◡◶▿ HOME08 | Hobby horses
🐴 A sugar lump for the whinnying Bolex. Schneemann. Deutsch. Hill. Uncommon home movie framing methods. | Renovating the Home Motion Picture Week 8
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.
Hello, dear film students. How are you? I have that awful throat thing that’s going around. Awful!
But let’s press on bravely. First, a glance back to last week’s lesson on frame work. We learned how:
The home movie genre is framed by the imaginary structure of the home, but the filmmaker must find her own frame for the actual shots.
There are pros and cons to using a shelf, a cup, or a gran to steady the camera.
The filmmaker might also consider buying a tripod to prop up her device and her confidence - and unlock a range of potential mishaps.
It doesn’t matter if the film frame still ends up wonky, though. It doesn’t matter at all!
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Okay. Following our look at common framing devices, today I want to add an instruction about uncommon framing devices. But to provide further context - and academic value - I will pair it with an instruction about hobbies. And hobby horses. And how:
🛠️ The hobbyist consumes and is consumed by the accoutrements of her hobby.
🎥 The hobbyist filmmaker may forget about “content” altogether in the quest for oneness with her tools.
🧪 Gustav Deutsch and Carolee Schneemann reconceptualised their home movie framing methods using a phantom dolly, a cat, and acid.
🏗️ Tony Hill’s camera rigs are more elaborate than most high-end set-ups - but he’s a hobbyist, dammit. And a home moviemaker!
Great. Super. Support your school - share the knowledge ☝️.
Hobbyists
You can hear me deliver this lesson by scrolling up to the header and clicking Listen and/or the play ▸ button.
The word ‘hobby’ comes to us from the hobby horse. A toy horse made of broom pole and rags, pretend-ridden and maintained for pleasure. “Almost every person hath some hobby horse or other wherein he prides himself.” “Prance, hobby - hiss dragon, and halloo boys!”
A hobby is pursued for its own sake. Itch and scratch are one and the same. There is no personal or cosmic “call.” No dialogue. The hobbyist takes pleasure or delight in the process and perhaps the satisfactory completion of a project or cycle.
This mechanism is perpetuated with:
minimal effort. Or
hard efforts that go unnoticed, eclipsed by
the pleasure that is derived and
the hypnotic seduction of the activity.
The filmmaker who wishes to achieve this level of oneness should give special attention to her apparatus. Her fetish.
If she devotes attention to the mechanical processes and aura of her tools, the filmmaker may invoke a self-sufficient space of hobbyist activity. The activity - and the film - need go no further. Who cares if the movie turns out insular or self-indulgent?
Perhaps the filmmaker cares. In that case, she is not a pure hobbyist. Nothing wrong with that! She may instead harness the intense engagement of hobbyism towards other goals:
Creating an aesthetic or metaphysical quality for her movie. Or
retuning the quality of the time she devotes to filmmaking.
The era of novel analogue consumer formats was a rich one for hobbyists. Those 8 mm and 16 mm hobbyists in oneness with their accoutrements. Clunking and clicking. Lost in a fantasy architecture of image-making.
Cameraphone moviemaking is rarely considered a hobby. It’s too casual! But add a selfie stick into the picture and the cameraphone hobbyist begins to take shape. Her stick wags and probes with purpose; its purpose is to wag and probe. The hobbyist has found her horse.
Uncommon home movie framing methods (spatial)
The home moviemaker is gifted with a broad instinct to record. But she may lack more precise techniques or principles with regard to framing her general subject. That’s okay! It’s a home movie!
Still, doubt over how to frame the time and space in front of her camera can lead to inaction. Conversely, the bolder home moviemaker may fire away with a lack of selectivity. Both may get more satisfying results with a more principled approach to framing the time and space around her camera device.
Common stances include the handheld point-and-tap, the improvised stand, and the consumer-grade tripod. But more determined and determinate moviemakers have devised their own framing methods:
Gustav Deutsch and the strategic manoeuvres of his “pocket movies.”
Manoeuvres such as “observation,” “panorama,” and “phantom dolly.”
Driven by principles such as “Passive observer,” “Nothing and nobody can stop the movement,” or “Dolly-shot into the unknown.”
Carolee Schneemann imagineering her cat’s perspective for her sex reels,
“to present our coupled images in the contexts of the rectangles and the seasons surrounding us.”
Sticking things to her exposed frames and dipping them in acid.1
The hobbyist Tony Hill invented his own home movie rigs. Camera frames that swoop and spin and envelop. His mechanical frameworks might invoke a:
cold third-party camera,
tooled-up professional, or
ethnographer of the home.
But they don’t. The metal beams and axles are an extension of Tony. Tony the Dad.
In Downside Up (1984), Tony’s satellite crane swings up from the earth, building momentum until it completes a vertical 180° and - through careful editing - continues to slice through family scene after family scene in a rotary motion.
But the operator, Tony, is not invading his children’s lives with his unwieldy crane. It’s simply what Dad was doing. What Dad was doing in that freshly sliced space, in that freshly sliced moment.
Please share your thoughts, queries, and exercises from this week’s lesson in the comments.
Interminable
There are just two weeks left of term. Still, when you consider that means you’ll have lessons right across Christmas and up to the new year - still good academic value! Next week, we’ll learn a bit more about that Deutsch and those pocket movies - and how to sort and categorise your own random visual recordings.
Class dismissed!
~Graeme Cole.
(Principal)
She also sets a temporal frame for her lovemaking: the wind-up runtime of her Bolex’s spring motor, grinding down as it shaves off each slice of life.