Darryl Louise (DL) and Frenesi Gates: 24fps Companions Growing Apart

Darryl Louise (DL) and Frenesi Gates share the political filmmaking world of 24fps, but their partnership grows increasingly distant as they take different positions toward visibility, risk, and intimacy. For DL, filmmaking is work that demands tactics and escape plans; for Frenesi, the camera can make ignored injustice visible. Their diverging methods eventually sharpen into a personal estrangement, as DL recognizes that a colleague she once knew has become inaccessible to her.

Shared Work, Different Relationships to the Camera

Frenesi speaks directly to the danger of looking away: ignoring the repression of farmworkers organizing in the county, she argues, is more dangerous in the long run than confronting it. She knows that several cameras are keeping her in close-up. Visibility is not incidental to her argument; she continues speaking while being filmed, making the camera part of her public political presence.

DL, by contrast, tries to stay clear of the lenses. Forced to live at the pace of 24fps, she approaches the work with cold practicality, speaking chiefly about tactics and schedules rather than politics. She keeps the film supplied, scouts meeting points and escape routes, and carries a crowbar beneath the car seat. When the crew is pursued, her security role requires her to remain behind and slow the pursuers. The contrast is not simply between two temperaments: Frenesi uses the frame to confront what others ignore, while DL works to keep the people and equipment behind that frame safe.

Risk and the Terms of Collaboration

The crew’s work repeatedly puts its political purpose into tension with physical danger. Sledge worries that tampering with power meters and making illegal connections will eventually get them caught, and points out that he may be the one who has to drive everyone out of town. The group also confronts a harder question: whether a film is worth someone being killed, injured, or left with a lasting disability, especially if the footage might never be used. DL’s matter-of-fact response to the danger reflects her operational role, but the dispute exposes the cost that the filmmaking enterprise can demand from its participants.

That shared risk helps define the ground on which DL and Frenesi work together, even though the evidence emphasizes their different functions rather than a private bond between them. Frenesi takes the visible, political position before the cameras; DL makes the work possible through preparation, security, and readiness to retreat. The collaboration depends on both kinds of labor, while leaving unresolved how much danger the film can justifiably ask them to accept.

From Colleagues to Distance

The later strain becomes personal through DL’s relationship with Jinx. At the time Weed Atman’s behavior is becoming more erratic, Jinx suspects that his intimacy with Frenesi has motives beyond sex and confides her fears to DL. The two women train together at a dojo in Redondo Beach a couple of times a week. Their practice can absorb hours, though they communicate more through their bodies than through direct conversation.

In those encounters, both women sense another Frenesi: a protected, repudiated self to which they are denied access. The exclusion hurts DL especially because Frenesi is her colleague; DL might have expected such concealment from a lover, but not from someone she worked beside. Their shared history in 24fps has not disappeared, but it no longer guarantees intimacy. The camera that once made Frenesi conspicuously present now stands beside a more troubling absence: the part of her life that DL cannot enter.