◡◶▿ Imaginary Software class cancelled today
😷 Teacher feels dreadful. Plus: Mubi Notebook and Criterion play with sound, Slow Film Festival calls for films. Bad jokes.
Good morning, students. Perhaps you remember: last week I mentioned I was unwell. Well, it got worse! It really done for me, and I didn’t have time to prepare today’s lecture. So class is cancelled today.
My illness also meant I couldn’t attend the London Short Film Festival this week. So, if you saw me and said Hi to me as I suggested in last week’s letter, it was an imposter. Or George Clooney, perhaps! Sorry. Professor joke. “They call me Professor Jokes.”
Did you go? How was it? Let me know in the comments.
Anyway. Our spring term module - Imaginary Software of the Filmmaking Future - will continue next week. I’ll fit in the missing class before the end of term. We may need to continue into the spring break. So, if you’re preparing a trip, please plan to take your smart phone with you so you can read my email while you travel.
Class is cancelled. But, I do have a few notes and suggestions for fieldwork below. And, since the present email will, inevitably, be the only one some of you will open this semester, I’ll make a little reminder here: this spring term, we’re looking at how to use, confuse, or avoid AI and other interfering softwares now and in the future.
The module offers “a soft imaginary science for conceptualising the film arts in (and beyond) this moment of radical retooling.” And it aims to “reassure you that the most powerful piece of software remains the mind - running on a rickety old, tea- and wine-greased piece of hardware we call the human body.”
You can read more about it here:
The sound of Notebook pages flapping
Good. Okay. Here are some notes I had already prepared for the end of today’s now tragically cancelled class.
Criterion released their latest sort-of annual Room Tone video on 25th December, causing a minor internet uproar. The video promises a supercut of actors and filmmakers waiting silently after being interviewed for the Criterion Collection. Waiting silently so that the production team can collect ‘room tone.’ Room tone being the spare background noise that every sound recordist attempts to sample to help their director “to paste over gaps in edited sound or conceptual space.” A heroic but thankless task.
Why the “minor internet uproar”? Because, rather than a supercut of awkwardness and cute lowercase celebrity sounds, Criterion elects to drown out the non-silence in their Room Tone videos with non-diegetic music.
“This was not the ASMR feast I was expecting...” said one YouTube viewer, quoted in
’s This Week in Sound. Mm. Disappointing. Perhaps more frustrating is seeing Martin Scorsese noisily (and badly) joking through the process. Other big-name directors and actors fidget and gesture their way through. They should know better. Fidgeting isn’t silent, Bong Joon-ho!Naturally, it falls to the Dardenne brothers to make ‘the big move’ that signals tone time is over.
Over on the other channel, the fourth Mubi Notebook print-only magazine was delivered in December. And one assumes it’s in the shops now.
The Notebook journal seems to be finding its feet. Finding its feet as more than a scented and tactile fetish object - by turns glossy and ersatz riso. As a space, a source, for off-the-track film(making) writing and picture projects that might not find a home elsewhere. It’s tough to balance “fun freeform side project” and “serious disciplined almost-book that costs £15”! But they’re getting there.
Issue four is a sound special. A sound special that goes long-form on topics we’ve touched on in this newsletter, such as benshi and foley. It includes writing from diverse and respectable voices, including Jurij Meden (on piracy as education) and Julia Holter (on scoring Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc).
And Notebook’s Things A Filmmaker Should Know feature offers fresh aphorisms from a respected filmmaker in each issue. Channelling Bresson. In issue four, Pedro Costa is up. Some of Costa’s notes I agree with, some not, some are obtuse or obvious, but some really pop.
Here’s one that popped for me:
“grow old shooting”
This can be read may ways. I choose to read it that you should grow old during the shooting of each shot. Grow old again and again. Of course, this is unavoidable if, like me, you have bad knees. It’s kind of unavoidable anyway:
Writing time-images to film metricises experience, mapping time like wrinkles and grooves.
Multiple takes write multiple realities, forking memories, and complementary traumas.
There’s no going back along the same route, but the filmmaker and her audience may tunnel between realities - if they know the way.
This could be the Benylin talking.
Altogether, it’s a worthwhile publication if you feel like buying it or reading (and stroking/sniffing) it at staggered intervals in your local library, newsagent, or airport.
Oh yeah! It also includes a limited edition 7” vinyl single from Gus Van Sant and his sound designer Leslie Shatz! I think that may have been a gift for subscribers, though. Shamefully, I’ve not listened yet because my turntable is buried beneath an academic-style teetering pile of books. As, now, is the 7”. (A pile of books that now includes Lessons in Perception by my associate Paul Taberham. Thanks, Paul!)
Slow Film Fest calling for even slower films
Finally, the UK’s Slow Film Festival celebrates filmmakers:
“whose work engages with time and duration on screen” and who
“take you on journeys through boredom and into the expanded realms of perception that await beyond.”
As UPV’s longer-term ungraduates know, I have a long relationship with this fest, showing work, delivering UPV lectures, Q&Aing Luciano Pérez Savoy about his engrossing feature M-1, and standing awkwardly outside with my satchel. It’s a small festival with an open but tight, engaged, audience whose community evolves every year. And it recently made the transition from country life out in Mayfield to the more urban milieu of East London.
Submissions are now open for their 2024 event. And for the first time, the Slow Film Fest is calling for feature-length movies. (Previously, features were only shown by invitation). I highly recommend you submit your “slow” and/or “boring” film to this festival, and attend if you can in September!
Okay. Sorry. If you’ve somehow stumbled onto this extended sick note and are not a subscriber to our little absurdist film school, please subscribe above. And if you are one of mine, thanks for understanding.
Eat fruit and get some exercise. Build that immune system. Although, take it from me, none of that stuff works. Term resumes next week.
My gravest apologies,
~Graeme Cole.
(Principal)
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Get well soon! 🙏