◡◶▿ After amateury / before sound
Recapping our 12-week edu-romp through film and love. Announcing what comes next. Plus: Manel Raga Raga workshop in Ulldecona!
Hello, loyal students.
Thank you for sitting - reclining - through UPV’s 12-week Advanced Amateury module.
It’s all over for now. We’ll return to the subject later. And - as you’ve probably intuited - the principles discussed thread through much of what the school teaches about filmmaking, be it image-making, character deconstruction, or catering.
Towards the end of the present email, you’ll find a lesson-by-lesson breakdown of what we learned. Scan through! Revisit and revise! Bathe in the nostalgia and sweet body aroma of those 12 lost weeks in a crowded seminar hall!
🌱 And please consider which friend, colleague, or network might appreciate one sub-topic or another. Share the link with a thought or a nod. It is how UPV grows! 🌱
What happens next? (Sound, gardens, mutants)
We (the school) (me) have discussed what to do with these awkward summer weeks ahead. I’ll hardly have the time to deliver a full program of thought. You’re hardly going to be looking at your phone or other learning device on the beach.
The faculty (me) have found a solution: UPV will deliver an abridged version of a module called Something About Sound Design, Gardening & Mutants (SOME).
A single pocket essay each week with limited trimmings and few, if any, exercises.
Some of you are familiar with this module from our lecture at Slow Film Festival in 2020. Receiving excerpts in written form will enable you to fill some gaps in your notes and maybe create some new gaps. I will include one or two brand-new micro-essays to freshen up the module and give you something to talk about at breakfast.
Plus, we’ll put you all on a special summer school scholarship. None of you need pay a penny. But please make like Haley Joel Osment and “pay it forward” by forwarding this notice and subsequent sound-wrangling classes to your friends and listeners.
It starts next Monday.
Occurrences in the “thoughtful filmmaking” universe
Ok. You’ve nearly reached that recap I mentioned! But first, I’ll draw your attention to a couple of occurrences in the “thoughtful filmmaking” universe.
🐔 My friend and colleague Manel Raga Raga will present a workshop on nurturing the “unique, almost secret relationship between the director and reality” at the School for Art and Culture in Ulldecona. Next week!
He will show films and also you will make films. You will need your own camera but of course, a camera-phone will suffice. I believe the workshop will be presented in Catalan.
Raga is an artist of extraordinary sensitivity. He is noted for his uncanny ability to translate the undercurrents of our physical and spiritual environment into streams of sound, image, and story. He is perhaps best known for his film La Gallina. I studied and worked with him under Béla Tarr in Sarajevo, where he was considered “a natural” - mutual friends have since assured me that Raga’s pedagogic practice is every bit as wonderful as his filmmaking.
🐌 Elsewhere, (erstwhile) ‘slow cinema’ scholar Nadin Mai is making her online archive available to access for free - if you email her to arrange an account for you. (Perhaps you might also offer some form of payment, or buy one of her books, by way of acknowledging her time and thought.)
🏖️ Do join me in the comments throughout the following weeks of summer sound school. I’ll check in between attending to the UPV faculty creche and a trip to Helsinki, to work as cinematographer on somebody else’s film for the first time. On Super 8, of course. What could go wrong?
Let me know in the comments.
~Graeme Cole.
(Principal)
Index: Advanced Amateury
How to be better at being worse: clumsy loving in the age of competent content
Bold title links lead to the full article. Bullet pointed links are anchored to the corresponding instruction within the article.
Introduction (to beginnerism) | UPV AMAT01
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.
