Concussion Protocol

The scouts

Begley's doing the thing where he weaponizes found footage against the institution that generated it—reversing the slow-mo so trauma becomes this impossible-to-look-away-from rhythm. It's a formal setup that actually earns its provocation, which is rarer than it should be.

This sits squarely in the lineage of essay film as evidence—think Harun Farocki, think structural documentary—where the editing itself becomes the argument; the decision to reverse and compile rather than narrate places the viewer in direct confrontation with institutional violence, a rigor that recalls the best of Agnès Varda's late work.

The reversal isn't just a gimmick—it strips the spectacle machinery bare and reframes each collision as something approaching a requiem, and that single formal choice transmutes stock footage into an indictment that costs almost nothing to make but everything to watch.

Reviews

By cutting together only these scenes of injury — moments of impact, of intimacy, of trauma — and reversing them, I hope to open up a space to see some of this violence anew.

The backwards slow-mo technique is a bit off-putting at first, but as Greg Dorsainville noted in the video's thread: If it was in forwards it would be like any big hits package you see in an espn highlight show where we celebrate the football and hit and not mourn the result of the moment: a human in pain, disorientation, and slowly killing themselves.