◡◶▿ AMAT07 | Error
"System failure" is the "doomed expedition" of our epoch. Here's why to lead your film crew on a doomed expedition. Plus: Kitano/Scorsese/wrong. | Advanced Amateury Week 07
Hello! Here’s our seventh batch of micro-essays on the value of introducing bad techniques into your artistic practice. Right now, we’re knee-deep in imperfections. Remember last week - Mistakeism? We learned:
The difference between a mistake (it’s personal) and an error (it’s the damn system).
How it takes a specially trained eye to recognise the value in a mistake or mistakes.
The ways in which the ‘mistakeist’ cultivates and nurtures slips and bloopers.
How a mistake, followed to its (il)logical conclusion, can re-map your entire process and creative outcome.
In this lesson, across five truly tiny essays, we will discuss:
🕳️ Error as a trapdoor in the system.
🏭 How multiple errors can operate together as a critique of the system of your choice (body, society, universe, local council etc.)
🗝️ The singular error as a magic key to the underlying substructure of your movie, crew, life etc.
🎆 Takeshi Kitano telling Martin Scorsese about his own advanced amateury techniques.
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.
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The lesson starts after this long horizontal line. Let’s go!
Error
You can hear me deliver this lesson by scrolling up to the header and clicking Listen and/or the play ▸ button.
A mistake is a lapse, a slip. But an error is a hitch: a catch, a bobble, a hobble. An error is:
Nothing where there should be something, or
something where there should be nothing, or
the wrong thing occurring in the right place for an unintended outcome.
An error is a discrepancy; a wrongness committed for want of a rightness. A bug in the machine.1 The word “discrepancy” comes from a Latin word for discord. An error, therefore, is a bum note sounded by a player piano. (A concert pianist who fluffs a note is making a mistake.)
Error tends to be structural or systemic. An error may occur due to:
A lack of education or experience
or money or humour.
A miscommunication (between people or machines or people and machines [including the universe and its physical forces]).
A mismatch of strengths or weaknesses across the crew.
Or a technical issue in the machinery,
for example.
The filmmaker may nurture errors and allow them to prevail across a work. To prevail as a structural, decorative, or thematic thread through the work. The intentional inclusion of errors is not so different from the practice of mistakeism in this way.2 The difference is in the cause, meaning, and purpose of a mistake vs. that of an error. And its position and function within the film’s substructure.
The errors in a work where error is prevalent share a collective meaning. The meaning of “all those errors.” But an error↓ on its own is its own damp universe. Its own leaky fissure.
A bold word or phrase indicates that an instruction of the same name and concept will appear later in this module.
Systemic error
The filmmaker may nurture errors and allow them to prevail as a structural, decorative, or thematic element across her movie.
The intentional inclusion of errors is not so different from the practice of mistakeism in this way. But, while mistakes are organic and subjective in nature, errors are systemic and objective.
The filmmaker who nurtures or permits errors has a more or less expressible reason or reasons for using errors in this way. But she needn’t explain why all those errors are there. The film itself probably explains or conjures an impression of why “all those errors are there.”
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Maybe the essence behind the errors she chose is infuriating or hilarious to her. An abundance of errors, you might say, is an implicit critique of the “system.” What is this system? It may include any of the following:
The human body.
The body of this particular human.
The human personality.
The personality of this particular human.
The above as it applies to the full spectrum of the actor-character as person.
Society and all that.
The society (and other mechanical systems) imagined in this particular movie.
The art form.
The industry. Industry.
The text. The pretext.
The universe.
Perception.
Feeling.
Or, the abundance of errors in her work could be an implicit critique of the concept of systems in general.
An error
The errors in a film with lots of errors share a collective meaning. But each individual error is its own damp universe. Its own leaky fissure.
A fissure through which the audience may grasp a feeling of the abyss between:
The failed gesture’s ideal operation and
its faulty execution.
It is a blind grasp. The cinema audience grasps this feeling without ever gaining full access to the prehistory and meaning of the error. The error is discrete and finite. A sealed event. But the implications are boundless. The audience can only begin to measure the abyss and sniff at its aura.
And from there, the audience may attempt to reverse-engineer a flawed understanding of:
the universe in which the error is an error.
the universe within the error.
System failure
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A substantial technical, narrative, or material error shifts a whole film into malfunction status. A system failure. The audience, and the filmmaker, (and her mother), question the implications of this error for the rest of the film. Whether the film will “make it,” and - if so - what will be the outcome.
Great!
System failure may be the “doomed expedition” of our epoch. (This paragraph was written in the spring of 2023). In other words, a dramatic and vital working metaphor for the singular and collective human effort, using a science-fiction of the present.
Perhaps that’s why the filmmaker who includes errors in her work includes errors in her work!
Hard error
Says Tori Kudo, ‘King of Error’ and messy band leader: “Error itself can not be a purpose. There is nothing better than not to error.” He’s right! There’s more: “We always try hard to play well, and it is legitimate.”
This is why the errorist filmmaker doesn’t create error; she tolerates errors and nurtures them. And the harder she tries to play well, the harder she drives the machine, the harder her errors hit.
Exercise: System error
Please share your thoughts, queries, and exercises from this week’s lesson in the comments.
Takeshi Kitano gets it wrong
Here’s Martin Scorsese interviewing Takeshi Kitano in 1996. Although, I think Kitano is referring to mistakes rather than errors.
Are you inspired by cinema of the past?
“I can honestly say, that I am not the type, that is inspired by other filmmakers. I learn instead by errors made in my past works.”
What pushes you to make films?
“I consider films to be like toys. I find nothing more pleasurable than making a film.”
If there was a moment, even a revelry, that defines cinema for you, what would it be?
“Cinema is an inexplicable enigma or an insoluble enigma. I create the enigma that the public can resolve in the manner it chooses.”
Seems relevant.
Voter fraud at the UPV
😲 Perhaps you remember that last week I ran a poll about whether you’d prefer this email to be shorter or longer or just the same. Well, I think there has been some very lovely voter fraud going on, because the first two options came out equal, with the majority calling it “just right.” Nobody lost. So nice! This steady boat situation has given me the balance to think about how to structure the next couple of terms.
📱 Some Like It Short 8 is a smartphone film festival in a real place in Prague. They’ve just extended the submission deadline to the 4th of June (despite what the website says). I don’t have first-hand experience of the festival. But I do have first-hand experience of its proprietor. I don’t know if the program will be good, but I’m fairly certain it will be ‘a good time.’ So you could apply to that.
Next week: prepare to fail - prepare to blame. Plus, that Hollis Frampton content I’ve been teasing.
Class dismissed!
~Graeme Cole.
(Principal)
From the point of view of the bug, this is a mistake rather than an error.
Indeed, you needn’t consider mistakeism and “errorism” to be separate techniques. (But you can if you like!) Mistakeism can be an umbrella term for both.