◡◶▿ ROTT08 | Pathetic media

🥀 A movie is a site of organisation we visit to feel, for a moment, that decay makes thematic sense. Plus: NTS stars feat. John Cassavetes & how to merge your movie. | Rotting the Image Week 08

Nov 20, 2023

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Hello, hello! Welcome, welcome. It’s week eight of our series of micro-essays on the death and afterlife of your movie’s look. Are you sitting comfortably?

Okay. First, a recap. Cast your mind back to last week. We learned:

Digital filmmakers like to call their .mov, .avi, and .3gp files “wrappers” - and to say these wrappers contain the data that spells out their film. And that’s alright.
But a filmmaker might instead consider the wrapper to be any format type that holds their movie at the point of exhibition. 35 mm, for instance!
Inside this wrapper, there may be various other wrappers that have been added along the way, if the filmmaker has transferred and re-transferred her images “for effect.”
Each of these wrappers affects the visual odour of what it contains; the filmmaker might combine them to manufacture a particularly meaningful stink. Oh!

Great. Good. In today’s lesson, we’ll examine what happens when that wrapper buckles or decays. We'll find out how:

🌸 Noted human and cinematographer Fred Kelemen has drawn a metaphor between analogue-digital and organic-artificial. And it’s not as simple as all that.

🎨 Art without the capacity to crumble or rot doesn’t hit the same.

🎞️ Thankfully, since filmmaking has so many moving parts, the form’s various media exist in a state of perpetual decomposition.

👩‍🎨 The filmmaker might exploit this vulnerability - but she must tread carefully.

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.

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

Digital flowers

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

Fred Kelemen tells us the difference between film and digital video is like that between real and plastic flowers.

Of course, you can take a plastic flower apart, and its pieces will be fine. But a real flower has been “nourished,” says Kelemen. Nourished by light and anxious attention.

Still, there’s something about the persistence of tooth marks in plastic, isn’t there?

Pathetic media

Every art medium has its Achilles’ Heel: a gap in the seal that leads to decay or destruction. If this were not the case, art wouldn’t mean a lot to us. Decay and finitude are part of the human rhythm. They are wired into our condition.

The movies are a particularly wriggly art form. So, the media of movies have very pronounced gaps in their seals:

Chemical film breaks down. (Often, it ignites).
Magnetic video flakes, warps, or fades. (It is the sheer extent of VHS’s weakness that makes it such a powerfully pathetic medium.)
Digital video data corrupts. Sometimes, it just pops out of existence altogether!
- Digital media are also subject to ‘social decay’:
  - Digital video quickly becomes networked. So, nobody thinks to provide the anxious attention it perhaps craves.
  - The most touching weakness of digital video is that we might someday find ourselves without the software to play it. The stuff of myth.

Decay of these types may occur or appear during the screening of a movie. As often as not, the decay of the medium adds pathos to its content. Flawed film, flaking videotape, or moshed video data adds pathos when it resonates with the decay of a:

Character
Situation
Relationship
Location
Language
Theme
Moral
Narrative
Notion
etc.

The decay of the medium and of one or more of these elements mix, accentuating the shared feelings they evoke. Whether the decay occurs:

throughout,
in waves,
or sputters,
or in occasional splashes.

For example, a video that happens to go crunchy right when a character’s loyalties go crunchy may hit with greater impact than a flawless exhibition print.

(If the video goes crunchy (for example) before or after a crunchy moment in the movie, it may add a new emotional or narrative ‘beat.’ Could be good.)

The filmmaker may deliberately damage her movie’s media to achieve this pathos. However, if this technique is not true to the movie’s current1 and internal mediaphysics, it will backfire. Any sensitive audience will know the movie’s faking it. (Could that be good?)

Better if she chooses an appropriately pathetic medium to begin with and lets nature take its course.

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From John Cassavetes to Henry Cow

Here’s a recommendation for your ears. “Searchlight Moonbeam is the new narrative compilation from Time Is Away (Jack Rollo and Elaine Tierney).” Narrative compilation! It opens with a song from The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (Dir: John Cassavetes, 1976).

This ‘Time Is Away’ duo are new to me. Perhaps you know them? They seem very interesting. If you don’t know them, let this be the start of your ‘narrative Googling.’

I was curious about one of the bands on the mix. Slapp Happy. I discovered this inspiring fact about them: “The band members moved to England in 1974 where they merged with [a band called] Henry Cow.”

Not a supergroup - a merger! Wow.

Mightn’t you merge the production of your next movie with that of a neighbouring crew whose work or fashion sense you admire? Do it! Just show up and merge your crew and your movie with theirs. They might resist at first, but remind them that it worked out well for Henry Cow.

One last note. Lately, I’ve heard several people refer to our weekly micro-essays as “philosophical.” They are not philosophical. They are instructional.

Please make sure to “use” these instructions. Each has undergone (or is scheduled for) a rigorous “meat test.” Meaning an experiment to prove that it can be applied practically outside of the classroom.

I know that I haven’t included many practical exercises this term. Perhaps that was a mistake. Perhaps it’s all a mistake!

Let me know in the comments.

Current

The current is the flow of a movie:

the synergy of its components as experienced in time;
the essence of the 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.

Volodymyr Nanneman chose this term 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 do better to address - ‘current,’ which is something quite different, or rather more precise.