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🔪 The blackout as building block of the diary film. Plus: Bergman at Harvard. Call for filmmakers. Funding for Amazons. | Renovating the Home Motion Picture Week 4
Hello hello. Get comfy! We’ve had a few weeks away from this term’s module on Renovating the Home Motion Picture. The half-term break, followed by last week’s illuminating interview with Emma Rozanski, whose second feature is currently playing on cinema screens in Colombia. Did you read it?
So let’s briefly recap the last lesson in our home movie series, Shootouts with friends, when we learned how:
Joyce Wieland and Hollis Frampton spent a trip to Toronto chasing each other with Bolexes.
Their movie is an existential and action sequence thrill!
The act of chasing each other with film cameras evoked essential aspects of the true home movie, such as capture and embarrassment.
Wieland and Frampton achieved an enviable interlacing of life and art, lofty intellectual vision and stupid fun.
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.
Great. Really good. Today, we continue our dissection of the home movie with a look at the diary film. And how:
💇 The cuts and omissions of the diary film may be their most eloquent parts.
🤳 A moment in Joseph Morder’s phone camera diary highlighted the worlds that live beneath the video stream.
🧟 The film diarist is a “Frankenstein of meat and machine, vanity, sorrow, denial, base instinct, learned grammars, and mediaphysical proprioception,” and
🚧 By putting her life on screen, the film diarist confronts the reality of her existential punctuation marks.
Plus: read to the end for an experimental Bergman/Moholy-Nagy double-bill at Harvard Film Archive, an opportunity to participate in Owen Vince’s new film project, and how to contribute to Julie Rodrigue’s documentary on feminist activism in France and beyond.
Please, do the institution a favour and share this post with the lapsed film diarist in your life. If you don’t know which of your filmmaker colleagues that is, you could send it to all of them!
And in case it interests you - and it shouldn’t - our marketing department has established a 🦋 Bluesky account. In case it interests you. Perhaps they’ll use it! Perhaps they’ll forget.
The gappy diarist
You can hear me deliver this lesson by scrolling up to the header and clicking Listen and/or the play ▸ button.
An eleven-year-old boy’s “Good Behaviour Diary” began and ended with the single entry “Got ready for school.” It was found abandoned beside an industrial wheelie bin from which he was chased, one frosty Wythenshawe morning, after he elected to go scavenging instead of going to school. Could any diary object be more profound?
Probably! But this diary wrapped in a drama exposes an essential facet of the diary film: what comes between the edits and after the end1 of a diary film may be more valuable than what makes it to the tape.
The diary film’s edits and cuts (where it is chopped and what is truncated or unfilmed) may be profound for three reasons:
The cut is a fundamental tool for making meaning (and obscuring meaning) in cinematic grammar.
The moving image is recorded in the moment, so a cut is a rupture in the fabric of both the diary and the life which it records.
The diary film is recorded live and conspicuously, and recording may be stopped for moments of high drama, sensitivity, etc.
A safe example of the cut’s unique qualities in the diary film occurs in one of Joseph Morder’s video diaries: J’aimerais Partager Le Printemps Avec Quelqu’un. In the opening entry, Morder is learning to use a mobile phone camera. (It is 2007.) Learning to start and stop it. In a room. Each time Morder remembers which icon stops the recording, there is an in-camera jump cut to the moment he remembers how to restart it.
We’re in the real-time of the camera but not the life.2 The viewer’s access to the room is punctuated with ellipses. Blackouts that are triggered by Morder’s short-term memory kicking into action.
What is the life underneath the surface stream of the diary film? The viewer may fill in the gaps, through imagination or persistence of vision. Extending the implied action or narrative. But a diary is not a fiction film for which every audience speculation is valid. The diary film is both a subjective and concrete record of a finite reality. And the viewer soon finds themselves up against the functional limits of their imagination.
The film diarist worldbuilds with slices of time. But also builds a shadow world of what is omitted. And when. The intimate, spontaneous, and often first-person unfolding of a diary film seems to make the audience one with the diarist.
But by cutting and omitting, the diarist-filmmaker makes the audience one with the diarist’s shadow self: a Frankenstein of meat and machine, vanity, sorrow, denial, base instinct, learned grammars, and mediaphysical proprioception.
This gravity of the diary film’s gaps pulls the experience of life - or of diarizing - inside out. The diarist-filmmaker is already one step ahead of herself, anticipating where in the present scene of her life she should turn the camera next. But she may also think in terms of the notches and blackouts in her stream of footage, since these are makers of meaning in film.
Every video diarist faces the question of when to stop the camera. And the analogue film diarist lives with the knowledge that she’s always running out of film. When to hold on for an action to play itself out, or an aesthetic event to resolve, or the time code to reach an even 60 seconds, or the filmmaker’s lucky number?
The film diarist must find a solution, since the fabric the diary and the life which it records are interwoven: how to lead a gappy life? Where to cut? Where to trim? How to add meaning through ellipsis? Tough questions. Maybe a nap would help.
Please share your thoughts, queries, and exercises from this week’s lesson in the comments.
Bergman’s Non-Verbals
“I collected non-verbal sequences from Bergman’s films: Persona, Wild Strawberries, all kinds of films,” said Dušan Makavejev of his Ingmar Bergman Dream Film Experiment. It is to be reconstructed at Harvard Film Archive this Friday. “I had something like seventeen clips and I tried to organize them into a one-hour Bergman film that Bergman never made. It was clips from his films, but it was all him.
“I didn’t do anything. I just found some order. We made a three-screen presentation, with black-and-white dreams in the middle and then two screens in colour after half an hour, but without words. There was a world appearing when you collected the clips and put them in order.
“Suddenly there was something going from sequence to sequence … I think I managed to get something that would look like a dream you can’t explain. The response was very interesting: there was a big silence. People would not dare to discuss it. It was a fantastic response.”
It seems the last time this movie-event was attempted was ten years ago, when a handful of students - of which I was one, in very much a supporting role - reconstructed it digitally then took it on the slow train from Sarajevo to Zagreb’s Galerija Nova at the behest of Tanja Vrvilo.
This week’s screening will be discussed by none less than Pavle Levi, and paired with Vlada Petrić’s similarly rare “Constructivist realization” of an ambitious Moholy-Nagy film experiment, Ein Lichtspiel: Schwarz, Weiss, Grau (1930).
All in all, the night will give you something to talk about with the family at Sunday dinner.
Awful Screen’s Fantastic Proposition
A couple of weeks back, I sent you some half-term reading written by Owen Vince, author of the Awful Screen newsletter.
Well, today Mr Vince is looking for filmmakers to participate in a new project. Here are the details:
“In this new experimental film project (The Film in Question; or, threno-die), I am exploring political violence and our filmic representation of political violence – as well as the ethical questions raised by such “imaging”. The final film will be somewhere between 60 and 90 minutes in length.
For the film’s second (of seven) chapters, I’m looking at the recent assassination of former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe; an event which was captured by many witnesses and subsequently distributed online. It entered the memetic at a startling rate at a time when acts of political violence (assassinations, coups, attacks, etc) appear to be on the rise, worldwide.
For this chapter, I’m inviting filmmakers to stage and film a non-violent re-enactment of the assassination; somewhere between an “interpretation” and the seemingly now defunct genre of the crime-scene re-enactment.
There are no specifications as to how this scene should be shot, as long as it is non-violent. I am not specifying the technology that should be used nor requiring absolute fidelity to the events – or its subjects or setting. A five-second iPhone video is as appropriate as a more elaborate re-enactment filmed on a high-end DSLR, etc.
Filmmakers are encouraged to bring their own formal approach to the event; there is no “correct” way to approach this call-out. The final re-enactments will be edited for the final film, and may ultimately be cut-up or interpolated in different ways during the editing process. Naturally, all contributors will be properly credited in the film and during its promotion.”
You can contact Mr Vince here: owen.m.vince at gmail.com
“In the streets, at night, the Amazons have been protesting against violence against women since 2019…”
Finally, my friend and colleague Julie Rodrigue is making a documentary about a group of feminist activists in France. There are just four days left to support the project on Kickstarter, so please go over there and right-click > Translate if you don’t read French.
Rodrigue’s movie will “bear witness to their efforts, their courage and the sisterhood within the group” as an “observation of feminist activism today in France, of the singularity of those who carry it, of its impact and its demands. It aims to question our representations and our reflections on the subject.”
Okay. That’s it. See you next week for part five of Renovating the Home Motion Picture.
Class dismissed!
~Graeme Cole.
(Principal)
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Or abandonment.
Some film and video diarists eschew live event recording in favour of a one-on-one end-of-day confession-to-camera style diary. But most film diarists who record confessions tend to do so over the top of their footage at a delay of weeks or months. This creates an emotional flanging effect, particularly when the filmmaker overlays multiple commentaries across extended delays, as in the diaries of Anne Charlotte Robinson.