◡◶▿ ROTT07 | Wrappers
🍫 The stuffy world between your movie's nested formats. Plus: the vibrating (rear, middle) seats of Finality Of Dusk (!) | Rotting the Image Week 07
📹 Unfound Peoples Videotechnic | Cloud-based filmmaking thought. ☁️
Hello students. It’s week seven of Rotting the Image: The Odour of a Film’s Look. Remember last week? We learned how:
The filmmaker chooses fabrics for every element of her movie: “recording material, light, person, thing, place,” etc.
These fabrics should be sturdy enough for the job, and sensitive enough to express whatever is to be expressed.
Inevitably, such fabrics suffer from bobbles and tears.
These abrasions become “interdiegetic ruptures,” allowing improbable flows of feeling, meaning, and other matter between the world of the movie and that of the audience.
In today’s lesson, we will delve beneath the movie’s outer packaging and examine its wrapper. We’ll find out:
🍫 What a movie’s wrapper is and why it smells like that.
🎁 Why watching a movie is like playing pass the parcel - with your EYES!
🧥 Who might cloak your movie in their own wrapper given half a chance, and how to prepare for that.
👻 How your movie develops a curious funk between the sheets.
Missed a week? Joined late? Don’t worry about reading these lessons out of order. Each functions independently. They are sent in a sensible sequence but hardly reliant on it.
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The wrapper
You can hear me deliver this lesson by scrolling up to the header and clicking Listen and/or the play ▸ button.
Among digital filmmakers, the “video wrapper” is another name for the “container” of a digital video file. Its virtual shell.
We are told that .mov, .avi, and .3gp are common examples of these “wrappers” or “containers.” And we are told that a wrapper contains “data” encoded in a particular language, called a “codec.” Okay!
But you might instead consider a broader use of this word: wrapper. You might consider a movie’s wrapper(s) to be the medium that holds the sound and images at the point of presentation. Regardless of whether this medium, this wrapper, is even digital at all.
Nothing too technical. Just a wrapper, like you might find outside any chocolate bar. A separate material from the contents but an intrinsic part of the experience. Only, in this instance, the wrapper might be:
VHS
Super-8 film
MP4
JPEG-2000
Paper flipbook
Your movie’s end format is a wrapper. But this wrapper probably contains other wrappers. For example, 35mm transferred to AVI is a movie in a 35mm wrapper, all wrapped up in an AVI.
Your audience may play a solo game of ‘pass the parcel’ with such a layered wrapping structure. They may peel back each wrapper with their eyes and/or minds. (And whatever else they watch a movie with.) Each pocket between nested wrappers has its own rotting odour.
Some of these wrappers may be very fancy. But they all leak. They mutually contaminate. And none is impervious to the rots of time.
A bold word or phrase indicates that an instruction of the same name and concept appears elsewhere in this module.
Wrapper vs. packaging
A movie’s wrapper is distinct from its packaging.
The packaging is the literal (or virtual) box in which the movie is stored and delivered. A tin can or a plastic box or a little picture of a folder.
The wrapper is the medium that holds the sound and images at the point of presentation. VHS, Super-8 film, MP4. JPEG-2000!
The audience (or the projectionist) discards the packaging, although its feeling lingers. But the audience holds the wrapper in their eyes as they devour the movie. (Imagine if the audience could discard the wrapper part-way through! The movie-watching experience would quickly become an unmanageable mess.)
The filmmaker considers the packaging as a part of the overall movie experience. The packaging alters the audience’s sense of the movie’s materiality (its weight, its presence, its thingness).
But the filmmaker considers the wrapper(s) to be an integral part of the image surface itself. The wrapper is an active element of the image surface. It is often considered to be neutral, utilitarian. But a movie’s wrapper affects the flavour and consistency of the image volume beyond.
Implications of the wrapper
A movie’s wrapper is the medium that holds the sound and images at the point of presentation. For example: tape, 35 mm, cathode-ray, any particular digital movie file. Usually, it takes several nested wrappers to hold a movie securely.
The filmmaker may have less control over the choice of outer wrappers for her movie. These wrappers may be chosen by other parties. Producers, proprietors, pirates. Chosen to suit the circumstances1 in which the movie will be consumed.
The filmmaker may have less control over the choice of outer wrappers for her movie. But if anything, the filmmaker might give these wrappers even greater thought than those wrappers over which she has direct control. She prepares for wrappers that may contradict her intentions. The filmmaker creates pockets of odour between wrappers that will endure the adding of industrial wrapping or crude home formats.
The viewer may sense the conventional implication of some of the wrappers. ‘Conventional implication’ means ‘what you are usually expected to think when a filmmaker uses a certain technique or format.’
For example, wobbly video tape implies “1980s” or “home video” or “pirate copy” or “voyeur.” The implication may be that the movie is a “home video.” Or just that “home video” is a theme or association that the filmmaker would like the audience to notice.
Another viewer may have a more intuitive response.
For example, wobbly video tape, somewhere in the mix, might indicate “character with wobbly feelings.” Or “dubious memory.” Or “dying world” or “fragile social structure.”
Or the use of video tape, or whatever type of wrapper, might mean something less clearly defined. A mush. A feeling. A weight.
How can the filmmaker protect this feeling from the busy, wrap-wielding hands of producers, proprietors, pirates? How can she prepare for the likelihood that the producers, proprietors, and pirates will add feelings of their own?
?
Time and the wrapper
A movie’s wrapper is an integral element of its image surface. The material on which the images are recorded is one such wrapper. It is most likely enveloped by other wrappers along its way to the screen.
The filmmaker works with and on the material of the wrapper(s) to highlight particular elements of the image volume beyond. To highlight characteristics of the plot, location, breath, theme, setting, sounds. And characteristics of the movie’s odour. Indeed, the wrapper both preserves and modulates the odour of a movie’s look.
Both preserves and modulates the odour a movie’s look?
Like any wrapper, a movie’s wrapper seals its contents into its own quasi-hermetic timezone. ‘Quasi-hermetic timezone’ means a sealed timezone that seems to be - but is not quite - independent of time outside. The time inside the wrapper is metered to external time (usually at a much slower rate). And external time inevitably contaminates time inside the wrapper.
Just like a packet of crisps.
And, just as an odour hangs, stales, or rots in a food packet, your movie’s odour will breathe and mutate within its various wrappers.
What might happen if the filmmaker works against the material of their movie’s wrapper(s)?
A food wrapper is designed to counter the natural tendencies of its contents. Likewise, the filmmaker might select a wrapper that counterpoints the themes of her movie.
She might wrap:
Eternal themes in ephemeral forms.
Internal themes in transparent bodies.
Topical themes in obsolete media.
That’ll keep the audience on their toes!
Please share your thoughts, queries, and exercises from this week’s lesson in the comments.
Sound through the seat
I had the honour of beaming in on filmmaker David Bickley and his class of sound designers in Cork, Ireland last week. We chatted about the sonic atmosphere of movies. How filmmakers and sound designers and everyone else can alter the feeling of a film through the materiality of the soundscaping process.
The same day, but all too late, I read an article that relocated this materiality to the very seat in which the audience sits. (I found the article by way of
). The filmmakers of Finality of Dusk2 (Sound designer: Michelle Irving, 2023) turned up the bass to amplify the vibrations to “not only bridge the hearing world and the Deaf world but also to allow deaf moviegoers to feel the film,” according to the Hollywood Reporter.The effect “can be felt more intensely if you aim to sit in the middle to the back rows inside a movie theater,” says the movie’s writer, Katarina Ziervogel.
There’s your materiality for you! There’s your interdiegetic rumble!
Okay, enough’s enough. Please share this email or its web link with carefully chosen associates.
Next week, we’ll learn how to go on when your format can’t take it anymore.
Class dismissed!
~Graeme Cole.
(Principal)
Which circumstances? Technical, economic, atmospheric, cultural, judicial.
Never mind that this could be the title of a Donald Kaufman movie.