Towards A Cinema of Openness (Gently Closing It and Going Away)

An odd red carpet experience. And how to costume your character when they don't have a body.

Nov 15, 2021

Dear Students, Alumni, Faculty, and Trespassers,

Quick news bullets first!

Everybody at the UPV is “pulling it together” to get a new video workshop finished in time for the winter festivities.
My ‘amateur’-themed video essay using the WTO archive will appear in 2022.
Anselm Burke and I conducted a conversation on Lee Man-Hui’s Black Hair (1964) for noir fanzine Stimmung 2. Do grab a copy if you spot one.
The latest episode of UNIVERSAL EAR (which I directed, DoP’d, and edited) plays at festivals in Istanbul and Marseille this weekend.

That was the news.

Next up: reflections on a peculiar red carpet experience in peculiar times. And: a new instruction, regarding how to costume virtual characters.

Contaminating the Red Carpet

The Bistrik7 filmmaker collective (including myself) made an omnibus movie in and about the pandemic. Letters From The Ends Of The World.

It was selected at short notice to open the Sarajevo Film Festival, along with the new Danis Tanović picture. (In the resulting confusion, our entry in the MUBI database is illustrated with a still from the Tanović.)

I attended the premiere with three colleagues. It was an odd experience. Odd because “opening the festival” was a big deal but “our movie itself” was not. We were interviewed on the red carpet for prime time TV. Invited to lunch with the gentleman Wim Wenders. Made to feel more welcome even than usual at the warmly welcoming Sarajevo Film Festival.

Talent campus attendees were bussed in to fill empty seats while everyone else went to the Tanović. Thankfully, these attendees were tender and engaged. Which is a great way to be a filmmaking student. (But not the only great way). At our Q&A, it was suggested that there is a difference between ‘cinema’ and ‘movies.’ And, that Letters qualified as ‘cinema’ - a particularly post-pandemic form of Cinema - because:

Letters is raw and personal yet generous and collective. (Which is not to insist that it is any good).
The screening was social, outdoors, a fringe or even niche affair amongst the pizazz of the festival; in this atmosphere, the wilful communicability of the movie was magnified, a dialogue between screen, filmmakers, and audience.

Openness

I understand the above diagnosis of our screening. Do you? Not sure if I agree with it. Probably do. But it’s something to think about.

The shared factor of those bullet points just above is: openness.

Exercise: How do you make an open film? Is openness a desirable outcome? Make a movie on this subject. Make sure it’s closed.

How does one make an open film? Is openness even a desirable outcome? What if your characters escape? Just look at our Letters movie for example: the characters escaped. Each segment of the film was about the quarantine life of its maker. But when the film was chosen for a festival, we maker-characters broke out of our segments and our quarantines. To share air with the movie’s audience.

(We, the characters who got out, took responsible precautions. Vaccines, tests, masks etc. But what if your open movie character felt differently?)

New instruction: Costuming the Post-Corporeal Non-Body

Regular visitors to the UPV website enjoy the regular addition of instructional texts. Here follows a copy of the latest.

A sublimate is a massless cinematic character. All cinematic characters are without mass in the real world. But a sublimate is also without mass in their own diegesis. Perhaps they are a ghost, a video game sprite, or a virtual entity. As our sublimation into the digital world gains pace, sublimate characters will become more common.

But what should they wear?

Removing physical limitations from the realm of costuming is an exciting prospect. But it introduces infinite possibilities into the mix. Getting dressed is hard enough today (the early 2020s). Things are about to get harder, even as ‘things’ de-materialise.

Costume is a matter of choice. Characters and real people must choose what clothes to wear. We all must decide which colour of make-up to apply and how to carry our hair.

Pioneers of virtual worlds have already discovered that when you don’t have a body, your sartorial choices expand exponentially. And that means a lot more time spent in front of the mirror. If limitless options make dressing difficult for you, a real human with a thick back catalogue of identity choices, imagine how overwhelmed your characters must feel. After all, each is already little more than a cipher, an abstract entity. Especially before they put on some clothes.

Post-Directional Attire

A sublimate is a massless cinematic character. The sublimate’s costume may expand in all directions. Or, more likely, it will exist (once chosen and styled) in a post-directional state. That is to say that top and bottom become meaningless, and pockets no longer need be convenient to the wearer’s reach.

And that is to say nothing of the cost! Does your character have cash, if she is made of software? Are her resources as unlimited as the potential size of her post-directional hat?

When your character becomes fully-modular, the defining boundaries of costume are loosened. Yes, your character might choose to wear a lilac necktie to a showdown. But might he also choose to wear a blue sense of humour, hired for the evening from a virtual tailor, or downloaded for free under a Creative Commons license? Is he still the same character with that sense of humour? In that necktie?

Impractice

A practicum is a guided part of a course where students explore the practical application of the theory they have learned.

Jason Urban & Leslie Mutchler have created an online Color Impracticum. As the title suggests, it is hardly practical. I salute the impracticality of this ‘course’ and aspire to deliver impractica through Unfound Peoples Videotechnic over time. Meanwhile, you can get some hue on your hands over at Urban and Mutchler’s “personal mythology of colour.”

Now, go kick up some leaves.

~Graeme Cole.

(Principal)

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