Here are the posters for the filmography in endnote 24 of Infinite Jest.
Most of the films are unrelated to the main storyline so this is largely just a bit of fun. That said, there are a few plot-related easter eggs, some world building, and some potential biographical clues that are easy to miss. I’m hoping visualisations make it easier to take all of them in. I remember how confronting it was arriving at your first multi-page endnote with dense small print descriptions of esoteric documentaries.
I’ve excluded the details around film length etc but you can read the descriptions in full here.
Before Subsidization (B.S.)
Kinds of Light
4,444 individual frames, each of which photo depicts lights of different source, wavelength, and candle power, each reflected off the same unpolished tin plate.
Dark Logics
Child-sized but severely palsied hand turns pages of incunabular manuscripts in mathematics, alchemy, religion, and bogus political autobiography.
Tennis, Everyone?
Public relations/advertorial production for United States Tennis Association in conjunction with Wilson Sporting Goods, Inc.
There Are No Losers Here
Documentary on B.S. 1997 U.S.T.A. National Junior Tennis Championships, Kalamazoo MI and Miami FL
Flux in a Box
Documentary history of box, platform, lawn, and court tennis from the 17th-century Court of the Dauphin to the present.
Annular Fusion Is Our Friend
A nontechnical explanation of the processes of DT-cycle lithiumized annular fusion and its applications in domestic energy production.
Annular Amplified Light: Some Reflections
A nontechnical explanation of the applications of cooled-photon lasers in DT-cycle lithiumized annular fusion.
The Machine in the Ghost: Annular Holography for Fun and Prophet
Nontechnical introduction to theories of annular enhancement and zone-plating and their applications in high-resolution laser holography.
Union of Nurses in Berkeley
Interviews with hearing-impaired RNs and LPNs during Bay Area health care reform riots of 1996.
Union of Theoretical Grammarians in Cambridge
Interviews with participants in the public Steven Pinker-Avril M. Incandenza debate on the political implications of prescriptive grammar during the infamous Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts convention credited with helping incite the M.I.T. language riots of B.S. 1997.
Cage
Soliloquized parody of a broadcast-television advertisement for shampoo, utilizing four convex mirrors, two planar mirrors, and one actress.
Widower
A cocaine-addicted father leads his son around their desert property immolating poisonous spiders.
Cage II
Sadistic penal authorities place a blind convict and a deaf-mute convict together in 'solitary confinement,' and the two men attempt to devise ways of communicating with each other.
Death in Scarsdale
A world-famous dermatological endocrinologist becomes platonically obsessed with a boy he is treating for excessive perspiration, and begins himself to suffer from excessive perspiration.
Fun With Teeth
A dentist performs sixtenn unanesthetized root-canal procedures on an academic he suspects of involvement with his wife.
Immanent Domain
Three memory-neurons in the Inferior frontal gyrus of a man's brain fight heroically to prevent their displacement by new memory-neurons as the man undergoes intensive psychoanalysis.
Kinds of Pain
2,222 still-frame close-ups of middle-aged white males suffering from almost every conceivable type of pain, from an ingrown toenail to cranio-facial neuralgia to inoperable colo-rectal neoplastis.
Various Small Flames
Images of myriad varieties of small household flames, from lighters and birthday candles to stovetop gas rings and grass clippings ignited by sunlight through a magnifying glass, alternated with anti-narrative sequences of a man sitting in a dark bedroom drinking bourbon while his wife and an Amway representative have acrobatic coitus in the background's lit hallway.
Cage III
The figure of Death presides over the front entrance of a carnival sideshow whose spectators watch performers undergo unspeakable degradations so grotesquely compelling that the spectators' eyes become larger and larger until the spectators themselves are transformed into gigantic eyeballs in chairs, while on the other side of the sideshow tent the figure of Life uses a megaphone to invite fairgoers to an exhibition in which, if the fairgoers consent to undergo unspeakable degradations, they can witness ordinary persons gradually turn into gigantic eyeballs.
The Medusa v. the Odalisque
Mobile holograms of two visually lethal mythologic females duel with reflective surfaces onstage while a live crowd of spectators turn to stone.
Homo Duplex
Interviews with fourteen Americans who are named John Wayne but are not the legendary 20th-century film actor John Wayne
Zero Gravity Tea Ceremony
The intricate Ocha-Kai is conducted 2.5 m. off the ground in the Johnson Space Center’s zero-gravity-simulation chamber.
Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell
God and Satan play poker with Tarot cards for the soul of an alcoholic sandwich-bag salesman obsessed with Bernini's 'The Ecstasy of St. Teresa.'
The Joke
Two video cameras in theater record the 'film' 's audience and project the resultant raster onto screen — the theater audience watching itself watch itself get the obvious 'joke' and become increasingly self-conscious and uncomfortable and hostile supposedly comprises the film's involuted 'antinarrative' flow.
Inside Every Inch of Disney Leith
Miniaturized, endoscopic, and microinvasive cameras traverse entire exterior and interior of one of Incandenza's technical crew as he sits on a folded scrape in the Boston Common listening to a public forum on uniform North American metricization.
Year of the Whopper
The Man Who Began to Suspect He Was Made of Glass
A man undergoing intensive psychotherapy discovers that he is brittle, hollow, and transparent to others, and becomes either transcendentally enlightened or schizophrenic.
The American Century as Seen Through a Brick
As U.S. Boston's historical Back Bay streets are stripped of brick and repaved with polymerized cement, the resultant career of one stripped brick is followed, from found-art temporary installation to displacement by E.W.D. catapult to a waste-quarry in southern Quebec to its use in the F.L.Q.-incited anti-O.N.A.N. riots of January/Whopper, all intercut with ambiguous shots of a human thumb's alterations in the interference pattern of a plucked string
The ONANtiad
Oblique, obsessive, and not very funny claymation love triangle played out against live-acted backdrop of the inception of North American Interdependence and Continental Reconfiguration.
The Universe Lashes Out
Documentary on the evacuation of Atkinson NH/New Quebec at the inception of Continental Reconfiguration.
Poultry in Motion
Documentary on renegade North Syracuse, NNY, turkey farmers’ bid to prevent toxification of Thanksgiving crop by commandeering long, shiny O.N.A.N. trucks to transplant over 200,000 pertussive fowl south to Ithaca.
Mobius Strips
Pornography-parody, where a theoretical physicist, who can only achieve creative mathematical insight during coitus, conceives of Death as a lethally beautiful woman.
Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat
Possible parody/homage to B.S. public-service-announcement cycle of Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, a harried commuter is mistaken for Christ by a child he knocks over.
Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad
Blood Sister: One Tough Nun
A formerly delinquent nun’s failure to reform a juvenile delinquent leads to a rampage of recidivist revenge.
Let There Be Lite
Documentary on the genesis of the reduced carbon bourbon industry.
Valuable Coupon Has Been Removed
A boy helps his alcoholic-delusional father and disassociated mother dismantle their bed to search for rodents, and later he intuits the future feasibility of D.T.-cycle lithiumized annular fusion.
Baby Pictures of Famous Dictators
Children and adolescents play a nearly incomprehensible nuclear strategy game with tennis equipment against a real or holographic (?) backdrop of sabotaged ATHSCME 1900 atmospheric displacement towers exploding and toppling during the New New England Chemical Emergency of Y.W.
Stand Behind the Men Behind the Wire
Documentary on Essex County Sheriff's Dept. and Massachusetts Department of Social Services' expedition to track, verify, capture, or propitiate the outsized feral infant alleged to have crushed, gummed, or picked up and dropped over a dozen residents of Lowell in January, Y.T.M.P.
As of Yore
A middle-aged tennis instructor, preparing to instruct his son in tennis, becomes intoxicated in the family’s garage and subjects his son to a rambling monologue while the son weeps and perspires.
Low-Temperature Civics
Four sons intrigue for control of a sandwich-bag conglomerate after their CEO father has an ecstatic encounter with Death and becomes irreversibly catatonic.
(At Least) Three Cheers for Cause and Effect
The headmaster of a newly constructed high-altitude sports academy becomes neurotically obsessed with litigation over the construction’s ancillary damage to a V.A. hospital far below, as a way of diverting himself from his wife’s poorly hidden affair with the academically renowned mathematical topologist who is acting as the project’s architect
(The) Desire to Desire
A pathology resident falls in love with a beautiful cadaver and the paralyzed sister she died rescuing from the attack of an oversized feral infant.
Safe Boating is No Accident
A claustrophobic water-ski instructor, struggling with his romantic conscience after his fiancee’s face is grotesquely mangled by an outboard propeller, becomes trapped in an overcrowded hospital elevator.
Very Low Impact
A narcoleptic aerobics instructor struggles to hide her condition from students and employers.
The Night Wears a Sombrero
A nearsighted apprentice cowpoke loses the trail of the gunslinger after misreading a road sign and is drawn to a sinister Mexican ranch where Oedipally aggrieved gunslingers are ritually blinded by a mysterious veiled nun.
Accomplice!
An aging pederast mutilates himself out of love for a strangely tattooed street hustler.
Dial C for Concupiscence
A cellular phone operator, mistaken by a Québecois terrorist for another cellular phone operator the FLQ had mistakenly tried to assassinate, mistakes his mistaken attempts to apologize as attempts to assassinate her and flees to a bizarre Islamic religious community whose members communicate with each other by means of semaphore flags, where she falls in love with an armless Near Eastern medical attache.
Insubstantial Country
An unpopular après-garde filmmaker either suffers a temporal lobe seizure and becomes mute or else is the victim of everyone else's delusion that his temporal lobe seizure has left him mute.
It Was a Great Marvel That He Was in the Father Without Knowing Him
A father, suffering from the delusion that his etymologically precocious son is pretending to be mute, poses as a 'professional conversationalist' in order to draw the boy out.
(Film Adaption of) Marat / Sade
Fictional 'interactive documentary’ on Boston stage production of Weiss’s 20th-century play within play, in which the documentary’s chemically impaired director repeatedly interupts the inmates’ dumbshow-capering and Marat and Sade’s dialogues to discourse incoherently on the implications of Brando’s Method Acting and Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty for North American filmed entertainment, irritating the actor who plays Marat to such an extent that he has a cerebral hemorrhage and collapses onstage well before Marat’s scripted death, whereupon the play’s nearsighted director, mistaking the actor who plays Sade for Incadenza, throws Sade into Marat’s medicinal bath and throttles him to death, whereupon the extra-dramatic figure of Death descends deus ex machina to bear Marat and Sade away, while Incadenza becomes ill all over the theater audience’s first row.
Infinite Jest
Incadenza’s last film, Incadenza’s death occurring during its post-production. Most archival authorities list as unfinished, unseen. Though Canadian archivist Tete-Beche lists the film as completed and privately distributed by P.Y.E.U. through posthumous provisions in the filmmaker’s will, all other comprehensive filmographies have the film either unfinished or UNRELEASED, its Master cartridge either destroyed or vaulted sui testator.
