◡◶▿ ROTT03 | Volumes

🥡 A pretend space full of things the filmmaker has photographed or conjured. Scorsese and Waters talk home movies. Almodovar doesn't. | Rotting the Image Week 03

Oct 16, 2023

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Unfound Peoples Videotechnic (UPV) is a roaming absurdist film school. You’ve found us amidst a weekly program of micro-essays on the ‘odour of a film’s look’: how to creatively mis-use cinematography and all your other tools to give your images life and, inevitably, death.
You are very welcome to dip in or sign up. 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 week three of Rotting the Image: a 12-part series of micro-essays on how to ruin your movie’s ‘look’ within carefully thought-out and meaningful parameters.

Last week, we covered the image surface. We learned how:

The image surface is the close face of your movie and thus a question of intimacy.
The audience cannot touch the image surface, no matter how lush the grain.
As a semi-permeable membrane, the image surface leaks materials selectively from the image volume, leaving matter all over them.
The filmmaker cultivates the nature of this membrane to affect the meaning and feeling of what leaks through.

In today’s lesson, we’ll continue with the architecture of the image. Specifically, we’ll cover:

🥡 The image volume: a pretend space to put pretend things.

🌐 The relationship between the image volume and the source world from which you rip its properties.

🏗️ How to build a little pretend-volumetric universe from scratch.

🏠 Plus: Home Movie Day is right around the corner. Here’s what John Waters and Martin Scorsese say about it - and only one of them is right!

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The image volume

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 appears elsewhere in this module.

The image volume is the pretend space beyond the surface of a movie’s image. It looks like a place. A place with solid objects and depth.

The image volume is two-dimensional, but filmmakers refer to it as a volume because it looks like a place and to distinguish it from the image surface.

When the camera moves, the image volume mutates. The shapes, colours, dimensions, and odour flow into new forms. The objects appear to present themselves from a new angle. But, since the image volume is two-dimensional, it is not a new angle but a mutation.

The objects in a film do not have depth.
- The viewer can’t look around them.
Nor are they solid.
- The viewer can’t touch them.
Places are constructed with perspective tricks, not depth.
- The viewer can’t reach into them.
‘Buildings’ of the image volume are intangible and ephemeral.
- They appear and disappear as if by magic.

The filmmaker engineers the image volume with mirages. She goes where a place meets its idea of the place. The filmmaker detaches the image from its concrete setting: she builds with the movement of light.

When the filmmaker lifts the image from its concrete source, she sheds her obligation to realism. Indeed, she loses the possibility to make a literal representation of geography, environment, objects, and animals, etc. What a relief! ‘Literal representation’ is a heavy responsibility that has crushed many a filmmaker’s imagination.

What does this mean for your image volume? It means it owes little to anybody or anything. And least of all does the image volume owe anything to physics: the physics of the concrete world that you discard. Good riddance!

Physics of the image volume

The image volume↑ is a pretend space full of things the filmmaker has photographed or conjured. It exists just behind the image surface. Audiences accept the image volume as a proxy for the place it pretends to contain. They accept this despite disparities in scale and the odd effects of cutting and camera movement.

The filmmaker lifts her images from their concrete source. Planting the lifted images in the image volume frees her of any obligation to realism. In fact, the image volume is its own universe. When she transfers images from the source world to the image volume, the filmmaker imagines a new set of physical laws for the objects and processes that the images appear to show.

To be clear, these physics include mechanisms such as:

The speed, direction, and character of time (if time even exists in the movie.)
Gravity and other real-world inconveniences.
Geometry and space.
Outer space and celestial mechanics.
Particles and other little bits and bobs.
Miscellaneous odd forces.
That sort of thing.

Please share this lesson with those rare souls in your life/class/extended network who might heed it.

The physics of the image volume can and must be engineered from scratch. Most filmmakers copy over the physical laws from the discarded source world. They install them in their image volume with only minor, unnoticeable alterations for convenience and the purposes of conventional film grammar.

But the diligent filmmaker imagines a whole new set of physical laws for her image volume. She may end up with a cocktail of:

Imaginary physics (rules invented for her movie).
Carefully selected and facsimiled physical laws from the source universe (i.e. The one with Tescos, etc.)
Metaphysics, given equal weight to the above and cooperating with them quite naturally, too.
Mediaphysics.
- The effect of real-world media materials, grammars, and ecosystems on the lives and bodies of the pretend characters.
- Media as turbulent channel between the concrete world and the collected image volumes.
Other categories of physics which only she could imagine.

Thankfully, the filmmaker needn’t write an entire physics textbook for her image volume. It is enough that she thinks through and maintains an understanding of the physical mechanisms listed above (and all the others). The audience does the dirty work. Using their whole body and much of their mind.

What a funny little box the filmmaker ended up with!

Ethics of the physics of the image volume

(When you lift an image from its concrete source to plant in your image volume, you shed your obligation to realism. This means your image volume owes little to anybody or anything. Least of all does the image volume↑ owe anything to the physics of the concrete world that you discarded.

What is the little that it does owe? A little ethics. The filmmaker must develop and maintain their ethics towards the concrete people and places that could be mistaken for the images you detached from them.)

The viewer volume

Simply put, the viewer volume is the viewer’s body (or collective audience body) imagined as a receptacle for the contents of the image volume↑.

The viewer volume is an under-explored space, although that may change by the film’s end.

Please share your thoughts and queries from this week’s lesson in the comments.

Film archivists released from vaults for brief family visits on Home Movie Day

The 20th Home Movie Day takes place on Saturday, 21st October from sunrise. Or maybe from midnight. I don’t know!

Following our recent semester on amateur filmmaking, I’m sure many of you have freshly exposed home movies in your catalogues. Waiting to greet the world outside. You can find a list of events local to everywhere, from Prague to Kobe to Bogotá, right here.

The London event will feature jewellery “created from the silver harvested during film processing.” Which is worth a thought ahead of our classes on considering film as an object. It takes place at the excellent Cinema Museum. There will be tea and cake, which is de rigueur at this venue, and you’re invited to bring your own home-baked reels along.

John Waters, Martin Scorsese, and friend. (Photo by Julie Cunnah)

“Home movies do not just capture the important private moments of our family’s lives, but they are historical and cultural documents as well,” says Martin Scorsese, a moment before missing the point: “Consider Abraham Zapruder’s 8mm film that recorded the assassination of President Kennedy or Nickolas Muray’s famously vibrant color footage of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera shot with his 16mm camera.” Jeez, Marty!

John Waters gets it, though. “There’s no such thing as a bad home movie,” he says. “These mini-underground opuses are revealing, scary, joyous, always flawed, filled with accidental art and shout out from attics and closets all over the world to be seen again.

“Home Movie Day is an orgy,” continues Waters, “of self-discovery, a chance for family memories to suddenly become show business. If you’ve got one, whip it out and show it now.”

Sort of feels like ChatGPT wrote these quotes “in the style of.” But they’re supposedly authentic. I wonder what Eisenstein would say about Home Movie Day 2023?

Let me know in the comments!