◡◶▿ AMAT04 | Construction
🔨 What is in the shed? Plus: The thin, sticky thread between Roger Corman and Tori Kudo. | Advanced Amateury Week 04
Hello. This is week four of Advanced Amateury, a series of micro-essays on the practice of integrating worseness into your filmmaking practice.
In last week’s episode, we learned how:
The amateur and the professional gaze at each other’s tools rather than staring deeper into their own.
Super 8 filmmaking is cheap to start and expensive to continue - posing a real riddle for home movie makers.
Shooting at a lower frame rate conjures a range of bizarre economic and ontological effects, not to mention visual.
In demanding digital, Hollywood producers free their directors from the shackles of time. But the shackles of time are important! A filmmaker needs the shackles of time!
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.
In today’s lesson, we will discuss:
👷 The principles of constructing a film.
🍂 What happens when it falls down again.
❄️ The value of being cheap and unique.
🧱 No, no! The value of using cheap, mass-produced components!
I’m snotty. Please don’t come too close. Thankfully, these lessons are prepared long in advance, because I feel horrible. But please don’t come too close.
Framework
You can hear me deliver this lesson by scrolling up to the header and clicking Listen and/or the play ▸ button.
The audience expects a film to function according to a loose set of pre-established terms. Rules and conventions.
These rules empower the filmmaker to construct and pad out an identifiable, comprehendible movie. A dependable movie.
And the rules empower the audience to recognise, comprehend, and assess a movie. Assess whether it does a good job of being what they expect it to be. A quality movie.
So, what happens if a film attempts to match the audience’s formal expectations - not to mention the filmmaker’s - but fails? When a film:
attempts to abide by generic and formal conventions, but
skews them through incompetence or circumstance?
The audience considers this film amateurish. Not only amateurish, but also bad.
Never mind that those rules were amorphous in the first place. Never mind that imprecision is no synonym for badness!
Let’s not call such films bad.
Unintentionally expectation-bucking films intrigue audiences. Intrigue! Intrigue is the hint of a mysterious secret truth beneath our surface reality. The way things are really working. Disturbing!
The audience laughs, nervously, together (safely) at a film like this. They don’t know how to investigate and they expect danger.
A film like this hints at how movies are supposed (expected) to work. But it opens up to reveal how they actually work.
In a film like this, the conventions warp. And in warping, draw attention to themselves. A warped convention may function very usefully and transferably in its warped state. In this case, it becomes a new convention.
(Study it! Borrow it! Use it quickly, freshly, before it becomes expected of you!)
A “bad film” of this sort wears its skeleton on the outside. Is that why it is so scary to some people? These films are not bad; they are horrific. Hooray!
Cheap
Tori Kudo1 frames his mistake-laden music as “cheap but unique.” This description carries an important modifier: “unique.”
Cheapness, today, is first associated with scale and repetition. And rarely with uniqueness. A cheap, mass-produced thing should offer an acceptable level of quality or dependability. But there is no expectation of uniqueness.
Products are cheap because they are created quickly by machines and sold affordably at scale.
Services such as delivery are cheap because they are centralised and regulated (and exploitative).
And uniqueness, today, is associated with handcraft. And handcraft market prices. A unique product of quality is so meticulously constructed it would be impossible to sell it at a reasonable price.
So how does Kudo achieve both cheapness and uniqueness? He dispenses with quality. His music is not dependable.
Kudo invites:
non-musicians to perform and record his songs for fun; or
accomplished musicians to perform and record with no rehearsal.
“In front of me in my teens, it seemed there were two types of music, music for playing and music for listening,” recalls Tori Kudo. “It seemed both had never been mixed.” It is as though the act of building the factory and of making the product are one.
The value to the consumer is not found in the music’s dependability or its quality. Indeed, much of the value is deferred to the musicians.
This value filters down to the listener, who is touched and fascinated. Touched and fascinated by the process of triangulating the flaws and spirit of the performance with the honesty and melody of the song. Its uniqueness. Its undependability.
I think it’s all the kids’ parties I’ve been taking my daughter to. That’s where I got this cold.
Often, the music is unlistenable, or not-as-good. That aspect is not dependable either. But that’s okay.
“I am not a socialist designer for amateurs or shamateurs but just an egoist who is trying to realise own inspiration,” says Kudo. “It is just a economical reason why my music sounds shabby.”
But there is something else there. Right?
Components
It was raining and Roger Corman was sad that the castle he built for The Raven (1963) would soon be deconstructed. He asked a writer to write a new script featuring a castle. And while the writer wrote, Corman sneaked back to the castle and spent two days filming Boris Karloff just walking around. No script. Just picking up some bones. The flesh would come later.
During another rainy production, actor Allison Hayes fell off her horse and broke her arm. While they waited for a car to take her to hospital, Corman shot a reel of close-ups of Hayes looking left, right, up, down etc., her arm out of shot, to fill in the scenes she would miss.2 What a reel!
Corman is an engineer by education and a dreamer by disposition. A professional amateur. Stock footage is not supposed to be accumulated and deployed like this. Clunky components of this sort reveal the joins in the machine. The attuned audience can see right through them and are captivated.
A bold word or phrase indicates that an instruction of the same name and concept will appear later in this module.
The idea is taken to its extreme in the production of the UNIVERSAL EAR cinematic serial. Entire sessions are devoted to capturing, on Super 8 film, a library of the gestures, postures, and signature reactions of the recurring and guest characters.
Each time the same exact footage of a gesture is used and re-used within the serial, it gains a new meaning. And the feeling of the gesture or posture grows and mutates.
But today, the industrial actor back-up process is less clunky, and less romantic. Entire Hollywood sequels and unlikely stunts are generated using licensed back-up files of dead or uninsurable actors:
The “signature” of each actor-character’s moves is calculated from motion capture footage.
The “signature” is applied to a digital replication of the actor’s body.
It is used to reprogram and vary the character’s moves and tics each time they are needed rather than re-using archive footage over and over.
Spooky!
Only when the most experimental directors and fan film makers toy with these physical signatures and do something wrong and new with the pretend bodies will the results be as profound and truthful as just using the same authentic footage again and again and again.
Sometimes it is the unique product that seems soulless, don’t you think?
Faulty
When a filmmaker attempts to abide by the conventions but skews them through incompetence or circumstance, the audience considers the resulting film bad.
But who is at fault?
Not the conventions. Not the filmmaker. It is the expectations that are faulty.
The filmmaker who is aware of her shortcomings may realign those expectations. Realign them each time she wields the conventions. Define her margin of error as a zone of possibility. Calculate the impact of the occasional dropped component. And if it all comes crashing down, pick among the ruins for scraps.
Homework: Unstructured play
This week, in lieu of an exercise, I am freeing you for some unstructured play. Don’t forget to be rambunctious, and don’t forget to structure in a finish time - or you might never come back!
Let me know how it goes, and don’t get sand in your Canon.
Please share your thoughts, queries, and exercises from this week’s lesson in the comments.
I feel terrible. TERRIBLE!
Next week: imperfections and imperfectionism. I bet you know someone who should sign up!
Class dismissed.
~Graeme Cole.
(Principal)
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Corman suggests Hayes was agreeable to this; if you know different, please tell me.