◡◶▿ HOME02 | “Junior playing with his toads... in SPACE!”
🐸 For an impure home cinema. A new set of ideas hiding in plain sight. Jia Zhangke and the Enthusiasts. Plus: dog makes movie at 500 feet. | Renovating the Home Motion Picture Week 2
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.
Dear students: hello! Get cosy. It’s week two of our look at the transferable techniques the home moviemaker has discovered by chance, for convenience, or on the command of the fierce, semi-dormant artist of their deep subconscious.
Did you read last week’s micro-essay? We covered how:
The home movie is defined not by the physical structure of the home, but by its metaphysical footprint.
Gaston Bachelard identified the home as a fertile bed of primal dreams.
“The filmmaker who can access their imaginary haunted “home”-place of humility, humbleness, and intimacy holds a powerful key.”
Embarrassment and shameless hugging (real and metaphorical) can be as useful to the filmmaker as a set of professional studio lamps.
Great! I wonder what you did with all that knowledge. Let’s move on.
In today’s lesson, we will discuss how:
📍 The amateur filmmaker may hide her location, but not her localness.
💡 The stubborn habits of the filmmaker and her neighbours make for unique and inimitable production values.
📽️ Jia Zhangke identified the future of cinema in these local folds.
📺 The Hollywood movie becomes a local phenomenon the moment it lands on your television set.
Please share this class with your colleagues and networks. And remind them to open their emails.
The local film
You can hear me deliver this lesson by scrolling up to the header and clicking Listen and/or the play ▸ button.
The barbecue movie. The Christmas morning movie. Clouds. “Junior playing with his toads.”1 What else could you film at home?
A religious epic? A city symphony? A desert movie? A space opera?
It is well-known that a movie needn’t be made in the location it purports to portray. That’s basic screen craft! From cardboard sets to the green screen, shadowy lighting to the trick establishing shot, half of cinema isn’t where it pretends to be. Everybody knows that!
However. Concealing a film shoot’s location and concealing its localness are two different things.
In the industrial cinema, a vast amount of money and effort go into disguising both a movie’s shooting location and the localness of its ingredients. What a waste! Between this money and an element of institutionalisation, the industry picture is able to conceal both location and localness very well.
The amateur movie may also conceal its location. But it cannot conceal its localness. No matter how green the one-day delivery green screen. No matter how authentic the hats.
The amateur film may be made with non-local intentions: for international festivals or in conversation with the broader amateur culture. But the amateur film is defined by love and by what it lacks. The home movie is defined by its humbleness. And the local creeps in to fill the gaps:
The environmental muscle memory of the cast and crew writes itself into every gesture and camera move.
The local quality of daylight or auntie’s flashlight or uncle’s reading lamp stands in for Fresnels.
The waves of the park landscape resonate with those of each viewer’s local park - even when made to play a distant grassy planet.
The amateur filmmaker drafts in an actual local creep to play a supporting role when the retired Shakespearian she’d hired drops out. (So-called collaborator magnetism.)
The love and the resentment.
The filmmaker resists, but her environment persists. So what does she do about it?
She may choose to lean into these “muscle memories” of localness. To accentuate the techniques and physical forces her neighbourhood imposes. Could be good. A new set of ideas hiding in plain sight.
Or else she might ignore these muscle memories. Or attempt to counter-balance them; to swallow her embarrassment. But the local will shine through, anyway: in the path of sausage to bun, or tin can spaceship to sandpit moon. And in shying from her localness, she’ll lose more than she gains.
Jia Zhangke, director of The World (2004), sees hope in the localness and cultural diversity of the amateur film.
Jia refers to the “real film enthusiasts” who “ignore the so-called professional methods, …refuse to follow the standardised principles, [and] free themselves from conventional customs and restraints to an infinite space for creation.” Yes.
But. “[A]t the same time,” says Jia, “they are earnest and responsible because they persist with the conscience and conduct of intellectuals.”
Well, those things are not local at all. Earnestness, responsibility, conscience, and intellectual conduct. The home movie is just as local when it fumbles the grammar of the international hamburger movie, deliberately or otherwise, as when it ignores them. Conscience and intellectual conduct, like “good taste,” immediately distance the filmmaker from herself.
What makes the creation space infinite is the singular spot from which the creation originates. It needn’t be pure to be local. It needn’t be pure of intention, or of influence from the international industry picture.
So. What if the home moviemaker happens to be an industry professional returning home with loose change from her £10,000 or £100 million budget? What if she uses her million-pound pay cheque to film a fairy light space opera? Would it still be a home movie? Could she still access that singular spot?
Perhaps she should assemble a small crew of local experts (historians, bus drivers, children), and see what they know.
And what they don’t know that they know.
Please share your thoughts, queries, and exercises from this week’s lesson in the comments.
Home Movie of the Week (Not A Regular Feature)
Probably you’ve seen this. But it seems relevant. Click through to watch.
“A dog climbed all the way up the Great Pyramid of Giza!”
Support home town cinema
This week, a reverse funding opportunity. Your chance to support a unique project from Tlaxcalan video artist Chrystyan Romero: Torre de Marfil [Ivory Tower].
The crowdfunding link is here: https://gofund.me/87bef08a
And here is an edited blurb:
“Manu, Chrystyan’s childhood friend, is famous locally as a rezanderx. Rezanderas are typically older, unmarried women who chant rosaries in an incantatory style, a highly respected popular form of Catholic devotion outside of the official church. Manu began to pray in this way after his mother died; our film is a portrayal of how being a rezanderx has given him a way into his grief and a celebrated role as a queer person in a conservative town.
…Torre de Marfil [Ivory Tower] is a 16 minute experimental film that we are close to finishing. We received Mexican public arts funding for production, and now need some help paying our editor and finalizing the sound design.
Any donation amount is very welcome and will help us put the finishing touches on our project.”
Next week, we’ll look at Hollis Frampton’s humble genre movie.
Class dismissed!
~Graeme Cole.
(Principal)
📹 Unfound Peoples Videotechnic | Cloud-based filmmaking thought. ☁️
🐦 Twitter | ⏰ TikTok | 📸 Instagram | 😐 Facebook | 🎞️ Letterboxd | 🌐 unfound.video
Suggests Fred Camper.