Rotting the Image
The odour of a movie’s look.
Written by Graeme Cole for Unfound Peoples Videotechnic.
37 micro-essays on how to bring your movie’s images to life and, inevitably death.
Evergreen, esoteric knowledge, originally delivered in the summer of 2016 and published in the autumn of 2023.
Read in any order.
Index
Underlined links lead to anchorpoints - each one a micro-essay or exercise - within the containing lesson.
The odour | To make your film live, you must give it the capacity to rot.
Activating the odour-eye | Rotting your image makes it harder work for the audience - the nature of decomposition should provide them with clues.
The image surface | The top of an image is teasingly close to the audience.
Image surface as membrane | How to modulate what gets through from the image volume.
Phenomena of the image surface | A meteorology of cinematic patinas.
The image volume | The pretend space beyond the surface of a movie’s image.
Physics of the image volume | People and things act differently in the box of moving images.
Ethics of the physics of the image volume | What does the cinematographer owe the real world?
The viewer volume | A mysterious void on the near side of the image surface.
A process object | The moving parts of the moving image.
Ghost cinema | Cinema as an apparition that rattles.
Undead cinema | Cinema as a latent energy for the audience to release.
The weight of the pixel | The power inside the movie’s atom.
Possession | If a movie is an object, who gets to hold it?
Packaging | If a movie is abstract energy, how does the filmmaker give weight to the images?
Concrete questions | How to analyse the thingness of your movie’s image.
Film by the foot | A story about Peter Kubelka, film stock, and dancing.
Fabrics | The materials with which the movie image is woven.
Inter-diegetic ruptures | What happens when the materials of a movie’s image fall apart.
The wrapper | How an image is parcelled.
Wrapper vs. packaging | The anticipation of hidden truths.
Implications of the wrapper | What a movie’s format suggests about its contents.
Time and the wrapper | Time flows differently when embedded in a movie’s image.
Digital flowers | How a movie falls apart depends how it was loved.
Pathetic media | When the material of a movie’s image frays in sympathy with the characters.
The nearsighted film-maker | The analogue filmmaker must remember to look past her wonderful apparatus.
The neutral image | The digital filmmaker should interrogate her software.
Resolutions | The loosening of an image and its refastening elsewhere.
The compromised resolution | The cinematographer has some tough decisions to make.
A pixel | The little square that conquered the world.
Definition | The assertiveness of each dot, patch, streak, and line.
Calibration-destination | How to maintain definition against smudgy agressors.
Definition across elements | Blocky actors, gloopy themes, and razor-sharp catering.
Show, don’t show | Filling in the gaps in the dark.
Image ellipsis | What to leave out and where to hide it.
Frame boundary | Hollis Frampton demarcates the void.
Indirection | A boon to the filmmaker on a budget.
