As the celluloid dust settles over Austin, and my liver relaxes to normal functionality, I bid Fantastic Fest 2012 adieu. Funny how a succession of 16-hour moviegoing days can fly by so quickly.

Here's the catch-22: solid screening schedules subtract from meet-and-greets with the hyper-creative international community, and the parties are sometimes as dope as the films they celebrate. I spent much of opening night plotting out 15 minutes to catch up with Team Tokyo, but due to massive red carpet premieres, I didn't find a free moment until night two.

“In my role, well...I'm not wearing this corset, for example. And I'm covered in blood. I think you'll love it.” — Je$$ica (star of “Z is for Zetsumetsu” in The ABC's of Death; my translation)

Besides the usual suspects, I befriended (i.e. became totally enamored with) platinum-coiffed jo-ō-sama Je$$ica, seductive starlet of Yoshihiro Nishimura's contribution to The ABC's of Death. We run in similar circles in that neon metropolis, so I'll definitely look her up when I return in November.

“I really want to split her lip. That's kinda my goal, so everyone can see the shame on her face at how pathetic she was in the ring against me.” — Sylvia Soska (co-director of American Mary, on her twin, co-director Jen, at the Fantastic Debates)

At the Fantastic Fest 2012 Awards, pint-sized powerhouse Rina Takeda nabbed “Best Actress” in the Gutbusters category for Dead Sushi. Only at Fantastic Fest can a film about carnivorous raw fish be considered a comedy. The Fantastic Debates began with discussion — like Twisted TwinsJen and Sylvia Soska, arguing pro and contra remaking films — and concluded with boxing! A shining moment at Chaos Reigns Karaoke wasHere Comes the Devil's Laura Caro channeling her inner Whitney in a room-scorching serenade of “I Will Always Love You.”

“Watching yourself die onscreen is a weird, strangely satisfying thing.” — Eli Roth (co-writer, producer, and star of Aftershock)

Latin America brought the heat. Mexico's Here Comes the Devil joined Sao Paulo-based fever-dream Two Rabbits and two Chilean films — Bring Me the Head of Machine Gun Woman (I'm convinced Fernanda Urrejola's bikini'ed badass heralds my ideal woman) and Aftershock (the seismic lurch from party flick to natural disaster terror totally worked) — as personal favorites. Though I gotta give the top spot to France and Holy Motors, infused with an irresistible cinematic je ne sais quoi. New York: this screens on October 11 at the NYFF, and I encourage cineastes to not miss it.

All told, I surmounted successfully 26 films, beating last year's record — barely. See, there's another double-F-bomb related to this festival: the “Fantastic Flu.” The combination of dry Central Texas heat and icebox theaters, surrounded by hundreds of film geeks, plus the extra-late hours and torrents of beer, equals a cinematically proportioned common cold. I left my flat in the morning only after coking up on green tea and vitamin C.

And now, I wade back to normality by returning to NYC for work. I may even catch some of NYFF while I'm in town, if I can will myself to sit in a theater.

Images: Main image and non-film-still images courtesy the author; ABC's of Death still via Monster Pictures; all other film stills via Fantastic Fest; Fantastic Debates boxing via David Hill/Fantastic Fest

“There are twenty-seven different definitions of the self,” I heard Siri Hustvedt say at the Brooklyn Book Festival yesterday. “So you had better decide which one you want to use before going any further.”

It reminded me of that morning, when Sheila Heti and Karl Ove Knausgaard faced a throng of literati at a discussion called "Ice or Salt: The Personal in Fiction." James Wood had acknowledged the former’s “surfeit of empathy”in How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life and the “ceaselessly compelling” quality of the latter’s My Struggle: Volume One. And both writers spoke out in contrast to the versions of the selves they’d presented on the page: Karl Ove read from one of the more meditative, “authorial” sections of My Struggle, while Sheila focused on a letter between herself and the sado-masochistic Israel.

Hustvedt, who was also on the panel with Knausgaard and Heti, noted how their books, despite hewing closely to real life, used novelistic conventions. The very act of forming art necessarily deformed the life from which it was drawn. The other two novelists nodded, throwing their hands up in mock-resignation. (Laurent Binet should have been on the panel solely on basis of HHhH.)

One of the most common (and certainly the most frustrating) questions authors must answer is whether their fiction is autobiographical — and then they have to explain how, and where exactly, and of course why. But why are we so fascinated by this divide, or lack thereof, between an artist’s life and an artist’s work? Why did the line for this event teem with so many people that it filled the second floor and most of the first floor of the Brooklyn Borough Hall Courtroom?

Because we are confused about our many definitions of selfhood, perhaps?

In my college creative-writing courses, I read thinly veiled autobiographies of near-suicides or first heartbreaks. It was a way to talk about the event without judging the person who had lived it. But I preferred the direction Sheila and Karl Ove took. To paraphrase Yeats, they resisted the impulse topack the personal in ice or salt; they actually used their own names.

A great deal of what makes us human is our evident self-consciousness. Because of this, we can think about ourselves as seen by others, as doing things not yet done, as different from our present and living selves in age or body or action. We can think about ourselves as others.

We want to know whether our books' authors are writing about themselves, because we want to know if it's possible to live two lives, to escape the one in the world by setting another one down on the page. We want to imagine that these different definitions of the self actually mean different selves.

It's clear that Sheila Heti and Karl Ove Knausgaard have grappled mightily with this question, and maybe even made some peace with it. They see their literary personae as separate selves, old and no-longer-personal selves that do not need to be packed in ice or salt. What we read is, to them, just another version to add to the hundreds of selves already in their heads.

image credit: elbauldeguardian.com