◡◶▿ AMAT11 | Paths
🎥 🏢 Shadow careers, or "quiet self-awarded trans-dimensional promotion" for the amateur filmmaker. A universal basic income for the serious hobbyist. | Advanced Amateury Week 11
Hello, eternal students. Welcome back. A quick recap on last week’s lesson, Home, in which we learned how:
The home movie - as opposed to the merely amateur movie - is defined by a humility of mindset (in production and/or distribution etc.)
Since the home movie is a state of mind, a stray creative notion can jolt it (or the aunt that is filming it) onto another plane of reality.
A professional film directed by Kira Muratova lived a secret life as a home movie passed between generations at a Moscow film school.
The home movie might become a multiplex property with just a few minor tweaks to global cinema culture.
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.
It is week 11 of our 12-week program on using amateur-leaning techniques to “soup up” your filmmaking engines. Let’s discuss:
🎠 The amateur filmmaker who “goes at it” with the discipline of the seasoned professional.
🧚 The professional filmmaker who “goes at it” with the untamed tenderness of the amateur.
🚸 The pootler who is lost somewhere between the previous two archetypes.
🍱 A question about how this affects lunch plans.
Please think of two - no, three! - people who might appreciate this newsletter. Thought of them? Ace. Now, please forward it to them. It’s the only way we grow. Thank you!
Amateur professionals
You can hear me deliver this lesson by scrolling up to the header and clicking Listen and/or the play ▸ button.
A bold word or phrase indicates that an instruction of the same name and concept exists elsewhere in this module.
The amateur professional is an amateur who devotes as much effort to the art and organisation of filmmaking as does a professional. This effort may be “comparable” by:
Scale or proportion (they may have a well-formed miniature career), or;
The room it takes up in the mind and body of the amateur.
Dedicated cine club filmmakers are amateur professionals. The home movie careerist with a system, also. But what about the ‘up and coming filmmakers’? How about those folks? How about the film students?
The amateur professional may have some, but not all, of the characteristics of the professional:
Formal access to equipment.
A group or collective schedule.
Production funds.
An established or expected audience.
A crushing and mostly self-imposed sense of peer expectations.
They may aspire to some or all of these; they might not like thinking of themselves as an amateur at all.
The amateur professional does not usually claim a wage for their work. What would happen if they got one? A universal basic income for the serious hobbyist?
Professional amateurs
The professional amateur is a filmmaker who is able to earn a living (or at least a small income) in a professional setting but who ‘goes at’ her job with the passion and (non-)technique of the amateur.
Examples include:
Some industrial filmmakers.
In particular: certain early bands of filmmakers who delivered information and education films for their king, country, or municipality with a spirit of playfulness that must have startled their sponsors.
The wedding filmmaker who de-prioritises her official subject matter (the loving couple, their family and rituals) and fixates on her
passions
experimental techniques, and
personal motifs.
(These may or may not be systemised across her filmography.)
The commercials director who “throws” a gig, creating a work of art at great corporate expense.
In each example, the professional amateur’s employers might get suspicious upon watching the finished product but be too proud or unsure to question it.
It is possible the professional amateur’s employer employed her just because of her passions, playfulness, and rough edges. The employer might soon regret it. Maybe when they’re old, the retired employer will recognise the value in the professional amateur work that displeased them ‘back then.’ Make peace with their decision. The decision to employ a filmmaker who would colour right over the lines, and who did not always do so in a way the employer could tolerate.
On the other hand, the professional amateur may have begun her job defaulting to professionalised tendencies but lapsed (glided or stumbled) into amateurism. What a relief!
The occasional
In practice, the terms amateur professional↑ and professional amateur↑ are not binary opposites.
Neither should we say that these terms (or these filmmakers) exist on a spectrum or “sliding scale.” These concepts and the people who wear them are dottier than that. Their dots speckle a breathing, bleeding, four-dimensional scattergraph.
Somewhere among these dots you may trace another constellation. Actually quite a common type of filmmaker. We could call her an occasional professional or the occasional amateur. However, she may do regular professional work or strive or love continuously. So let’s just call her “the occasional.” The integration of her amateur and professional practice - and, for that matter, her laundry and love life - is haphazard. Overlapping, not interlocking.
She may make a regular living making moving images. Or she may just welcome the occasional modest windfall with which to treat her friends to a café breakfast. None of our business! She may plan to:
Pootle along the same way for as long as it’s viable.
Gradually amass the goodwill to enjoy a late-career (retirement) renaissance.
Do it a lot more sustainably.
Achieve stardom such as her oeuvre’s limited audience allows.
Fade; occasionally re-materialise on request.
All valid career paths.
But how does she operate? She combines a certain freewheeling independence of thought and technique with elements of both the amateur professional and the professional amateur:
Like the amateur professional, she is organised and purposed.
Like the professional amateur, she embraces play and doubt within concrete or imagined frameworks.
So free! So lost!
Exercise: Lunchbox
Please share your thoughts, queries, and exercises from this week’s lesson in the comments.
Looking back; looking ahead
You might dive a bit deeper on today’s topic (or swim backwards, if you’re a longer-term subscriber) by reading these UPV-issued words. The words concern the professional amateurs of the WFO in Poland and the GPO Film Unit in the UK. Civil filmmaking servants with a license to play.
Next week we’ll learn about love. Love! And we’ll have a word about what comes next at Unfound Peoples Videotechnic.
Class dismissed.
~Graeme Cole.
(Principal)
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