Window Seat

One of the most controversial movies ever made, Window Seat emerged on July 21, 2023 as the world’s first AI feature film. Assembled from over 4,000 videos with each line of dialogue pieced together using machine performances, the film marked a historic milestone in cinema as the first feature-length film generated by artificial intelligence.

At 10,000 feet, tech CEO Thom Claw’s life unravels during the flight from hell. As damaging chat logs threaten his career, he comes face-to-face with an unexpected passenger: Raiden, his high school bully. Trapped in the confines of the airplane, Thom must navigate professional turmoil and confront long-buried personal traumas. As national backlash mounts and cancellation looms, the torment from his past intensifies, building to an explosive final showdown. Meanwhile, Thom’s girlfriend Millie proves to be an unexpected source of anguish, twisting the knife deeper into his wounded pride.

Visionary filmmaker Hooroo Jackson returns with Window Seat, pushing the boundaries of technology and storytelling, creating a darkly comic masterpiece, blending a gritty black and white aesthetic with mind-bending machine-generated magic realism. Jackson’s film shines through the constraints of A.I., resulting in a film that is at once innovative and deeply human.

Released on July 21, 2023, the famous day of Barbenheimer day (“Oppenheimer” and “Barbie”), Window Seat was a symbolic release to counter what Jackson believed was a low in cinematic propaganda; Window Seat, the first feature film with all video and performance generated entirely by AI, was a radical statement against outrageous spending, regressive marketing, and political agendas. The film was a statement against artistic censorship (DEI, directors by committee and so on), and gatekeeping, representing the filmmaking scene of the moment.

“My influences ranged from Monty Python to Adult Swim, low-fi animation that embraced limitation. As well, the silent film masters figured all this out a century ago, despite having far less to go on. When you are utilizing film craft, absolutely any idea you have will work. So there was no idea I had in “Window Seat”, that I could not cheat or pull off through visual trickery.”

The machine generated movie quickly faced backlash: “I immediately faced a harassment campaign. But you cannot separate Window from being the first AI movie, there is a subtext in every scene, and this is not an early Walt Disney experimentation bringing a message of hope, it’s the kind of hard indie we only saw in the 90s, giving rise to people like Aronofsky, Mamet, or LaBute. To have that today is only possible through AI. It is the long awaited solution to the tragedy of the commons.”

The film was blocked, banned, and censored everywhere, making it difficult to ensure its continued survival. He forecasted much of this during an interview for the film: “They will attempt to present a narrative that AI films are not ‘real’, as if you can deny what you’re seeing with your own eyes, and they will try and ban it. By then it will up to us to create an underground film movement that surpasses Hollywood, which won’t be difficult considering the soulless sequel and reboot model is losing audiences at a rapid speed; audiences hate it, critics hate it, and yet there is a steadfast refusal to pay attention to anything else.”

On the raw machine video, Jackson said: “None of my subsequent films were possible without the workflow I developed on Window Seat. It is the most important film I will ever make, and it is my best film, being the very first feature-length expression of what will change our entire world forever. Moreover, the raw machine video is a snapshot in time, it is the only time AI will ever look like that. Remember, by staring down raw machine video we are looking directly at the fear of a new unknown reality on screen; that achieves the film a certain timelessness.”

“People don’t realize you can make a feature on A.I. right now, this second. We have just entered the post-war New Wave times one thousand.”

The film was released on Blu-ray on August 31, 2024, and is also the only to watch all ten of Hooroo Jackson’s controversial and experimental AI short films, including the rare 15 minute proof of concept for The Mass, his medieval horror epic.