Girl Internet Show: A Kati Kelli Mixtape is screening as part of Fantastic Fest 2024, which runs from September 19 to September 26.

I have said my piece about the “compilation” film on this website before. In fact, I made some complaints about the format a few months ago when From My Cold Dead Hands played the Fantasia Festival. I’ll be brief about it here. The compilation/mixtape format is, by its design, artistically limiting. In borrowing from existing content, the artistry of the resulting film derives mostly from the edit. Why is this found footage being compiled, organized, and edited in this way? If the answer is, “I don’t know,” then the compilation has not succeeded in properly compiling.

The best of the format will create new meaning out of existing materials, or will resituate the original meaning of the materials in a way that produces new understanding. In short: the compilation film ought to produce a new media experience, not just repackage old media. That’s how I see it, anyway.

The major issue with the latest compilation/mixtape, Girl Internet Show: A Kati Kelli Mixtape, is that the new meaning produced is a celebration of the previous work (a reasonable goal), but that celebration does not substitute for the fact that the experience of watching Kati Kelli’s work in this film is not markedly different than watching that same work on her original YouTube channel.

Kati Kelli was an outsider artist from Los Angeles. Her YouTube channel, “Girl Internet Show,” experimented with the popular style of online media content through surrealist humor and a lo-fi aesthetic. Kelli passed away in 2019, and this mixtape serves as something of a memorial to her body of work (which was relatively underground by online content creator standards).

From an Internet history perspective, where the culture shifts rapidly, the work of “Girl Internet Show” has a sense of humor that appears dated. A reduction of what Kelli’s videos are doing would be to group them into the “YouTube poop” category from the early days of the platform. More accurately, the show harnessed the hyper-mimetic juvenility of an early Web 2.0 Internet culture for the sake of satirizing the online content creator space and its (mostly empty) promise of DIY fame.

This is all to say that Kati Kelli was doing something valuable and interesting underneath the veneer of the gaudy, ugly Internet video aesthetic. Girl Internet Show: A Kati Kelli Mixtape adequately curates the experience of this satire and aesthetic. Beyond bringing attention to the underseen artist, though, the film does little to justify its own place (for one, most of the YouTube videos re-run here are still available through that platform on Kelli’s original channel, which is now called “Kati Kelli Girl”). Perhaps one could argue the film presents a neater chronology of Kelli’s career than scrolling through her channel would allow for (although, the videos as presented in the film are not strictly edited chronologically).

In any case, compiling YouTube videos wholesale into an 80-minute film will almost always feel like an empty creative exercise to me when the film does not exceed the grasp of the work that it repurposes. The most this Mixtape affords is the inclusion of Kelli’s short film, “Total Body Removal Surgery,” which is much more difficult to access than her other content. It is a meaningful inclusion and an enjoyable experience to watch, but I cannot help but question whether the short film benefits from the compilation that comes before, as opposed to “Total Body Removal Surgery” receiving some form of festival circuit release on its own. Perhaps this is still a possibility, but I think the short film should have (in one form or another) its own space as a discrete creative object.

It is also commendable that the curators of this experience, Jordan Wippell and Jane Schoenbrun (director of my favorite film of this year, I Saw the TV Glow), reserve the “Directed By” title card for Kelli herself and Kelli alone. This is more credit than I’ve seen some other compilation films provide to original content creators. I suppose if I were to be as generous as I can be toward Girl Internet Show: A Kati Kelli Mixtape, I would have to engage with a conversation over whether or not media need be additive in nature. In being a tribute to a largely undiscovered artist, the film serves an extra-media function (in that, exposing someone to this compilation also exposes them to the creator at its center). This is its productive value – it doesn’t produce new media, but serves as a conduit to existing media. In the ideal, that’s a noble enterprise.

Girl Internet Show: C+

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As always, thanks for reading!

—Alex Brannan (Letterboxd, Facebook)