Girl Internet Show: A Kati Kelli Mixtape Review: A loving tribute to an Internet curiosity

Underground web personality Kati Kelli died in 2019, leaving behind six years of her bizarre, avant-garde YouTube series Girls internet show. Lovingly curated by filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun (I saw the television light up) and Jordan Wippell (Kelli’s widower), the loosely connected program is redesigned in film form, albeit with minimal intervention Girl Internet Show: A Kati Kelli Mixtape.

The film, as the title suggests, is a playlist of various sketch videos played back to back, followed by Kelli’s first short film, completed just days before her death from asthma. This effectively makes it as raw and unfiltered as possible A film adaptation of her absurd work and eccentric personality that makes for a surreal, funny and confusing 79 minutes.

what is Girls Internet Show: A Kati Kelli Mixtape around?

With minimal interference, Wippell and Schoenbrun let Kelli’s comically disturbing work speak for itself, providing only short text cards at the beginning and end for a touch of additional context. All we really know about Kelli at the start of the compilation is that she was homeschooled in Los Angeles.

This detail also proves to be subtly revealing, but before it even comes into play, the audience is whipped back and forth between supposed video shitposts with cheap effects and narcissistic characters in a litany of wigs and outfits. The whole thing has a frenetic DIY vlogger feel from the years before cheap but effective cameras and equipment were available, a la ring lights for Zoom meetings. However, Kelli’s rudimentary equipment doesn’t seem to be a hindrance to her gonzo creativity; In fact, her constraints reinforce her aesthetic as something taken from a lonely bedroom and created without any additional help.

The fact that we never see anyone else is a little odd – at times it seems like her camera is being operated manually, but she also adds camera shake in post-production to create a handheld feel. Most of the time, her work feels unique and strange, from her echoing sound effects and casually macabre tone to her Mommy Blogger sketches in which she perpetrates hilariously twisted violence on dolls, all while maintaining a sunny disposition befitting a mainstream Personal brand is due. It’s sweet and worrying at the same time, a breakup this runs through most of her sketches.

Finally her short film Whole body removal surgery plays as a coda to the mixtape, allowing us to see Kelli with film collaborators for the first time, albeit with exactly the same esoteric vibe and no-budget approach. By this point, however, it is mostly clear that her work, as playful and frivolous as it may seem, also carries with it a sense of foreboding.

Girls Internet Show: A Kati Kelli Mixtape predicts the future of the Internet.

Kelli may not have been a fortune teller in the truest sense of the word, but she saw where online entertainment was going and how it was slowly reshaping culture, and she brought it back to light in wonderfully strange ways. Nuances of future vlogging norms can also be seen in their parodies, particularly in the heavily personality-driven content that now dominates YouTube’s algorithm.

But no matter the topic, Kelli always seemed to deliver her snarky jokes with sincerity. Parodies and satires can so easily be laced with venom, but Kelli’s asides about her “mansion” and her numerous sped-up catwalks don’t so much poke fun at lifestyle, fashion and makeup vlogging – forms that were still popular at the time were in their infancy – as they merely reflect and refract the online world as it existed then and as it would continue to grow.

One character in particular is fun to watch, a dissatisfied upper-class woman named Marva Brian Jordan Alvarez way, with a deep discomfort hidden behind their affirmations. This dissonance between representation and reality underlines pretty much all of Kelli’s videos. It’s a great running gag, no matter which direction your humor takes – but at the same time it also proves to be self-reflexive.

While simply pressing play on a video mixtape may not fit within the traditional confines of filmmaking, Wippell and Schoenbrun crediting Kelli as writer, director, and editor allows Wippell and Schoenbrun to present her as she might have wanted to present herself . However, looking at all of these works in quick succession also reveals an important thematic needle.

Girls Internet Show: A Kati Kelli Mixtape is a film about loneliness.

Given that Kelli is homeschooled, the fact that her work appears to have been created with little to no help, and the fact that she often engages in broad pop culture caricatures (some of them Kardashian-style), this falls it’s hard not to see her as somehow alone. Schoenbrun’s involvement is crucial here, as both films – I saw the television light upbut above all We’re all going to the World’s Fair – deal with the haunting forms of millennial boredom. The latter even revolves around online creepypasta and video challenges as a window into emotional connection, with a protagonist staring into space through her webcam.

It’s hard not to see echoes of Schoenbrun’s work in this film, or rather why Schoenbrun might have been drawn to Kelli, who also seems to view the world from an isolated perspective. Their characters and scenarios all have references to the real world, but seem to process reality through layers and filters of entertainment, like reality TV. Kelli most likely had friends – Wippell may even have been holding the camera at times, although that remains unclear – but the version of her that ends up in her videos and her droll authorial voice seem desperately lonely.

From cheap compositing and repetitive cuts to eerie silence and harsh noise: Girl Internet Show: A Kati Kelli Mixtape joins the ranks of the most recent web-saturated films (alongside The people’s joker), which speaks the language of the burgeoning Internet as a tool for expressing yourself and finding connections. No doubt the concept is overly specific – few festivals outside of the underground genre will even care – but the film is also liberating in a way, being a montage of found footage that helps carve out a cinematic space for offbeat Outsiders create art from a place of veiled, distorted honesty.

Girl Internet Show: A Kati Kelli Mixtape was reviewed from its screening at Fantastic Fest.