◡◶▿ ROTT05 | Thingness
📦 Is your movie a 'thing,' and if so, which recycling bin should it go in? Plus: Dean Hurley David Lynchizes Tod Browning | Rotting the Image Week 05
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.
Okay, okay. Welcome! It’s week five of Rotting the Image: The Odour of a Film’s Look - how to give your movie’s image quality life and - bwa-ha-ha-ha! - death.
!.
First, a quick recap.
Last week, we tried to identify the precise point where a movie's pure, pre-physical potential meets its embodiment. In particular:
Whether the filmmaker (and her cinematographer) should think of their movie as a process or an object.
Or whether she might conceive of it as something else altogether: a spirit, a ghost, etc.
We looked at some filmmakers who divined their motion pictures from the raw stock or apparatus with which they set out to create them.
And we considered the pixel as an undervalued object that packs a ‘real world’ punch.
Today’s micro-essays do away with last week’s handwringing and assert that the film is, indeed, an object:
🖼️ A thing that the filmmaker must touch in private before presenting to the public in some form or another.
📦 A commodity that used to be delivered in plastic boxes but now zips along undersea cables at 180,000 miles per second.
🚧 A stew of ideas, metaphors, and heavy machinery.
📼 An artefact to be sliced, diced, carved, or tossed.
Please forward this lesson to someone or something who you know will appreciate it. Ta.
Possession
You can hear me deliver this lesson by scrolling up to the header and clicking Listen and/or the play ▸ button.
Said1 Hollis Frampton:
“For the cinematographer who edits his own film, and sees a clear sensuous connection between the flickering moving image on his screen and his chopped and spliced and measured celluloid ribbon, the tangible coil of film is his “art object.””
Whose art object? His (or, her) art object. Naked, on their cutting bench.
Nobody else’s.
What is the filmmaker going to give to everybody else? Ideas? Vapour? Light and wisecracks?
Packaging
A bold word or phrase indicates that an instruction of the same name and concept appears elsewhere in this module.
Analogue film exists as reels of celluloid or polyester packaged in metal cans. In the past, consumer copies were distributed as layers of plastic, packaged in another layer of plastic or - joy! - cardboard.
It seemed the idea of packaging for a movie would be forever. (This idea proved compostable, although the packaging wasn’t.)
Even Roland Sabatier’s Evidence (1966) - for which Sabatier expected his audience to mentally supply the images, sound, story, odour, etc. - came in a film can. A can of film for the audience to ponder as they unspooled their mental movie. A can of film as a vague, if weighty, prompt.
Once upon a time, people would say, “I have it,” meaning they owned a copy of a movie on disc or tape.2
(The subtext was that either:
a) they were yet to watch it, or
b) that they had such a need for instant access to this movie that they kept it nearby in a graspable format.)
For them, the movie was a discrete object to hold.
Now, they - people - are more likely to say a movie is on their queue. Or that they’ve “downloaded it” to a hard drive. Today’s consumer copies exist as endless and volatile indexes. In recursively packed virtual ‘folders.’ Packaged within an icon or - depending how you look at it - a metaphor (which is even harder to browse).
A movie is no longer boxed plastic to have but pure potential to maintain.
A movie is no longer something that you could make a little duvet for and keep in a cardboard box in your sock drawer.
Should the filmmaker compensate for this with her images? Probably not. Should she at least think about it while she calibrates the visual heft of her movie? Maybe!
Concrete questions
What is your movie made of?
What is the audience meant to think it’s made of?
Might it be pretend not to be what it is?
(Pretend not to be motion photography and sound caught on one format, manipulated in another, shipped in still another, and playing back in an environment you, the filmmaker, could hardly have imagined.)
Might it pretend to be something it’s not?
(A lost VHS, shadows on a cave wall, neurons firing, a fine work of architecture, a book, or another overused proxy.)
(Or something more nebulous in concept; a stone-ish thing, a more or less structured goop of fat and proteins, fur, dark matter, waves of this or that.)
Do you imagine your movie to be an object? Or like an object? And if so, what will you use to
construct your images?
Give them their weight?
their bulk?
their edges?
their scars?
their pliability?
their unattainability?
their toe-stubbability?
What is your relationship with the materiality of
your film (the literal fabric - digital or otherwise - that you’re manipulating),
your movie as it exists for the audience,
your cinema?
How does the way you relate to the objectness of your film affect the creative choices you make?
The look of the image surface
The behaviour of the image surface
The look and behaviour of the image volume
The implied source of the film.
How does the (real and/or pretend) materiality of your image surface interact with the material nature of your image volume?
What, then, is the effect of all this on the odour of your movie’s look?
Film by the foot
It was the 1950s, and Peter Kubelka was commissioned to make a commercial for a dance bar.
Kubelka filmed dancers in silhouette and alternated the images in positive and negative, black on white and white on black. He edited the footage to an inhuman metrical rhythm. His film was something else.3
The dance bar rejected the commercial. It was too crazy! Too abstract. But Kubelka showed it anyway:
By way of exhibition, Kubelka hung the film print of the commercial from haystack posts in an alpine meadow, inviting audiences to run their fingers through it. (What a narrative!) The meter of the movie became the measure of the fabric.
Whether the dance bar enjoyed a rise in admissions or drink sales following the exhibition of their rejected commercial does not appear to be on record.
Please share your thoughts, queries, and exercises from this week’s lesson in the comments.
“Fully hauntological” luxury home media
Dean Hurley’s latest release seems to cast a polite nod to most of the sub-topics we’ve discussed these past two or more weeks.
David Lynch’s regular sound supervisor has made a “fully hauntological” score for a Blu-ray (?) release of Tod Browning’s The Mystic (1925). The score features “dusty accordion, nylon-stringed guitar, calliope, brass, and more…all captured through sheets of authentic optical and analog noise.” And you can purchase it on MP3!
Definite music box/snow globe/Maddin/Argento/Caretaker vibes. If vibes are your thing. Love a breathy calliope when I’m thinking about the odour of a film’s look.
You can listen to this instead of doing homework this week.
Next week, we’ll learn about meta-fabric. What happens when the materiality (or otherwise) of your film gets snagged on its metaphysical substructures. Bring a needle and thread!
Class dismissed.
~Graeme Cole.
(Principal)
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It seems relevant to note that Frampton ‘said’ this in a dialogue conducted by typewriter.
Sometimes they’ll say, “I have a copy.” This is false modesty.
The dancers were only ever shadows or absences, never quite there. The strict metrical rhythm of the editing was pre-human; pre-sentimentality. You cannot film dance, and this is how to not film dance.