Islands
A new festival from Slow Film Festival. And an intro to the role of forgetfulness in filmmaking.
Dear Students, Alumni, Faculty, and Trespassers,
I’m hammering out a quick message to alert the unaware that Islands: UK / Taiwan Moving Image Festival has begun online. Sign up here to have the program delivered to you via mailing list as it unfolds across the month of August.
Islands is co-curated by our friends and sponsors at Slow Film Festival. It promises the luscious viewing experience that cineastes associate with that event.
A Little Update on the Film Essay Studio Experience
My participation at the Film Essay Studio has also been slow and steady. I am still itching to access the archive of the Wytwórnia Filmów Oświatowych (WFO). So my work on a new amateurism-themed module for UPV has been slow. However, there is a work-in-progress of a single new instruction on the UPV blog. I’ll paste it into this email too, for your convenience.
Catherine Grant presented a lecture as part of the Film Essay Studio’s program. And yes, she had theory, discipline, and politics. But she was also disarmingly frank about the virtues of just dabbling around. Dabble around with your materials until you find something that pleases you, she seemed to say. Try all the effects buttons, she hinted.
‘Get knee-deep in buttons you don’t fully understand’ is a great bit of filmmaking advice!
New instruction: Forgetfulness
Regular visitors to the UPV website enjoy the regular addition of instructional texts. Here follows a copy of the latest; the first in an infinite yet unsatisfying and self-contradictory series on amateurism.
The filmmaker who chose not to train should get the same respect as the filmmaker who trained but deliberately forgot their training.
Both of these clumsy souls should get the same respect as Big Mr Trained Filmmaker Man.
However, there is another filmmaker in the room: the filmmaker who forgot their training not by choice, but out of forgetfulness.
There is a lot to remember when making a film:
The mechanical and artistic rules of production.
The creative details (including plot and theme) of the film at hand.
The names of all the people and what they like to talk about.
And this is a fraction of what we must remember in life as a whole. Things will be forgotten. The forgetful will, by definition, forget more than others.
And yet, forgetful filmmakers persist. They persist in their fog of missing knowledge and confusing memory particles. Sometimes, as the cast and crew gaze in her direction, the forgetful filmmaker suspects that she once knew what she was supposed to say.
Maybe forgetful filmmakers persist:
Because the film strip is a lot like memory. Coiled, it is illegible. But as it uncoils, it conjures ghosts.
Because film is like love, and a little muddiness heightens the experience.
In the hope of recording their doomed memories.
Because they forgot the effort and pain involved in filmmaking.
Because they forgot what else they like to do.
Is the forgetful one an idiot? Not necessarily. Let’s define idiocy as foolishness combined with a resistance to learning. The idiot never learns and the forgetful one is a passive unlearner. Both may have a lot to offer to cinema.
Love the idiot and the forgetful filmmaker even as they clang their heads together again.
The idiot and the amnesiac could learn a lot from each other. For better or worse, they probably won’t.
Instruction ends.
Sign Your Name Across Various Hearts
As long as we’re talking about mailing lists, I should alert you that the artist Daniel & Clara has a new mailing list for their Moving Image Artists (MIA) organisation. They have done so in light of receiving funding for a slate of salons, masterclasses, and other creative development endeavours. Intriguing!
You can sign up to the MIA mailing list here.
All of which is enough mailing list activity for one day. So, I’ll sign off.
~Graeme Cole.
(Principal)
Link Coaster
Amplifying the sound of dust being vacuumed for a more fulfilling housework experience | This month’s Rosa Menkman link | This month’s colleague plug (Valdi Jóhannsson): it’s time to choose your arthouse cinema farm animal of allegiance | Holly Herndon has franchised her voice and face | The bleakness of Béla Tarr in gloriously weird prose | 🎥 “It’s nice to shoot a film, isn’t it?” 🎥 | 👂 Listenography 👂
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