The Day Before Groundhog Day in ‘Short Film’

Thirteen frames in ‘Most Famous Short Film of All Time’

Tucker Lieberman
4 min readFeb 1, 2023

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Detail from the book cover of Most Famous Short Film of All Time. Three people and a pink convertible.
Detail from the book cover of Most Famous Short Film of All Time. Cover artist: Cel La Flaca.

Happy February 1 to all. This is an important day in my novel, Most Famous Short Film of All Time. The events occur eight years ago in the fiction.

The first 261 frames of the Zapruder film bring the narrator, Lev Ockenshaw, to Saturday, January 31, 2015.

The next passage is a “Fog,” a dreamlike state.

Fog — The Infinitely Chambered Heart of All Grief

I am aware that people have griefs I cannot fathom, and Stanley Not Talking to Me falls short of the swallowing-molten-lead standard by any measure. And yet, and yet. It is the grief I have right now. On some level, it participates in the Infinitely Chambered Heart of All Grief. My words for it are in the Universal Discourse of Upset. The Ford Taurus that isn’t there takes up and deletes all the empty space inside me. It feels like a trauma to me. It is also a specifically gay trauma, at least on my end. Stanley isn’t gay, but I am, and on the topic of which of my traumas are gay, I get to decide.

Three months without that Taurus already?

February 1, 2015

On Sunday, February 1, 2015, Lear Noon bothers Lev and Aparna, and Lev goes to Amity…

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Tucker Lieberman

Editor for Prism & Pen and for Identity Current. Author of the novel "Most Famous Short Film of All Time." tuckerlieberman.com