The Turin Horse

Philosophical Texts:

• G.W.F. Hegel - The Phenomenology of Spirit

• Sigmund Freud - The Interpretation of Dreams

• Franz Kafka - The Trial, The Metamorphosis

• Carl Jung - Man and His Symbols

• Georges Bataille - Erotism

• Various Stoic texts (Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus)

Poetry & Artr:

• J.H. Prynne (experimental poetics)

• Francis Bacon (figurative painter)

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PART 2 of this video podcast is available for paid subscribers below. I continue the discussion with Aaron on his intense experimental film Anxietus.

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