◡◶▿ AMAT02 | Standards
Worried your film is terrible? Here's how to make it explode. Plus: Friedl Kubelka Film School in Lisbon | Advanced Amateury Week 02
Welcome back. Do you remember last week’s lesson? We learned that:
Filmmakers - including those simply trying to video a robin on their fence - struggle to resist aping that Hollywood sheen.
Meanwhile, their so-called inadequacies harbour complex truths.
The amateur is often defined by what they aren’t.
This not-something-elseness is the gateway to a swamp of doubt that’s thick with cinematic nutrients.
In today’s lesson, we will discuss:
🌊 The hidden force that drives filmmakers, disastrously, towards ‘better.’
🛥️ Why “your best” isn’t just not good enough, but is also a vessel for society’s ills.
⛵ How wobbling wrongly can be so right.
🥊 Exercise: A bespoke pair of gloves for every colleague.
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.
Please put your calculators away.
The Quality Imperative
You can hear me deliver this lesson by scrolling up to the header and clicking Listen and/or the play ▸ button.
“The quality imperative” is a shorthand term for a complex force. That complex force? The collective aspiration towards neatness, common standards of “quality,” and technical elitism.
Let’s put it another way. The “quality imperative” refers to the
idolisation of perfection and
positioning of ineptitude as a ‘lack’ and
promotion of competence as ‘normal’
by pervasive cultural forces.
Maybe you like that sort of thing!
Seems arbitrary, though. That everyone should be pushing in that direction for that outcome.
Filmmakers experience the quality imperative as inner and outer pressure to imbue their movies with an aura of quality. This aura of quality usually has more to do with marketing or vanity than the film itself.
What quality should the performances in a particular film be? The sets? The plot? The image? Should you start from the bottom and work your way up? Start with perfection and chip away what’s irrelevant? Or jump in the middle and paddle around the ‘soup of capability’?
The quality imperative would have us ignore these important questions.
“Your Best”
“Your cutting bench should encourage you to do your best!” demands Tony Rose, unreasonably, in LET’S MAKE MOVIES. (This was before the advent of smart hardware; before we could have an actual conversation with our tools). Shut up, cutting bench!
There’s nothing wrong with trying hard. But to a culture that subscribes to the quality imperative↑, this “your best” is a generic best that assumes professionalized ideals of neatness, efficiency, and power.
A bold word or phrase indicates that an instruction of the same name and concept exists elsewhere in this module. An arrow↑↓ indicates that the referenced instruction can be found in the present lesson.
This is a “your best” you first hear in childhood. Your granddad, your maths teacher, your driving instructor, all repeat what they were told when young. This is a best of “run as fast as you can,” “colour between the lines,” and “speak in a clear, bold voice.”
And now, they want you to keep a clear, clean cutting bench to encourage clear, clean thinking and doing. A “your best” without teacup rings or notes on torn envelopes or the personal detritus you squeeze into a drawer when you sense company approaching.
What does that leave you with, besides a clean bench?
Resonant Crapness
You, the filmmaker, may feel burdened by the expectation that you should strive towards your “your best”↑. And deflated upon discovering that “your best” is not really good enough.
Instead, try vibrating.
Ever seen an opera singer hold that high note until the champagne glasses around them shatter?
Spectacular!
Is the sound “doing its best”? Is the glass? No. They’re just being themselves, intensely.
Every object has a resonant frequency. This resonant frequency is the tone pitch at which the particles in the object begin to wobble. When an object hears a sound at a pitch that matches its resonant frequency, and the force is sufficient, the object will vibrate with enough intensity to shake itself apart. It happens all the time.
Perhaps you don’t want your subject matter or your crew to explode. But every facet of your movie has a resonant crapness that an unattuned filmmaker might overlook or ignore.
Not you!
The attuned filmmaker thinks for that inadequate prop object at its resonant crapness: shows how it behaves; traces its desperate roots; lets its crapness interact with that of your film’s other elements.
The attuned filmmaker identifies what’s wrong about the lighting you’re stuck with and magnifies its waveform of wrongness to make it ring out.
Rather than aim for “your best,” the filmmaker (and, by extension, your cast and crew) might seek to vibrate as closely as possible to your respective and collective:
abilities,
values,
ideas,
humour,
imagination,
memory,
luck,
habits,
appetite,
tics,
flaws,
friends,
footwear,
tempo,
environment, and
resources.
And not - for example - aim for a display of your noblest values, most talented friends, wildest ideas, and keenest efforts to make a cardboard box look “a million bucks.”
A standard not of clean, smug bests but of wildly explosive worsts.
Exercise: Cotton gloves
Please share your thoughts, queries, and exercises from this week’s lesson in the comments.
The Friedl Kubelka School @ IndieLisboa
IndieLisboa is my favourite film festival1. And it starts this weekend!
I won’t be there. But our fierce rivals from the Friedl Kubelka School for Independent Film will be. And to rub salt into the wound, they’re delivering a program of school work, called Analog Imagination, and it sounds good.
Perhaps these films are awful! I’ve not seen them. Perhaps you’ll go along? That’s fine. Please let us know if you make it to the festival. An email or a comment will be fine.
Next week we’ll look at filmmakers looking jealously at other filmmaker’s apparatus. And listen to the little voice in your kit bag. Whisper it to someone who’ll smile:
Class dismissed.
~Graeme Cole.
(Principal)
🐦 Twitter | 📸 Instagram | 🎞️ Letterboxd | 🌐 Website
Equal with Sarajevo Film Festival. And Slow Film Festival.