◡◶▿ HOME01 | A blueprint for the filmmaker’s inner studio
🔩 The power of hugs and embarrassment. Gaston Bachelard's Tupperware of Time. Plus: The WTF London Film Festival | Renovating the Home Motion Picture Week 1
Welcome back. Settle in! Below, you’ll find the first micro-essay of our autumn semester module - Renovating the Home Motion Picture.
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.
This term, we will discover what the incidental home moviemaker can teach the dedicated amateur and the industry professional. And vice versa a little bit, too. And we’ll unfold some of what we covered last year in our class on “Home,” in which we established that:
The amateur filmmaker is not necessarily a home moviemaker; nor the home moviemaker necessarily an amateur.
the amateur is defined by what they lack, plus a surplus of love, but
“the home movie is best characterised by its humility or humbleness.”
Humbleness of technique, investment, talent, completion, distribution, or exhibition.
a “home movie needn’t be made in the home,” and
the home movie genre may be “a state of heart or a state of belly or a state of fingers.”
Okay!
Today’s essay is called The bosom embarrasses. And it’s about taking your inner home moviemaker to the film set - wherever and however it is you make movies.
In today’s lesson, we’ll veer from the theoretical to the over-affectionately practical, as we discuss how:
🏠 Home represents both a physical and emotional space - for better or worse.
🍼 Gaston Bachelard highlighted the home as both primal “bosom” and a kind of Tupperware of time.
🫣 The home moviemaker wields embarrassment like a set of hyper-enthusiastic Fresnel lights.
🫂 Before you learn how to see, you must learn how to hug.
Please remove all pastries from their paper bags and teabags from their cups. The lesson is about to begin.
The bosom embarrasses
You can hear me deliver this lesson by scrolling up to the header and clicking Listen and/or the play ▸ button.
The “home movie” needn’t be made in the home. It needn’t be made in the house, flat, cave, garden, stairwell. But “home” is a good name for this type of movie. “Home” remains a good organising term for the techniques and characteristics that define this mode of filmmaking.
Why is “home” a good organising term? Because home represents:
the soil from which the filmmaker sprung,
the bed to which she retreats, and
the shelter in which she may expose her most fundamental vulnerabilities.
(It may represent these things anywhere on the messy scale from idyllic to atrocious.)
“[T]he house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind,” wrote Gaston Bachelard.
“The binding principle in this integration is the daydream[1]. Past, present and future give the house different dynamisms, which often interfere, at times opposing, at others, stimulating one another.
“…Life begins well, it begins enclosed, protected, all warm in the bosom of the house.”
Bachelard was writing about the physical home of one’s childhood. But this space also works as a blueprint for the home moviemaker’s inner studio. The filmmaker who can access their imaginary haunted “home”-place of humility, humbleness, and intimacy holds a powerful key.
The key is powerful regardless of whether she’s filmmaking for an “audience of family and friends” or the billion-dollar box office. If she’s canny, the filmmaker will persist in poking it at that lock, though she fumbles the key in her nervousness.
But how?
Bachelard offers us a poem by Rilke:
House, patch of meadow. oh evening light
Suddenly you acquire an almost human face
You are very near us, embracing and embraced.
It doesn’t take much to misread the last line as “embarrassing and embarrassed.” An improvement. A more pertinent epithet for the house-bosom of any filmmaker whose films might be worth the audience’s time.
Here’s how the filmmaker should operate this haunted home studio she carries from location to location:
The house and the bosom embrace and embarrass. They are embarrassed yet know no embarrassment; they boldly are and do without the need to try.
The home moviemaker might watch, shamelessly, as the mechanisms of intimacy play out in her surroundings.
She observes the domesticity that people bring with them. Bring even to the shanty town of the industrial film set or location shoot.
She adopts embarrassment.
She may be embarrassed with but not for the boom operator’s exposed bum-crack.
She occupies space with brazen over-familiarity.
She moves with the automatic trust of a 50-year-old child falling back into their parents’ fading easy-chair.
The house and the hug and the home movie camera are all mechanisms for catching.
Bachelard imagines the home-dweller caught in formative memories, the cradle, childhood.
But the home moviemaker may also be a parent.
Of children, dogs, plants, pigeons (officially or otherwise), a media library, a movie project.
The filmmaker might scoop together these contrary feelings into a smothering (embarrassing) bear hug:
of parenting and being parented.
of responsibility and dependency.
of peeking up and glancing down.
of tidying and testing space;
designing and exploring;
shaping and occupying;
occupying and shaping.
as adult, child, hamster, spider, and sourdough starter.
Embarrassment is an intimate moment of public capture. Of being caught transgressing collective boundaries of dignity, modesty, or humility. Or over-indulging your innermost codes.
However, the home movie camera, the home movie actor, is self-conscious and embarrassed only towards its intimate witnesses: the self, those in the room at the point of shooting, and perhaps an imagined “audience of family and friends.”
Embarrassment requires an “Other.” But, for the home moviemaker, this Other is familiar to the point of affection/contempt.
The home movie and its participants have license to loiter. To witness (and share) embarrassment from the privileged vantage point of the (shared) bosom.
The filmmaker may invoke this “embarrassing hug” whether filming a birthday party or a big-name superhero sequel. However, as with all good techniques, she may wish to keep her intentions a secret from her embarrassed producer.
Please share your thoughts, queries, and exercises from this week’s lesson in the comments.
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The WTF London Film Festival
Last weekend, I went to the Slow Film Festival. A ticket covers the whole weekend, and there are only ever two rooms to choose between.
But now the London Film Festival is on. And I cannot summon the power to study the program. Constantly balancing the intrigue of titles against the availability of tickets and my own availability - physical and emotional.
Students, you know my tastes and curiosities by now. Do any of you have any recommendations of what I or your fellow students should see or do? Did you work on something that’s showing (I saw at least one of your names in a movie’s credits at Slowfest!)? Please let me know in the comments!
Next week, we’ll start to look at the shapes (patterns, genres) your home movie might take.
Class dismissed!
~Graeme Cole.
(Principal)
All cinema, including the home movie, is a daydream from the filmmaker’s perspective and a dream for the audience; many of the best movies are nightmares or daymares.