To transition between scenes, and advance the narrative along, Reid Kelley uses stop-motion to animate letters. Text merrily dances across the screen, as words become jumbled, shuffle around and form into other words. Surplus Devotion becomes Spurs Devolution, Unloved Puss Riot, Loves Input Sourd, Virus Loots Unpend and End Virtuous Slop. There is a clever poeticism to all this, as it elaborates on characters and their dialogue. This word play is typical of her earlier films; however, more established now, she obsesses over the details in the stage sets. Reid Kelley has embraced her role as a storyteller, using typography as a background player integrated into the characters and sets themselves. In the most recent film Priapus Agonistes, the text is limited to a brown paper bag that covers the Minotaur’s head, costumes, and graffiti scrawled across the walls of his lair. Language and text are now seamlessly and carefully incorporated into a much more unified whole.

In You Make Me Iliad, a young German soldier, with aspirations of greatness as a writer on a par with Homer, meets a nameless prostitute, similarly a victim of war-torn circumstance. They match wits in a long exchange about literary inspiration and artistic genius, which fails to interrupt her douching routine. He desires a muse, while she just wants to get it over with, bluntly cutting to the chase: “Do you recall my home/ it was on route/ your armies sacked it/ as I balled my eyes quite helplessly/ but in this setting/ I am alpha female/ and I am alpha betting/ that you can’t spell disaster/ you are slow to learn/ which will make the clean up faster.” Romanticized images from the trenches of heroic deeds and merciless battles of the kind Sadie elicits from Jack have long perpetuated the myth of manhood. Here, in this film, our focus is turned to those outside of the trenches, as both characters lose their innocence in the midst of imperial aggression and mechanized war. As dreams are crushed, how will they be remembered, if at all, by history?