◡◶▿ AMAT05 | Imperfections
...and imperfectionism. In filmmaking. | Advanced Amateury Week 05
Welcome back to ‘slightly-off film school.’ Welcome also to all the new faces. It’s getting crowded in here! Yet I can see all of your faces so clearly. So clearly!
Here’s a quick recap of last week’s lesson, Construction. We learned how:
Filmmaking conventions permit the filmmaker and the audience to share a safe and navigable movie experience. (Boo!)
But when the filmmaker gets the conventions wrong, the audience is exposed to the underlying mechanics of filmmaking and, by extension, the universe. (Hurray!)
A film constructed lovingly by incompetents can hit the sweet spot of “cheap and unique.”
The filmmaker who holds her own cack-handed construction skills in deep reverence may make pictures of strange and satisfying wonder.
And today? Today, we take the next logical step. Today, we’re on about imperfectionism:
🕵️♀️ What is an imperfectionist?
🤦 The trouble with imperfectionists.
👩🏫 So you’re an imperfectionist. Here’s how to indoctrinate your crew.
👩👧 Exercise: make a ‘cousin movie’ with that klutzy cinematic DNA.
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 forward this lesson to the imperfectionist in your life.
Imperfectionism
You can hear me deliver this lesson by scrolling up to the header and clicking Listen and/or the play ▸ button.
A perfectionist is only satisfied when she achieves perfection. An imperfectionist rejects imperfection after imperfection until she stumbles upon the right imperfection.
Care
The imperfectionist is not carefree:
Unsatisfying imperfections irk the imperfectionist.
The wrong imperfection is - to the imperfectionist - as irksome as a glaring perfection.
And at least as irksome as any imperfection is to a perfectionist.
It is not that the imperfectionist doesn’t care about anything; but only that she doesn’t care for perfection. In fact, the imperfectionist may try harder than the perfectionist to honour her ideals. Try harder, because:
Perfection is bold and clear.
The target is familiar, if perhaps unknown.
But imperfection is chaotic and subjective.
The target is an amorphous phantom that materialises only after it’s hit.
Look! Perfectionism and imperfectionism have something in common. Each is a kind of rule or target. A discipline.
However. Try both, and you will sense how perfectionism comes from outside while imperfectionism comes from within.
Perfectionism is a societal ill that infects the individual. Imperfectionism is a personal ill whose symptoms spread the deep (and therefore opaque) care that the person feels for whatever it is that they’re imperfecting.
Fuzzy Myths
The imperfectionist rejects imperfection after imperfection until she stumbles on the right imperfection.
But what of her family, friends, or colleagues? How are they to cope?
Life can be difficult, a situation troubling, when the way a person cares is opaque or irregular. How to know what boundaries to respect when particular slips, breakages, and violations are to be celebrated - and others, regretted?
You can see the awkwardness this could create on an imperfectionist’s film set.
Here is a solution: the imperfectionist filmmaker could categorise acceptable imperfections. Create a list or diagram against which her crew might check the imperfections that arise.
No. This is a valid and valuable technique for some.1 But for the true imperfectionist, this technique is too close to bounding imperfection. It counters the spirit of imperfectionism and leaks irksome imperfections. That is to say:
Listing “acceptable imperfections” transforms imperfections into a new type of perfection.
Categorising “acceptable imperfections” allows for imperfections that fit the acceptable categories but which aren’t right at all.
Instead, many imperfectionists have discovered that a form of fuzzy discipline does the trick: try constructing mythology instead of boundaries.
The mythology may concern:
The internal physical and narrative logic of the movie.
The (mythologised) story of how the crew and their resources happen to be together; how and why the production (and their universe) operates.
Nested myths: the mythology of the movie world shaped by the mythology of the production world that contains it, or vice versa.
Symbiotic myths: the mythologies of the movie and production worlds shaping each other, with no particular hierarchy.
The introduction of personal or umbrella mythologies as either a unique, nested, or symbiotic myth.
Mythologise a crew member (real or otherwise).
Mythologise the circumstances of the screening.
Mythologise the movie industry.
Mythologise the weather.
Naturally, these options are available to non-imperfectionists; but it happens that they suit the imperfectionist filmmaker very well.
People seem to care about myths. A crew that invests in an imperfectionist mythology “gets” when wrong is right and when it’s wrong. This crew cares about cultivating satisfying imperfections, even if it is a path strewn with doubt. The crew understands that the imperfectionist’s process is closer in nature to a culture than to a machine.
If the filmmakers attend to their collective mythology with care and discipline, the imperfections they cultivate will resonate internally and with the audience.
On the other hand, to be carefree is to eschew discipline. Anything goes! Could that work?
Exercise: Audit I
Please share your thoughts, queries, and exercises from this week’s lesson in the comments.
Arman Soldin
This section is a reflection on a true story about war and death. You might prefer to skip to the next header if you are dealing with trauma related to those things.
Arman Soldin was a kind, keen, open-hearted, and funny chap, and a brave and sensitive video journalist. He was killed in a rocket attack near Bakhmut last week, reporting on the Ukrainian struggle from the front line.
Arman was born in Sarajevo in 1991 and evacuated from the siege in the early days of the Bosnian War at just one year old. His personal feed of reports and moments from Ukraine threads back to that conflict and suggests how it shaped Arman’s sensibility. His videos recall Ademir Kenović's video diaries of the Sarajevo siege. Images of town life absurdly, necessarily pursued against a backdrop of burning vehicles and the thunder of shelling. Citizen soldiers and obstinate locals sharing moments of mundane terror and transcendent humour. Blood, water, electricity, vegetables.
“All I think of is when will everything grow,” 69-year-old Galyna, gardening in the din of shelling and generators, told him. “So I can admire these flowers. What else can I do during these bombardments other than admire what grows from the ground?”
That’s a reassuring way to look at it, in retrospect: that Arman’s humanity, his fine fellowship, grew from the rubble of Sarajevo. But he wasn’t a fucking flower, he was an excellent human being and nobody should have to live and die like Arman, his compatriots, and the people whose stories he broadcast from Ukraine.
I knew Arman briefly, studying in Sarajevo at the same time, at different schools. We played casual football and were involved or nearly-involved in a couple of productions together. None of the lovely stories that are emerging about him surprise me - he was the genuine article - but it’s good, if bittersweet, to learn more about his life. (I’m gutted I didn’t realise he was living in London. He was working the dream assignment of reporting on the Premier League for Canal+, but volunteered to go to Ukraine at the very start of the invasion.)
You can read more about Arman from people who knew him better here and here (in French - easy to auto-translate in Chrome if that’s not something you normally do). And I do urge you to look through his feed on Twitter. It is his work, and a terrible story, and nobody would have lived it and told it in quite the same way.
Fuck the war. Fuck war.
Next week
Next week we’ll learn about the difference between mistakes and errors, the value of mistakes, and I think - I could be wrong - a little bit about how Hollis Frampton approached the issue.
Class dismissed,
~Graeme Cole.
(Principal)
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E.g. The curious formalist. Or for the filmmaker who wishes to introduce imperfections into their work, but who doesn’t consider herself “an imperfectionist.” Nothing wrong with that!