◡◶▿ Rotting the Image: 37 micro-essays on cinematography
🗂️ A hyperlinked guide to creating the odour of your movie's look.
Hello again. Last week, I sent the final lesson of UPV’s autumn-winter module - Rotting the Image: the odour of a film’s look. 🎉.
Over 12 weeks, we delivered 37 micro-essays on the life, death, architecture, respiratory system, materiality, and otherworldliness of an appropriately-pungent cinematographic image.
Today, I’ll provide you with brief, hyperlinked recap. An ‘annotated index’. Great! Helpful.
Read through the index below to reinforce your memories of the semester. Click through to the micro-essays that you missed or misunderstood. Or simply print out this email and pin it to the back-end of your movie camera for easy reference.
And please give me a big “December 25th” gift by forwarding this email to the filmmakers and cinematographers you know. Share it on your networks. And quote it at your colleagues on set.
I’ll first direct you to a case study on this very topic that I sent out in May ‘22 - before many of you enrolled! It concerns Aki Kaurismäki’s Shadows In Paradise (1986). What a well-perfumed film!
Okay. Good. Now here’s the recap.
Index: Rotting the Image
The odour of a movie’s look.
Bold title links lead to the full lesson. Bullet-pointed links go straight to the corresponding instruction within each lesson.
Odour | UPV ROTT01
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.
Surfaces | UPV ROTT02
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.
Volumes | UPV ROTT03
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.
Substance | UPV ROTT04
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.
Thingness | UPV ROTT05
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.
Metafabric | UPV ROTT06
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.
Wrappers | UPV ROTT07
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.
Pathetic media | UPV ROTT08
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.
Soft mechanics | UPV ROTT09
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.
Resolution | UPV ROTT10
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 | UPV ROTT11
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.
Ellipsis | UPV ROTT12
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.
The rustle of virtual overcoats
There it is. We learned so much! Or perhaps you learned nothing. That’s ok! Just think about the cups of tea you drank. The rustle of virtual overcoats in the virtual UPV vestibule. The sensation of your ballpoint pen bouncing senselessly over your notebook.
You can find similar indexes for our modules on advanced amateury and sound design, which also ran in 2023. Even more learning! Or even less.
As a reminder: the new semester starts, with a new filmmaking topic, on January 22nd. Subject to everything.
I wish you a restorative winter festival if you observe it.
Class dismissed!
~Graeme Cole.
(Principal)
📹 Unfound Peoples Videotechnic | Cloud-based filmmaking thought. ☁️
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