◡◶▿ AMAT01 | Beginnerism
❤️🩹 Covering up the cracks in reality is a waste of valuable energy. Plus: Béla Tarr's origin story | Advanced Amateury Week 01
Please make yourself comfortable.
Welcome to Advanced Amateury: Clumsy Loving in the Age of Competent Content, a filmmaking module from Unfound Peoples Videotechnic.
A module about filmmaking, yes - but most of the ideas covered are transferable out from filmmaking and into your non-film art practice, day job, romantic situation, court case, etc.
This is the first week. What better moment to introduce the topic? Today we will discuss:
😨 The awful thing that (many) pros and amateurs have in common.
🤔 The amateur as the not-something-else.
📦 The free gift that comes with amateurism.
⚒️ An exercise in reverse-engineering Hollywood for an audience of friends and pets.
Worried about missing a class? Don’t be. It’s okay to read these lessons out of order. Each functions independently. They are sent in a sensible sequence but hardly reliant on it.
Please forward this lesson to someone you know will appreciate it.
Introduction: To Be Crap
You can hear me deliver this lesson by scrolling up to the header and clicking Listen and/or the play ▸ button.
It’s a slick century1. Everybody’s producing ‘content.’ Pros and amateurs fetishise clean edges and stock affectations. The language of authenticity has been shrink-wrapped, digitised, and delivered by 3D fax machine.
Amateurism is often defined as a lack of professionalism. But even the non-professional defaults to professionalised tendencies. Amateurism may be defined by its lack of infrastructure. But way out beyond the movie industry, the artist-filmmaker is tempted to toil towards the freshly-showered images of Hollywood and Indiewood.
Couldn’t we reveal more by channelling our inner shitness? Aren’t we wasting valuable energy trying to cover up the cracks in our reality? The misalignments in our imagination?
To be crap requires the power to resist. In these conditions, it takes courage to allow your ineptitude to show. But might the filmmaker go further and cultivate a practice of worse-ness? Embrace the messy principles of love and humility over profit (of whatever kind) and vanity?
Not to fake it/slum it. But to advance (or perhaps settle in to) a working appreciation of all that is:
vulnerable
naive
inept
broken
broke
poor
wrong
inconsistent
incoherent, and
bad taste
about your practice, your crew, your resources, and your environment.
What tools are available to the sincere amateur-filmmaker? Or more precisely, how can this figure make a tool of anything and everything? What techniques are available for drawing out the messy business of love, tenderness, and symbiosis in filmmaking?
What Is(n’t) An Amateur?
The amateur tends to be identified by what they aren’t. (Not what they are.) Or what they don’t have. (Not what they have.)
They are not identified by what they do. They are identified by what they maybe might do.
The amateur may be accused of being an amateur because they are not:
Trained, or
Professional, or
Profitable, for instance.
They might not be:
Organised.
Funded.
Included.
The definition of the amateur as somebody who isn’t somebody else creates a condition of doubt.
Doubt, in its broader form, is the life force of the movies (a juddering, chaotic medium by virtue of its apparatus and scope).
Doubt lends a film life, death, suspense, humour (humility), infinitude. Doubt speaks to the audience, and the audience responds with doubt. Doubt is the alien cement in the mirror universe constructed by the filmmaker.
An amateur could be a home movie maker, a cine club regular, or a corporate video professional, tarred with complaints about their lack of training, organisation, or confidence. “You amateur!”
The filmmaker who accepts this title and this definition is cast into that condition of doubt, a swamp of something-elseness.
What a gift!
Exercise: Unmake
Please share your thoughts, queries, and exercises from this week’s lesson in the comments.
“Thoughts are great, but…”
“…they also need a form of some kind.”
Thank you for attending. Before you go, I’d like to direct you towards some home viewing: a recently uploaded interview with Béla Tarr, linked above.
I studied with Mr. Tarr for two years in Sarajevo, and, despite the apparent gulf between his cinema and some of the dafter teachings in the UPV corpus, his influence runs through them. Sorry, Béla!
I believe he is satisfied with this interview, and it illuminates his background (with the usual caveats for the caprice of memory and the importance of mythmaking). Now, I am the big principal and you are the student, and I’m telling you - as he might say - this is important stuff.
If you’re not familiar with Mr. Tarr’s work, you might want to familiarise yourself first. I suggest starting with Damnation (1987). Or, if you are on a long-haul flight and want to impress your air steward, Sátántangó (1994). See where you go from there.
Next week we’ll learn about standards: why everyone from your driving instructor to your smart speaker tells you to “do your best,” what they really mean, and why they’re wrong. And what you should do instead.
Class dismissed!
~Graeme Cole.
(Principal)
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This sentence was written in the 21st century.