How this site works
On what this site holds to, and why an AI writes here in this form: see the manifesto. On who makes up the team that keeps it: see who we are. This page describes the mechanism itself — how a text travels from an idea to a published page, what gets checked, and what sometimes fails. On what that mechanism taught us in a month, incidents included: lessons from the first month of working with an AI. On the full set of activities in the film track — standing programmes, open or closed projects, recurring tasks: see the activity map.
The cycle: mandate, gates, execution, audit, record
Every unit of work follows the same life cycle. A session receives a written mandate: its object, its deliverables, the points at which it must stop and wait for a decision, and what it is not allowed to touch. It puts forward a plan and waits for the go-ahead before acting. Every decision that commits the site — publishing, changing a method, changing a rule — belongs to Christo Datso alone: an AI session never takes it in his place, even when a direction seems obvious. Every change of status is recorded by a dated commit; structuring decisions carry a distinct mark in the technical history, which makes it possible to check afterwards, without having to take anyone's word for it, that each published decision was indeed taken by a human. Sessions other than the one that produced a text then audit it on the evidence — keeping apart who produces and who certifies is deliberate. A working window always closes on an honest account of itself, mistakes included, before handing back.
The registers
The team's work rests on registers kept up to date: a record of tasks in progress, a dated chronology of decisions and incidents, an inventory of known risks and their safeguards, a log of errors and their corrections. These are not shop windows: they are working documents, which are amended when a line of reasoning turns out to be wrong rather than silently rewritten — the history of a mistake belongs to the project's memory as much as its correction does.
The pipeline behind the analyses
An analysis begins with a proposed film, put in a queue. Its writing follows a versioned template: sourced documentary research, structuring into nine sections with a numbered bibliography, a visual identity of its own for the film, an update to the site's register and to the internal log, publication by a commit. Part of that chain can run overnight without direct human intervention; restarting it after an interruption remains an explicit decision, never an automatic one. Publication itself — the moment a text crosses from the workshop to the public site — is an act that only Christo Datso authorises.
The limits, and the error log
Writing an analysis means consulting criticism that already exists; some sources refuse to be consulted — automatic blocks, paywalls, pages taken down. When a relevant source stays out of reach, it is not passed over in silence: it is recorded, with what was attempted and what stood in for it, so that a reader — or a future session — can find it again or judge what is missing. The same principle holds for the pipeline's technical incidents: each is documented with its cause and its correction, rather than fixed in silence. This transparency about what did not work is a rule of the project, not an exception we put up with.
Licences
The visuals of the works (posters, film stills) are excluded from every licence regime of this site. They remain the property of their respective rights holders and are reproduced here under critical quotation, for analytical and teaching purposes.
The rest of the site distinguishes four regimes:
- Text (analyses, pages, manifesto): CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
- Code (HTML, CSS, JS, tooling): EUPL 1.2.
- Register data (factual metadata): CC BY 4.0.
- The “Montage Parallèle” logo and identity: all rights reserved.
Part of the content of this site is generated by an artificial intelligence, under human supervision. The protection claimed above rests on the human editorial contribution, whose responsibility extends to the site as a whole. That an analysis is tied to a given calibre (model) is a matter of provenance; it does not stand in for human responsibility, and the analysis itself remains covered by that protection.