◡◶▿ MAPS12 | Unfolding futures

🕰️ Designing sets is easy - but how to hook them up to the ravages of time? | SCHOOL CLOSED UNTIL SEPT. | Otar Iosseliani | Mr Cole's film in Pantelleria | Maps, Flaps, & Infinite Wallpaper Week 12

Graeme Cole

Jul 15, 2024

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Dear students of filmmaking - it’s the final week of term! This summer semester, we’ve enjoyed or endured 11 weekly sets of micro-essays under the banner Maps, Flaps, & Infinite Wallpaper. Today is the twelfth and final one of those. And tomorrow is the holidays.

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.

Before we get into today’s topic, briefly cast your mind back to last week’s lesson - “Worldbuilding by committee.” We learned how:

The costume designer thinks of set design as baggy costume, but the set designer knows costume is just clingy set.
A character can be “almost a location” if he’s charismatic and/or disorientating enough.
Image resolution is just another layer of paint for the set designer.
The filmmaker may prefer a low-resolution set - furniture that is built deliberately blocky and opaque.

Over the past three months, we’ve covered the spatial and meta-spatial elements of set design. Surfaces, layers, flaps, openings, and so on. We’ll end the program today on a series of notes about putting the temporal into your set design. Time and implied time.

In particular, let’s talk about how:

🇬🇪 Georgian filmmaker Otar Iosseliani set his camera in a doomed village and let zealous town planners do the set construction for him.

🛋️ Science fiction furniture requires science fiction furniture showrooms.

🗿 Real (not necessarily realistic) movie sets are designed to crumble at a moment’s or a lifetime’s notice.

💀 Every design element should have its own backstory, but also its own obituary written into its DNA.

🏝️ Don’t neglect to read to the bottom for a note on the upcoming summer break at Unfound Peoples Videotechnic. I won’t be seeing you for a while!

Modernity

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.

In Aprili (Director: Otar Iosseliani, 1961), speech is silent and sounds are musical.

A pair of lovers tease and bicker among the labyrinthine brickwork-and-cobblestone town. Dancers and instrumentalists take their regular place in open windows, on rooftops, and well-worn steps, and rehearse alone in accidental harmony with the others. Workers scuttle, uncountable, here and there, ants in dungarees. Furniture is crafted. Furniture is shifted.

As the film goes on, a row of modern apartment blocks emerges on the edge of the old town. People move in. The couple moves in. Locks and locks are added to the doors. Windows are shut against the noise. Speech becomes audible.

An ancient tree is chopped and made into plywood cabinets.

Otar Iosseliani knew these buildings were due to be erected in the ‘real world.’ And that his characters would move into them. Their lives would change. The changing environment is the topic of the film.

Modernity infects Iosseliani’s premise. Town planners and the construction industry rebuild his set. (Let’s not think too hard about whose decision it was to chop that extraordinary tree.)

But imagine if he hadn’t let the town planners play! If he’d shut the town planners out of his set. Or given the contractors busywork, painting wallpaper or doing research. And they had left the task of set design to the old town’s original designers. Whoever they were.

It would have been a different film, of course. A different life for the lovers, the musicians, and the ants.

It would be nice to see a version of Aprili that ends just before the ‘inciting incident.’ Instead, Iosseliani lets the editor1 remodel the set towards the end, sucking the lovestruck couple into the foundations of the old town for eternity with the aid of the Director of Photography, shifting the genre slightly with his dissolves and his découpage. Modulating the nature of the real-world film set back and forth through time.

Futuristic fixtures

Maybe your movie is futuristic. You want to include futuristic objects and textures that are impossible today and unlikely even in the ‘real’ future. Don’t let unlikely set design ideas restrict your imagination!

Volodymyr Nanneman suggested that futuristic movie designs should feature fictional furniture shops in the background. These furniture shops would validate the appearance of otherwise ‘outlandish’ or ‘unlikely’ interiors. The characters might already be sick of the sight of this fantastic stuff. Tomorrow’s unimaginable family sofa may be considered a quaint curiosity or a naff mass-produced design hiccup in the deep future.

Quivering unhatch

How can you make the still objects in your movie move?

Monumental architecture is a lie. Like crisp white underwear, monumental glass buildings out-stare you. They dare you to suggest there could be a mishap. A lot of still photography perpetuates this myth. A lot of CGI perpetuates the myth. The myth of stability.

In the conventional cinema, everything perpetuates this myth. Even explosions. When Christopher Nolan blows up Batman’s neighbourhood, the fragments don’t seem like fragments. The rubble isn’t rubble. The dust isn’t dust. It’s just smaller and smaller monuments. Dust that just got out of the shower and put on brand-new clothes.

Doesn’t everybody exist in a permanent state of quivering unhatch? Desperately holding the fragments of our shells around us, their edges eroding so they might never quite fit again. Don’t our houses exist in this state? Our ornaments? Ornaments everywhere, just trying to hold it together.

Backstory of doom

Your production design should be alive. Each element should have a backstory. An autobiography for every ornament.

But each element should also be dying. ‘Each element should be dying’ means the ornaments have their own blueprint for decay or dismantlement. You know how they will expire in ideal conditions. Even if their end might come about sooner by some other means, as so often happens amidst the hustle and bustle of movie action.

Do your movie buildings:

Sing about their before?
Foretell their own doom?

Do your ornaments:

Struggle to hold it together?
Chip and discolour, even if only conceptually?

If the answer to any of these questions is “No,” you might not have a movie set. You might have a mere projection.

The exquisite corpse rides again

Will you be on the island of Pantelleria around the 1st-4th August, 2024? If so, you might catch my film, The Curse of the Phantom Tympanum, alongside excellent movies from esteemed friends and strangers, including Aleksandra Niemczyk, Peter Treherne, and Petr Makaj.

Keja Ho Kramer has arranged another screening of her Cadavre Exquis program which played in Palermo earlier this year. Great! Maybe I’ll be there. Probably I won’t. But maybe I will!

The arrangements are still hazy. It’s all hazy! Check the program website for updates if it appeals to you.

Summer break

Across 67 consecutive weekly emails, I’ve delivered 178 micro-essays on the absurd art and mediaphysics of filmmaking. Plus, sundry industry gossip, screening and funding tips, movie criticism, wild speculation, and one sick note. I hope it had some value to you. I hope it’s given you comfort!

Anyway, it’s time to take a pause. A pause for you. A pause for me. A pause for the school apparatus.

Unlike last year, there won’t be any formal summer school this summer. I don’t have the time. I don’t have the strength! But I may pop in now and then to deliver a choice bit of wrong advice or a funding tip. Maybe some gossip. Maybe not.

It’s a long rest. So, for those who pay for their UPV education - the “guaranteed A-grade” students - I will pause your subscription until we resume regular classes. But my eternal gratitude, I will not pause - not even for an awkwardly placed ad break! And you’ll still receive any incidental emails I send over the summer. If I do.

Don’t forget, you all can revisit past lessons in your mailbox, through your printed archives, or by visiting the Unfound Peoples Videotechnic’s highly-memorable URL: unfound.video

Let’s meet back here in September. And see what sort of form the autumn semester might take. It might take a different form altogether. Or it might not! “Who knows what the future holds?”

Let me know in the comments!