◡◶▿ MAPS10 | Virtual concrete

🖼️ Diegetic flâneurie through the infinite movieverse. The blank canvas within your blank canvas. Plus: Jiri Anger and the aesthetics of the crack-up. | Maps, Flaps, & Infinite Wallpaper Week 10

Jul 01, 2024

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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 hello. It’s nearly summer break at our broken film school. We can nearly get out of here! But there’s a bit more to learn first. A bit more to cram before you make your holiday movies.

Today’s set of micro-essays are about intensified space, and ersatz space, and flat space. Film design techniques that involve these sorts of spaces. Since they are space-based, they start out pretty affordable. There’s space all over the place! Between pages, between appliances. Look to the sky - oceans of space!

You may wish to pair this lesson with UPV MAPS02 | S p a c e s, to which it is something of an extension. For now, however, we’ll begin by summarising last week’s lesson on implied places.

We learned how:

If a film is a map, then featuring a map or world model within it is the first step to a dramatically fecund recursive Hell.
Too few maps - and too few movies - incorporate ‘lift the flap’ technology.
The filmmaker should design every scenography as a crime scene of banalities.
The diegetic spaces that the filmmaker neither films nor imagines exist as “filler areas” - narrative prairies or voids that the filmmaker (or her fans and critics) might return to explore later.

Super. And today, we’ll learn about fog, mirrors, and the pause button. And how:

🌬️ The smoke machine both accentuates and smudges the contours and volume of your cinematic spaces.

🧖‍♀️ A mirror in a movie needn’t obey the conventions of physics.

💭 A mirror in a movie might be a portal into alterity or a stray notion of the main picture.

🔖 If cinema is the art of the illiterate, play on.

Please forward this lesson to someone you know will appreciate it.

You can hear me deliver this lesson by scrolling up to the header and clicking Listen and/or the play ▸ button.

Reverb (Fog)

Fog machine fog is the reverb of the live-action motion picture.

Mirrors

A movie mirror needn’t reflect as it would in our world. The filmmaker can put anything she likes in the so-called ‘reflection.’

She might add or remove details of a scene from its reflection. To thicken or streamline the story or aesthetic. She might move this or that detail here or there; enlarge, desaturate. Add fog. Build a rhythm of echoing light that works for the movie rather than the real world.

It’s just a moving picture, after all. Not a functioning reality. The visual elements need only function (or play as a non-functioning anomaly) in the context of the movie. A character is the sum of their actions. A movie world is the sum of its reactions.

Most movies represent a physical universe similar to our own. In such cases, reflections should not look conspicuously different from what they purport to reflect. Not unless the filmmaker wants the audience to ask certain types of questions. But there is no good reason for a mirror to reflect the literal scene in front of it. Inconspicuous disparities spice the soup.

For example, the filmmaker might block the elements of the room in a different arrangement for the reflection. An arrangement that she had thought to use for the film but abandoned for some reason. If she is not sure she should have abandoned it, there is always space for a different version of a scene in a mirror. Mirrors give the filmmaker the opportunity to entertain her doubts. “Bonus material.”

Or she could add different shadows. Smoother surfaces. Creepy crawlies.

What is that space in the mirror, anyway? Posterity at the speed of light? A thought bubble for the primary scene? A sliver of otherworld leaned on the walls of this one?

The filmmaker can put what she likes in that mirror. She shouldn’t let anybody tell her that she can’t! However, mirror tampering is best pursued with a design sensibility. What qualities does the deviation bring? Are the deviations cohesive or appropriately in-cohesive? Otherwise, the audience may doubt her film’s credibility.

Many people doubt the real world’s credibility due to the awkward positioning or timing of physical phenomena. Maybe they’re right, and the real world is not credible. But assuming they’re not, external reality has a design problem. Maybe we in the real world could use mirrors to better organise the way things function. Perhaps we should change the way things ‘seem.’

Designing for pause

Have you ever watched a pre-verbal human child ‘read’ a book? A good pre-verbal human child book contains double-page (widescreen) vistas of detailed scenarios. A good pre-verbal human child will linger over each spread again and again. Spotting new details. Revisiting old details. Drawing relationships between details. Admiring the colours. Maybe trying to name some elements (trying to be verbal, or exploring the alternatives).

The child is likely more engaged than most cinema-goers. An explorer of worlds and defier of road signs. Or a video editor. Shuttling back and forth through the pages, constructing a drifting non-narrative, an understanding, a rough assembly.

Mightn’t you design your movie to be paused? A picture book for the generations?

The critical thing - the difference - is that your movie be designed for pause, and not for screenshot. If your double-page spread works just as well as a still (vs. paused) image, what’s the point in it even being a movie?

The aesthetics of the crack-up

Listen to this:

“Would it be possible to do film theory from below, through the perspective of moving-image objects, of their multifarious details and facets, however marginal, unintentional, or aleatory they might be? Could we treat scratches, stains, and shakes in archival footage as speculatively and aesthetically generative features? Do these material actors have the capacity to create “weird shapes” within the figurative image that decenter, distort, and transform the existing conceptual and methodological frameworks?”

Interesting, right?

It’s not an announcement for a follow-up to our Advanced Amateury module or the completion of my video essay on jitter, wobble, and smudge in the archive of the Wytwórnia Filmów Oświatowych. Nor extra homework for your class on the image surface. It’s from the description to a wonderful-sounding new book from the always fascinating researcher and archivist Jiri Anger.

The book is called Towards a Film Theory from Below: Archival Film and the Aesthetics of the Crack-Up. Perfect!

It came out last Thursday. I have not read it. But I really hope to! And in the meantime, I knew it would be of interest to some of you.

For now, I imagine most will have to wait. The book is only available in hardback at a price of over £80. Not easy for a film student with baked beans to buy and expired Agfa Moviechrome to process! But I know some of you are professors in disguise, sneaked in from nearby classrooms. Maybe your academic library budget might stretch to that?

If you buy it, tell me what it says!