◡◶▿ MAPS09 | Implied places
⛳ How to create compelling drama in the blanks of your scenographic blueprints. Plus: a nice job in the Balkans. | Maps, Flaps, & Infinite Wallpaper Week 9
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.
Welcome, eternal film students. Today, we’ll talk about some visual matter you may or may not dream up for your film - but that you certainly don’t need to actually ‘make.’ Yes, it’s THE IMPLIED.
But first, let’s think back to last week’s lesson, Maps, for a moment.
We learned how:
The filmmaker is compelled to flatten her 3D scenography into a series of two-dimensional images.
The filmmaker’s two-dimensional images can be pieced together to map the film’s places.
Due to the vagaries of cutting and mise-en-scene, this map is unlikely to be cohesive - but the filmmaker can instead evoke new dimensions with the scraps.
Béla Tarr, Peter Greenaway, and Guy Maddin are among the filmmakers to have exploited the cartographic potential of their moving images.
Super! Really great. Interesting. Today, we’ll look at some blank spaces in those maps and beyond those maps. The imaginary time-places your movie plants in the collective audience mind.
And in particular, how:
♾️ A recursive world-within-a-world structure can reinforce your themes while saving money on set construction.
🕵️♀️ Imagining what happened to make each set detail look the way it does is a full-time job - best outsourced to a murder detective.
🧗 Something must exist in all the places just beyond the edge of your movie, and it’s possible your characters can smell it.
🗺️ Such “filler areas” - unmapped blanks in the diegesis - are a rich source of sequel material. You could even make a movie set in some other director’s blank spaces!
Enrich your fellow filmmaker’s inner lives. Broaden their morning pastry break. Send them this post. Please.
Maps within maps
You can hear me deliver this lesson by scrolling up to the header and clicking Listen and/or the play ▸ button.
A bold word or phrase indicates that an instruction of the same name and concept exists elsewhere in this module.
They say that all those cycling shots in The Shining were a way to map the setting for the audience. The model maze and aerial shots of the real maze were practical mapping solutions. Imagine: putting a map within a map!
An image, map, or model of the film world within the film world suggests a hellish recursiveness. Within the film world is an identical film world with an identical hero. The identical hero, like the hero in the foreground, burrows deeper into Hell with each recursion they enter or encounter.
Or maybe the hero will break out the back of the movie and into our world. Did you leave any gaps for the hero to escape? If you designed the set well, the hero will find our world looks very different from theirs.
The other advantage of Kubrick’s hotel corridors was that all those doors made the hotel seem enormous. All for the price of a few doors. (Many were probably used twice.) The audience will never know what was really behind each door. Kubrick could have put anything there.
Too few maps incorporate ‘lift the flap’ technology. Maybe cartographers are afraid of flaps. Afraid that under each flap, there should just be another flap. Flaps all the way down.
Here’s your principal presenting this micro-essay with visual examples in 2020. Bonus grades for identifying the briefly clipped Belgian comedy!
Reverse forensics
When a crime is committed in the so-called real world, forensic detectives investigate the scene. The filmmaker’s job is the reverse: to create a scene where uncountable past crimes have occurred. Not actual crimes. But love affairs, accidents, decorating projects. Banalities.
The filmmaker and her set decorator must dream up all these crimes. The filmmaker may start at the end - the visual detail - and reverse-engineer the crime that justifies each design choice. On a location shoot, she must justify the details imposed on her by the environment. Maybe she will be inspired by the real crimes (banalities) that made the location look like that.
Or she may cook up the crimes from scratch. Design the set by imagining everything that happened there before. The spillages. The spring cleanings.
She must imagine the crimes (not actual crimes) that took place long ago. And those that occurred in the moments before the exposure.
Filler areas
Everything has to end somewhere. You can map, design, and build only so much of your movie’s diegesis. You need not and cannot create everything that exists off-screen. But something else must be after the end. Outside the lines. Mustn’t it?
Yes. Filmmakers call these elsewhere spaces “filler areas.” A filler area is an unimportant, unseen place in the diegesis of a film. A blank on the map. You might find one beyond an unopened door or over the horizon.
We must suppose this filler area extends under the tarmac, too. What shape is the underground in your movie? How far does it go? Then what?
Filler areas occur because nobody thought up what happens in an implied off-screen space, nor what it looks like. The filmmakers know that nothing happens there that affects the meat of the movie. They might not even have noticed the space is implied.
Naturally, this makes filler areas very interesting.1 If you stumble upon one in your movie, you can put anything you like there. You might also exploit filler areas in the films of others. You will need to consult the filmmaker’s blueprints in order to stay outside the lines.
Filler areas are a great source of sequel material. For a start, they’re cheap to produce, because there’s nothing there. You can mine them in sequel after sequel. Or, how about a prequel where the filler area reveals a game-changing absence behind the designed world of the original movie?
Some filmmakers spend a whole career returning to the diegesis of their first film and filling in the filler areas. There is always somewhere else to explore. Some even apply the concept to humans. Just think how Nola Luna IV returned again and again to the subject of her ex-boyfriend. In Takashi From End To End, she mapped all he had revealed to her, and for each of the 11 sequels, Luna imagined what was in the void.
Please share your thoughts, queries, and exercises from this week’s lesson in the comments.
Position Vacant (must believe in magic)
Here’s a good job if you’re in the Balkans or can at least speak Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian. Kumjana Novakova is an esteemed filmmaker and founder of the Pravo Ljudski Film Festival in Sarajevo, and she’s looking for an assistant!
In Novakova’s words, but with @ signs replaced by our own team of assistants, here’s the deal:
“Finally I am done with the myth of “I can do it all” because I can really not and I never could.
I am searching for a personal assistant.
Please spread the word. Thank you!
Personal assistant to filmmaker, curator and lecturer in cinema.
A part-time, 8 to 10 hours a week.
Who is it for?
Ideally, an aspiring filmmaker or artist with strong interest in research-based audiovisual art practice.
The support includes organizational tasks (managing calendar, travel, correspondence), project support (basic research assistance, basic locations research, archives research - mostly desk-top, project documentation) and different other support as needed.
What does it involves?
Highly organized, precise, and detail-oriented.
As the work tends to get rather personal, I am looking for someone who always believe in the impossible and searches for the missing part despite of all.
And believes in magic.
Everything else is open.
Preferably based in Skopje or the Balkans. Fluent in written and spoken English and BCS languages.
Info on remuneration available upon request (novakovakumjana [blah] gmail.com).
Please share latest by July 07, 2024 a bio with letter of motivation to novakovakumjana [blah] gmail.com.
Tell a Balkan filmmaker!
Liquid space
Next week, we’ll learn about virtual spaces and how to transform the home cinema remote control module into a single-button gamepad.
Class dismissed!
~Graeme Cole.
(Principal)
📹 Unfound Peoples Videotechnic | Cloud-based filmmaking thought. ☁️
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See also the 20% rule of interesting margins.