◡◶▿A new term at idiot's film school
& everyone's on a scholarship.
Dear Students, Alumni, Faculty, and Trespassers,
There is no new instruction in this week’s newsletter - because education is about to rain down upon you.
A new curriculum begins next Monday.
Unfound Peoples Videotechnic will release regular (weekly), structured filmmaking thought into the inbox wilds. Order! Regularity! This is a first.
The program is called Advanced Amateury: Clumsy Loving in the Age of Competent Content, and will last around two months. And the cost is nought, as everyone’s on a scholarship.
The benefits to you, the scholar, are manifold.
Elite professionals will benefit from a skewed look at how to reintegrate play, surprise, and ineptitude into their work.
Amateurs and new filmmakers will learn to value and hold onto their clumsy naivety rather than rushing past to the realm of clinical eloquence and precision.
Creatives in other fields, and those who aren’t creative at all, will find a wealth of transferable skills - many of them considered ‘too stupid’ to be covered by regular training gurus.
The lessons are short.
Perhaps you would like to advise the (eternal) film students in your life of this opportune moment to subscribe?
Perhaps not. There is no true education without dissent.
Instruction, aphorism, koan, or exercise. (Or absence).
Each Monday, you’ll receive an email of curated extracts from the UPV knowledge vaults.
Obviously, I hope for you to open and read each lesson as it drops into your inbox1. I will be a very hurt school principal if you don’t. But it is not compulsory.
Each set of extracts is curated to provoke insight and inspiration on a particular theme or aspect of amateur-leaning filmmaking. Each extract takes the form of instruction, aphorism, koan, or exercise.
Don’t worry about reading the emails out of order if you neglect to open one before the next appears. Each email functions independently. They are sent in a sensible sequence but hardly reliant on it. Encounter! Flip back! Cross-refer! Or march on regardless, assured in the knowledge there are precious air pockets in your understanding!
However, I would love to know what you were doing when you skipped class. Love? Drugs? Independent thought? Reading somebody else’s newsletter? Let us know all about it in the comments. You can find the comments for each email by clicking through to its web version.
Your responsibilities
With each obligatory scholarship come certain unwritten responsibilities. Because they are unwritten, I thought I should summarise them here.
Feedback. This method of program delivery is in development. It would help to know if you don’t find the content and structure helpful or interesting, or if you find reading and re-reading every last word a slog. Please reply to the weekly email if you think it should have been shorter, longer, better, etc.
Publicity node. Forwarding these emails to friends and colleagues; posting the link on websites; talking loudly about the program in rival film school bars: these are very valuable ways that you can support my work and the teetering infrastructure of Unfound Peoples Videotechnic.
Sharing. Found a text or object that might interest the UPV cohort? Made a movie that resonates with the UPV ethos? Created something that drew inspiration, no matter how diluted, from the UPV program? Pop it in the weekly comments or reply to me, and perhaps we’ll put it to the group.
Stationery
Thanks for opening. Bonus credits for running your eyes down the thing. Now go and buy some lovely stationery.
~Graeme Cole.
(Principal)
Make sure to receive these micro-essays in your inbox every Monday:
End-of-class Handout: A Lateral Reading List
Archiving | The end times cinema with [only] 3,000 films (
)Cinephilia | “possibly the first "top 100" movies list ever, 1947-1948” (h/t
)Distribution | “the V&A museum has shipped a huge chunk of the brutalist housing estate to Italy.”
Editing | “Burstiness”
Exhibition | Zen for Film (
)Health & Safety | M*A*S*H on gasoline safety
Writing | “failure is the body of a writer's life”
🎥 “I made ten goddam Westerns and I can't even tie a noose.”
🐦 Twitter | 📸 Instagram | 🎞️ Letterboxd | 🌐 Website
I have no idea how well-known or widely used the Pocket app is. But I recommend it if you don’t yet know/use it.
I find Pocket very useful for saving articles that cross my path to read “on the go” or “in the bed” later on. You can also use it to save emails if the email has a web version to click through to (as this one does - just scroll to the very top right and click “online.”)
Obviously, I hope for you to read each lesson as it drops into your inbox. But if you’re worried you’ll lose it in your overloaded inbox, open and Pocket it right away. Of course, you might lose it in your overloaded Pocket app instead. However, articles in the app tend to get prioritised through a process of “survival of the most enticing.”
It is said that Matter is also good for this sort of thing. Especially if you subscribe to newsletters. Perfect!