Advanced Amateury
How to be better at being worse: clumsy loving in the age of competent content.
Written by for Unfound Peoples Videotechnic.
A 12-part program containing:
45 micro-essays and
nine exercises
on the subject of amateurism as a technique in filmmaking, art, and life.
Evergreen, esoteric knowledge, originally delivered in the spring of 2023.
Read in any order.
Index
Underlined links lead to anchorpoints - each one a micro-essay or exercise - within the containing lesson.
To be crap | The awful thing that (many) pros and amateurs have in common.
What is(n’t) an amateur? | The amateur as the not-something-else.
The Quality Imperative | The hidden force that drives filmmakers, disastrously, towards ‘better.’
“Your Best” | Why “your best” isn’t just not good enough, but is also a vessel for society’s ills.
Resonant Crapness | How wobbling wrongly can be so right.
Technical bandwidth | Kit jealousy between the amateur and the pro.
Exploiting the so-called limits | How the amateur and pro alike are restricted in their choice of equipment.
Consumption | The amateur’s equipment is often characterised as ‘consumer-end,’ even if the user produces more than she consumes.
Footage | How the “Super 8 parent” can compress their child.
Levering down | An example of how exploiting the limits of your gear can transform the universe inside and outside of your movie.
Framework | The principles of constructing a film.
Cheap | The value of being cheap and unique.
Components | The value of using cheap, mass-produced components.
Faulty | What to do when the construction falls down again.
Imperfectionism | What is an imperfectionist?
Care | The imperfectionist and discipline: an unlikely marriage.
Fuzzy myths | So you’re an imperfectionist. Here’s how to indoctrinate your crew.
Error or mistake | Mistakes are your fault. Errors are your universe’s fault.
Mistakes value | Your mistakes are jam-packed with nutritious value - and it’s all free.
Mistakeism | The mistakeist strategises around the inevitability of mistakes and may generate new ones - again, at no extra expense to the producer.
Slipstream mistakeism | How a mistake, followed to its (il)logical conclusion, can re-map your entire process and creative outcome.
Error | Error as a trapdoor in the system.
Systemic error | How multiple errors can operate together as a critique of the system of your choice (body, society, universe, local council etc.)
An error | The singular error as a magic key to the underlying substructure of your movie, crew, life etc.
System failure | “System failure” is for our epoch what “doomed expedition” was for the Victorians - a daft and eloquent metaphor for the contemporary human condition.
Hard error | Try hard, fail hard (good hard).
Fault | Don’t mistake an accident for a mistake: mistakes cause accidents.
Misfortune | To remove blame from a film set, try surrendering to misfortune. Could be good.
Hollis Frampton’s misfortune | Hollis Frampton’s categorisation and fabrication of the six filmmaking misfortune types.
Clumsy | In filmmaking, clumsiness is a kind of handwriting - and often, there are several klutzes holding the pen at once.
Shabby pop | In music, imperfection means authenticity, while…
Patches | … in movies, imperfections reveal the underlying inauthenticity of the filmmaking process.
The realistical fallacy | A better world is possible, in which authentic clumsiness and shabbiness are broadly appreciated as legitimate and potent cinematic residues.
Lens flare | Analysing the celestial trouser patch.
Squirrel | The home moviemaking mistake that can shunt your family onto separate planes of existence.
What isn’t the home movie? | The “modest sandwich” definition of home moviemaking.
A hand-me-down-film | Kira Muratova’s hand-me-down break-up movie.
The home movie movie house | A thought experiment about your neighbour’s Nokia.
Amateur professionals | The amateur filmmaker who “goes at it” with the discipline of the seasoned professional.
Professional amateurs | The professional filmmaker who “goes at it” with the untamed tenderness of the amateur.
The occasional | The pootler who is lost somewhere between the previous two archetypes.
A loving dog | How the amateur might recalibrate Dziga Vertov’s “mechanical eye.”
Choosing love | Why the amateur is not a negative imprint of the professional, but an original agent of compulsion and spirit.
Carefree | What Maya Deren’s weird beef with weird burglars teaches us about love.
Oh no! | The toddler technique that defies mediaphysics.
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