◡◶▿ ROTT01 | Odour
🌬️ If your film's image doesn't stink, you're doing something wrong. Plus: festival programmers reveal all, or at least some; esteemed media fest deadline *today*. | Rotting the Image Week 01
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, students, old and new.
The autumn term begins now. Below, you’ll find the first of 12 sets of micro-essays on this semester’s topic: Rotting the Image (The Odour of a Film’s Look).
Over the next three months, we’ll look at how and why to flavour the visual quality of your film. How to ruin your image, really. But within carefully thought-out and meaningful parameters.
We’ll start with the fundamentals this week. In future weeks, we’ll work through:
image architecture and ventilation,
the organics and mechanics of your image’s thingness,
software and hardware abuse,
and some specifics, including recipes and case studies.
By Christmas, you’ll have a sublime mess on your preview monitor.
In today’s opening lesson, we will discuss how:
💩 To truly live, a film must exude a visual stink.
🍲 The filmmaker achieves their film’s ‘odour’ by giving every screen element the capacity to ‘rot.’
📖 The ways in which you degrade your image inform the audience how to read it.
📽️ Plus: what festival programmers really think about your stinking film; Berwick deadline today.
Is it the start of term where you are? Of course it is. Please forward this email to your students and classmates and encourage them to subscribe.
The odour
You can hear me deliver this lesson by scrolling up to the header and clicking Listen and/or the play ▸ button.
To breathe life into something is to breathe death into it. Nothing lives if it cannot die. To make your film live, you must give it the capacity to rot. Rot creates an odour.
Perhaps your film will rot in front of the audience’s eyes. Rotting as the movie unfolds. Or perhaps the film will play in a state of perpetual rot. A rotten situation.
Rot creates an odour. The odour of your film is the beyond-life of its visual texture. ‘Beyond-life of its visual texture’ means that the fate of every element on-screen is written into its visual look. Every prop, character, gesture, ray of light: all of it is expiring in front of our eyes.
But ‘beyond-life of a film’s visual texture’ also refers to each element’s origin. Its backstory. The way each telephone, breeze, pigeon, snarl, pink, etc., built up a sweat before landing in your film.
How do you create the odour of your film’s look? By modulating your film’s decomposition within its image volume and surface:
The image surface is the medium through which you reveal the image volume. The front of the image. The audience could almost touch it.
The image volume is everything within your image. The audience might feel tempted to reach into it. But that’s quite impossible.
A bold word or phrase indicates that an instruction of the same name and concept appears elsewhere in this module.
The filmmaker modulates the odour of a film’s look through the interplay of infinite variables. These variables include:
Film format: stock/resolution/software.
Lens.
Light.
Colour.
Texture of mise-en-scene (the collective rhythm and thread of all that you place before the camera).
Texture of props and production design (the individual feel of each of these objects, fabrics, and other manifestations), including
Skin. (Few details leak the prognosis of your film’s decomposition like your characters’ skin.)
Sound.
Breath (effect of light on the air).
Atmospheric conditions.
Post-destruction.
Certain other post-production effects and mishaps.
Exhibition circumstances.
The odour is part of your film’s text. Part of its current1. The odour is as integral to the ‘content’ of your movie as the pictures, sound, and speech, and more so than the screenplay.
The odour is the life and death of a movie.
Activating the odour-eye
Ruining the image of your film is a way to communicate without words.
You’re asking the audience to do more work, but you’re also providing them the tools to do it:
They work harder because it is hard to glean information from a destroyed image in a conventional way.
But they have the tools. The manner in which you destroy the image suggests a relationship between the image and its destruction.
From there, any sensible viewer will triangulate an understanding, although
understanding becomes a matter of feeling, rather than processing words or plot.
The audience must sniff your movie with their eye.
Exercise: Hiding
Please share your thoughts, queries, and exercises from this week’s lesson in the comments.
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Who programs the programmers?
🗣️ Well, they program themselves… into this live online talk between the programmers of the excellent IndieLisboa festival, curious filmmakers, and the general public.
The Zoom conversation participants will include festival director Miguel Valverde and shorts programmer Rui Mendes. I cannot imagine two kinder souls to explain how your life’s work will be judged and either elevated in front of adoring audiences or trodden into the muck of film festival submission history. Be gentle with them!
Register your place online. And prepare your notepad for Wednesday, October 4th, at 4pm (Lisbon/UK time).
🗓️ On a related note, today is the early bird deadline (£15) for the venerable Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival. It always seems to have a good program, although they never selected any of my films. That doesn’t mean they’re bad people. Nobody’s saying that.
Next week, we’ll peer more closely at the image surface. How to push your audience up against the window of your film and get them writing their names in their breath.
Class dismissed!
~Graeme Cole.
(Principal)
📹 Unfound Peoples Videotechnic | Cloud-based filmmaking thought. ☁️
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Current
The flow of a movie; the synergy of its components as experienced in time; the essence of a movie’s movieness.
The nagging meta-question, beyond language, theme, or character, to be resolved or at least defused.
That which each aspect of the movie strives to generate.
A term chosen by Volodymyr Nanneman to counter the primacy of narrative. (Even in a narrative movie, narrative should be working for the movie rather than vice versa.)
Other commentators referring to other films may refer to ‘story’ or ‘plot’ when they mean - or would be doing better to address - ‘current,’ which is something quite different, or rather more precise.