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Dear eternal filmmaking students,

It is, by now, well-known film.factory lore: of Béla Tarr’s 10 first-generation graduating MFA students, four of us are now legally married to one or another of the others. And that includes Gonzalo Escobar Mora, the subject of Supply No.2, who is married to Emma Rozanski, who you read about in Supply No.1.1 They married in Vegas!

Bogotá- and sometimes Chicago-based Escobar Mora has a list of odd short fictions behind him. Not to mention his sophisticated short doc Accidentally Sprayed (2008).

Now he is preparing his first feature, “based on the true story of a mother, who, in order to continue with her life, defiantly requests a meeting with the young man who murdered her son.” It is called RETENTION. “Restorative justice, reality, and fiction come together in this hybrid film, where actors and the real characters of the story, come together to advance and expand the narrative,” he says.

And if you send him some funds before Sunday, it will help him meet his crowdfunding stretch goal and extend production to a two-week shoot!

👛 Support Gonzalo Escobar Mora

You may wish to watch the films before you read the interview (the links are below). You may want to watch them after! Settle down. Let’s meet your supply teacher.

Connecting the dots

I interviewed Gonzalo Escobar Mora by text message between the 20th and 30th April, 2026. Quotes have been lightly re-formatted. Escobar Mora says that’s okay.

There is a lot that seems elementary in the films of Gonzalo Escobar Mora.

The aesthetic seems raw. The camerawork, unfussy. The sound design, unadorned.

Seems that way, anyway!

Some of his films seem like found or selected moments from which the viewer can piece together a broader story and set of character arcs. Dialogue is sparse. Occasional sentences may colour a situation, but are of only supplementary use in following the connection between shots and sequences. Between “scenes.”

Escobar Mora’s first fiction was Amongst Us (2015). In it, a young couple separately deal with the feelings and infections that have arisen from their infidelities.

With its fixed frames, minimal in-frame action, and handsome cast, Amongst Us may feel like one of those angsty photo stories from old teenage magazines. But the motion picture adds a stillness that a photograph can’t contain.

“I would say that it is the result of an ‘instinctual style,’ mixed with consequences from the working conditions,” says Escobar Mora, on how he decides what to add or withhold from a set-up. “I think I am able to construct the ideas in my mind (which could be a regurgitating salad of the films I’ve seen and liked), but I have to admit that doing too many of the required jobs myself (camera, editing, sound mixing, colour correcting), has its positive and negative consequences in some of the films. Perhaps that is a style!” he says.

And indeed, from Amongst Us onwards, the relationship between the filmmaking conditions and the filmmaker’s style evolves. Minimal grading, chance locations, uncharismatic performances, and boxy sound come to delineate Escobar Mora’s captivating universe.

This universe awakens with a queasy sense of the uncanny but soon becomes outright weird. But normal-weird. Normal-weird, as a result of the thin line between:

• the real-like raw elements that go into the film, and

• their arrangement on and around the screen.

The strange ways his films think out his notions and curiosities at you emerge from how Escobar Mora “thinks” and “does” with his raw notions.

“The more you ‘chew on it’, contemplate it, around and around in your head, you start making sense of certain things, finding or adjusting connections,” he tells us. “It is not a very efficient process, but it is a way to solve my writing deficiencies.”

He made Pool Version (2016) in Sarajevo after Amongst Us.

“Pool Version was the result of wanting to make a film about a woman I met at a cafe, and finding at the same time an interesting location,” Escobar Mora tells us. “I was having issues choosing what to tell from her stories, so I ended up finding connections to the location scouting pictures. I basically wrote a script based on that, after staring at the images for a while, moving them around, and generating from them a kind of storyboard.”

Pool Version extends Escobar Mora’s fragmentary style. The movie alternates between scenes of an unemployed woman’s encounters in a cafe and dreamlike sequences of a woman with the same face at a water park at night. The closest thing to a through line between the elements that make Pool Version is Alena Dzebo’s bare but compelling performance as an invisible woman, watched.

But she is also at the root of its split: switching between vape and cigarette as she nervously attempts to resell a hookah; different incarnations of the same neurosis shadow different layers of reality.

Matching silhouettes recur from one location and plain of reality to another. Apparently symbolic presences shapeshift or teleport through the sequences. Every bit part and non-player character seems to have a mythological purpose/presence. The elements are coming to life.

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Beyond the apparent

The elementary nature of Gonzalo Escobar Mora’s movies situates them in a chaotic real-like world. A world where things be and happen much as they might in the cold chaos of your daily life. Narrative is in the eye of the beholder. “Narrative is in the eye of the beholder” means the filmmaker tasks the audience with resolving this world into sense.

But from Pool Version (2016) onwards, the filmmaker further complicates the relationship between the world in which he shoots his films and the world the audience encounters.

In Pool Version, non sequiturs, doppelgängers, and the director’s aesthetic choices confuse the apparent veracity of each shot. These oddities confuse the apparent veracity of each shot by undermining the movie’s initial real-like appearance.

But the filmmaker does offer clues. Clues on how the audience should evaluate the materials they encounter.

• The title itself may be a clue on how to read the overlapping realities in the movie. Or it may just muddy the water.

• In the opening shot, one of the filmmaker’s trademark long, observational takes, the perspective is thrown when a drinking glass is lifted to the ‘face’ of the camera.

Pool Version is “a film about itself.” The tagline says that. Escobar Mora tells us that he made this film about the process of making this film. The filmmaker character - played by Escobar Mora’s filmmaker colleague, Lorenzo Fabbro - is a fictionalised version of Escobar Mora.

In fact, Gonzalo Escobar Mora embeds himself in others of his films, too:

• Accidentally Sprayed (2008) comes on like a political documentary but its politics are situated in the form of the personal essay.

• In Enthusiasts (2021), Escobar Mora and his filmmaker wife, Emma Rozanski, play fictionalised versions of themselves.

• Various of his films borrow the filmmaker’s biographical details.

“When the story is not about me, I have felt the need to include my personal connection, and make it part of the narrative,” Escobar Mora tells us. “It is like an ethical stance that helps in validating my intentions. I also usually enjoy being reminded of ‘the maker’ behind the work. I feel it gives a perspective on where to anchor your reactions.

“One very straight forward example (in the sense of actually seeing the maker) is Inextinguishable Fire by Harun Farocki; and another not so direct, The Headless Woman by Lucrecia Martel, where we feel the social class differences in the region where the filmmaker grew up, and where the movie takes place.

“I feel her perspective very much, especially in the scene where the protagonist drives to buy a plant pot in the neighbourhood where the dead kid used to live. The camera inside the car creates a powerful and smart tension that subtly feeds the whole movie.”

Living locations

“I do work with ‘carefully’ planned scripts,” Gonzalo Escobar Mora tells us. “Apart from liking ‘to feel prepared,’ it’s just a necessity with the time limitations on the set. However, I am aware of the ‘rigidity’ this preparedness can carry, so I thrive to be open to suggestions coming from the crew, actors, or the situations themselves.”

Gonzalo Escobar Mora’s debut film was a documentary, Accidentally Sprayed (2008). Poetic and political, more than a documentary, the film is an essay (a trying). A personal essay about the aerial fumigation of coca crops in Colombia and, more broadly, everybody’s complicity in everything.

Accidentally Sprayed was filmed and photographed on a range of formats. It encompasses bits of:

• found footage,

• animation,

• interview,

• meta-documentary,

• children’s show,

• staged protest, and

• materials borrowed and shared between friends and brothers.

In Accidentally Sprayed, Escobar Mora explicitly mediates and re-mediates the materials and situations he selects or constructs. This makes it feel more deliberate than his short fictions.

His short fictions, although cooked up from his mind, appear to take form through encounter and juxtaposition rather than heavy-handed mediation or conspicuous editorialising. Well, Accidentally Sprayed is also about the media. And about the relationship between words, rhetoric, and science, and the world of doing, feeling, and hurting.

In other words, the world he encounters in Accidentally Sprayed is one of pre-existing conditions and materials. The worlds he encounters in his fictions are yet to unfold. The raw materials are right in front of him, and he keeps them raw.

“I always shoot a ‘freeer’ version of what was planned,” he tells us. “[But] the hardest thing is to make fast (and good) decisions when things are not working out. […] I could also say that my goal is to have the ‘mental clarity and openness’ I assume from filmmakers such as Apichatpong [Weerasethakul]. His films and his class exercises embody the way I would like to function on a set: being calmly alert of your surroundings, letting them infiltrate whatever you think your ideas are.

“As I am currently casting for my next film, I have very much present Béla’s take on it, which is based on finding and working with people’s personalities, rather than people ‘acting’ your characters. I guess this works for certain kinds of films.”

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This is not to say that Escobar Mora refuses to acknowledge the presence and power of artifice in his fictions.

His trademark locked-off frames encourage the audience to find depth and meaning in framing, light play, and reflections. In Enthusiasts (2021), jumps through time are achieved with in-shot lighting effects and stylised sound design.

The viewer may even notice the characters ‘fade out’ in front of their background. Special effects! Their ghostly presences materialise the spectre of big life decisions and animate latent histories and/or futures of the filmmaker’s real-world flat.

A location is never just a background. Escobar Mora’s films acknowledge his complicity in the perpetual re-making of any given place. In doing so, he tenderises the tissue between the real world location and the spaces of his imagination.

“I am considering options for my next film. Depending on the budget, I might schedule rehearsals on the actual locations, have an editor on set, schedule longer shooting times, or aim simply to “listening to life” [sic], as our dear mentor [Béla Tarr] used to emphasise.”

👛 Support Gonzalo Escobar Mora

Thank you, Gonzalo! We hope you get all the money you need.

Students, you can leave your thoughts, queries, and exercises from this week’s lesson in the comments.

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School break

Unfound Peoples Videotechnic has inducted a few new subscribers since our last lesson in December. But I have been unable to press on with our usual Monday email-lessons. Today’s guest teacher spot is just a message out of the blue; I don’t know when you’ll hear from the school again.

I would love to teach you again soon. The amazing things I know. The fabulous things I imagine I know. But it just isn’t possible in the foreseeable. There isn’t the time. There isn’t the money. There isn’t the emotional strength!

But think of me when you’re eating your Monday morning pastries. I’ll be thinking of you.

And one last thing - share Gonzalo’s crowdfunder!

👛 Support Gonzalo Escobar Mora

Class dismissed,

~Graeme Cole.

(Principal)

P.S. 🎶

📹 Unfound Peoples Videotechnic | Cloud-based filmmaking thought. ☁️

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Dear eternal filmmaking students,

It’s been a tough year in cinema for hapless white blokes and Alana Haim characters. I’m not Alana Haim, but I also struggled: my efforts to create a trend - 𝕦𝕟𝕜𝕖𝕞𝕡𝕥 𝕓𝕠𝕪 𝕒𝕦𝕥𝕦𝕞𝕟 - based on the wrinkled vintage M&S-core shirts and sloppy beardsmanship of Josh O’Conner, Wagner Moura et al. (et me) failed to go viral.

The sun has had a better year, snatching small but pivotal roles in Levers, Resurrection, Nosferatu and more.

I didn’t see many “new movies” in 2025. But that didn’t stop me from submitting a “top 10 movies of 2025” list for a poll held by the email community. The results were announced live on computers last night, and - I’m writing this before hearing the results - I lost massively.

You can read that list elsewhere; here, I have summed up, Axios-style and in no special order, my notes on some of the most and least important movies of 2025. Let’s all try again next year.

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Some movies of 2025 (Director names in brackets)

Sirāt (Óliver Laxe)

Genre: It’s Gerry meets The Wages of Fear - on acid-laced poo!

In a nutshell: Quentin Dupieux picture without the jokes. A suburban dad and his son join a band of techno minstrels on an odyssey across the Moroccan desert, but they get into a bit of a pickle. The irony of the floor-is-lava climax scene is that you know these characters must have spent a considerable amount of time tightrope-walking in parks.

Why it matters: Just when you think the dialogue has hit a low point, it turns out to be an incantation that unlocks another metaphysical realm. Brilliant!

Lesson for filmmakers: Not sure any of the actors or non-actors managed to “go there” with their grief. But also: how to do this? Laxe comes closest to articulating grief when Sirāt shifts from desert realism to broader visual metaphor and/or batshittery.

On a personal note: Would’ve been funnier if the movie’s wandering desert ravers had encountered the Daft Punk robots walking back the other way.

Go deeper: Don’t let your characters get lost like the ravers of Sirāt. Instead, try baking a map right into your movie. Read more:

The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt)

Genre: Low-octane crime dribbler (the corduroy Good Time).

In a nutshell: It’s Kelly Reichardt’s turn with the heist drums. She ropes in 2025-veteran Josh O’Connor for one last job as a compulsive thief and dreamy granny-basher. But honestly, nobody seems very motivated in this movie. JoCo’s anti-hero doesn’t desperately need the money. No one points a gun at him. And when he’s on the run, he turns down a chance to hop the border because he doesn’t fancy Canada. (The scene of him forging a passport exists only for the practical challenge and sensual pleasure - it’s a shame JB will be in prison when Antonioni’s The Passenger hits the cinemas in 1975).

Why it matters: John Magaro’s smile.

Lesson for filmmakers: The great thing about making a getaway film is that you can end it when you get bored, and The Mastermind’s abrupt ending manages both an actual surprise (the second of the movie) and thematic resonance. The most thrilling (and relatable) scene, however, is when Josh tries to put something in the loft.

On a personal note: Perhaps this is like when dogs ask for more dog content, but I felt The Mastermind was just a shaving cut away from being one of the great ‘Dad’ movies.

Go deeper: Cinematographer looking for an alternative to The Mastermind’s tea-stained patina? Try this:

Bonus tip: The most practical Kelly Reichardt interview I came across for this movie was in Vogue, actually.

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Resurrection (Bi Gan)

Genre: Megalopolis but competent.

In a nutshell: In a future where filmmakers have forgotten how to dream, Bi Gan succumbs to “young filmmaker with high expectations on his shoulder” syndrome and is condemned to wander an over-elaborate 20th-century film set forever with his long-suffering camera operator.

Why it matters: Nobody in narrative cinema understands the power and potential of the image volume - “the pretend space beyond the surface of a movie’s image” - like Bi Gan.

Lesson for filmmakers: Make sure you charge the batteries when you get your camera back from Bi.

On a personal note: It turns out the three edge seats on the Regent Street Cinema seating plan are weird little balconies that give an oblique, slightly obstructed view and an evening of shared intimacy with a dating couple sitting next to you.

Go deeper: How filmmakers can build a little pretend-volumetric universe from scratch:

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Materialists (Celine Song)

Genre: People talk about “foreign cinema,” but I have rarely had such a profound feeling of experiencing an exotic culture conveyed through an exotic screen language.

In a nutshell: Kerry from Succession seeks an equally rich but slightly taller replacement for Logan Roy. Unfortunately, she hires the world’s most cynical and over-screenwriting-workshopped matchmaker (Dakota Johnson) whose Main Character Genes have a better chance than Kerry of surviving natural selection and taking a decent inheritance along down the generations.

Why it matters: Apparently, the man playing “John” is one of the world’s highest-grossing actors, although I’ve never seen him before.

Lesson for filmmakers: Celine Song is a very thorough screenwriter: the dialogue is all written in triplicate so that nothing gets missed.

On a personal note: I started watching this for reasons I’m not prepared to get into. I wished the characters all good luck around the 45-minute mark and went to bed.

Go deeper: If you, like the Materialists, seek money and aren’t sure why nobody’s given you any to make your feature, read this:

One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson)

Genre: Tunnel fiction.

In a nutshell: It’s literally one battle after a bloody nother.

Why it matters: Sarcastically puts Eddington’s equivocality into perspective. In Eddington’s world, evil doesn’t exist, but everyone is equally spiteful; in OBAA’s, half the characters are evil, and half are noble (and mostly either incompetent, drunk, or dead). As such, between the two films, there’s something for all audiences.

Lesson for filmmakers: In a year of movies titled after character names (Hamnet, Jay Kelly, Nosferatu, Steve), character traits (Deaf, Left-Handed Girl, The Running Man), or character pillow talk (Honey Don’t!, Sorry, Baby, Wake Up Dead Man), fair play to PTA for naming this one after his plot structure.

On a personal note: Thank you, Lockwood, for taking me to see this for my birthday ☺️.

Go deeper: Inspired by PTA’s use of space and spaces? Read ↓this↓ before you make your next picture!

Black Bag (Steven Soderbergh)

Genre: A whodunit wrapped in a marriage wrapped in a national spy agency wrapped in an extensive and versatile director filmography.

In a nutshell: The real puzzle is to work out who Fassbender’s performance is an impersonation of. There are five suspects and one of them is his wife.

Why it matters: A glance at the quotes page on IMDb will show you how bad the dialogue is, but Marisa Abela’s “cover to cover” is this movie’s “a few small beers” and Abela/Del Toro are 2025’s Cheekiest Characters®.

Lesson for filmmakers: Tom Burke expertly exceeds his allotted space as a British TV actor - i.e. he doesn’t seem like one - without exceeding his allotted space as a British character - i.e., his horizons are foreshortened.

On a personal note: I’m curious if the “Dark Windows” movie the heroes go to see is the real Dark Windows (2023), but I’m not prepared to watch the real Dark Windows (2023) to find out.

Go deeper: Planning a “game with guns” sequence like Soderbergh’s climactic scene? Nobody’s done it better than Hollis & Joyce:

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The Choral (Nicholas Hytner)

Genre: British

In a nutshell: Untitled Alan Bennet Movie, Great War Edition

Why it matters: Maybe the UK’s “Materialists.”

Lesson for filmmakers: The Choral’s dialogue is all spoken very slowly, and most of the choir are there to explain the ‘plot’ to each other and, by extension, older and/or TV audiences. You could consider making a version of your movie this way, just as European filmmakers used to shoot their scenes in French and then re-shoot them in German to make parallel versions for different audiences.

Bonus lesson: I don’t know much about lenses - but I’m pretty sure they were using the wrong lenses for much of this movie.

On a personal note: I went to see it with my mum, which is the proper use of this film. An unexpected handjob gag towards the end of the second act ruined the mood.1

Go deeper: What we exposit about when we exposit about exposition:

The 8th of April, 2024 (Patrick Marshall)

Genre: Home movie, road movie, home road movie, eclipse movie

In a nutshell: Multiple filmmakers this year have experimented with triangulating movie time, auditorium time, and the movement of the sun. This movie is both the cutest and the most political of them.

Why it matters: It's showing at the London Short Film Festival in January.

Lesson for filmmakers: You can pack it all into the length of a single Super 8 cartridge.

On a personal note: Patrick is one of my best friends, but I would love this movie anyway.

Go deeper: How the home moviemaker might match her structure to her theme:

Levers (Rhayne Vermette)

Genre: Eclipse movie

In a nutshell: It’s a “John Cage cover version of Chris Kraus’s Gravity and Grace.” On serotonin!”

Why it matters: Rhayne Vermette gets her silly on! Rarely has a ‘serious piece of filmmaking’ been so playful.

Lesson for filmmakers: “filmmaking is such a potent ground to actually manifest some shit.”

On a personal note: My favourite new movie of the year… and the one that truly got my “I love cinema” senses tingling.

Go deeper: How to make a movie without showing anything:

The Phoenician Scheme (Wes Anderson)

Genre: Wes Anderson

In a nutshell: Benicio del Toro, Mia Threapleton, Michael Cera, Riz Ahmed, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Mathieu Amalric, Richard Ayoade, Jeffrey Wright, Scarlett Johansson, Benedict Cumberbatch, Rupert Friend, Hope Davis, F. Murray Abraham, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Willem Dafoe, and Bill Murray.

Why it matters: The real-world battle for freedom in America is being fought through egregious manipulation of the paper theatre of public life, from the built environment back through a palimpsest of politically revisioned online media, engineered language use and a backdrop of AI-driven illusionism and manufactured consent, and here we are hate-fucking the latest Wes Anderson picture with our eyes 👍.

Lesson for filmmakers: Spend 15 years studying the movies of Karel Zeman and then the rest of your life trying to forget them.

On a personal note: I don’t remember watching this movie, but I can imagine what I saw.

Go deeper: On building your movie with cardboard:

So that’s where we are in cinema. We all hate each other and we’re going insane. America is tying off the human project, even if elsewhere we’ve still got a lot on. Okay! Fine.

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Going forward, we’ll be checking in on Timothee Chalamet’s pursuit of greatness, making sure he’s touching all the progress markers and milestones. While being careful not to veer from our own path towards mediocrity. Along with my job application to knot Josh O’Connor’s ties for him, this may mean there won’t be any UPV emails for a while. Well, there are lots of old ones to read.

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See you in 2026 - at the movies, no doubt!

~Graeme Cole.

(Principal)

📹 Unfound Peoples Videotechnic | Cloud-based filmmaking thought. ☁️

Dear eternal filmmaking students,

This is it: term coming to a premature close. You’ll find the final microessay of the series below.

I don’t know when the next will be. Could be quite a while. But that’s okay. As I’m sure you’ve understood by now, the gaps between the newsletters are as important as the newsletters themselves.

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While I’m gone, I invite you to revisit our classes on beginnerism, image texture, and set design. And all the others! And I would be super-grateful if you could share the school’s texts with your colleagues, students, and professors. And all your little social media buddies.

Look, I can make some little buttons to guide you:

Advanced Amateury

Rotting the Image

Maps, Flaps, & Infinite Wallpaper

A new annotated contents page for last autumn’s series on home movies has also appeared:

Home moviemaking

And there’s the little button.

Great. Now. Remember last week’s essays on speculative Richard Linklaterism? We learned how:

• “A metabolist epic is a movie that is filmed over a long period of time at intervals that more or less match the intervals in the narrative, so that the cast and environment age authentically.”

• The danger in making such a film is that your cast or environment might change beyond usefulness before you reach the denouement.

• One way to mitigate this risk is to build the volatility of nature and your actors into the premise of the movie.

• Or you could go the other way and engage electronics, using powerful computer simulations or time travel to follow your actors into the future - though this comes with risks of its own.

Nice! I am sure we will all do that.

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.

Now. Are you familiar with the sound of chairs scraping on the hard floor of a cold room on a Tuesday evening? Then I think you will totally get today’s lesson. It’s about the frozen time-outside-of-time of the extracurricular activity space, and how:

🎻 The opening of a film establishes its pitch and tension - just like an orchestral tune-up.

💭 But if the orchestral conductor or the filmmaker chooses to sustain that preparatory note forever, their work may leave linear time and form, instead, a bubble of time.

🎭 Belgian filmmaker Boris Lehman reinforced his film’s “bubble time” by nesting an absurdist bubble play within an absurdist documentary.

🎥 Lehman’s plot, prop, setting, music, framing, and editing choices all contribute to the pleasant, if disconcerting, non-time of his movie.

Maybe you’ve seen the movie we’re discussing: Ne pas stagner (Don’t Stagnate, Director: Boris Lehman, 1973). Maybe you’ll make an effort to watch it before or after reading. It doesn’t matter! There are no spoilers, because events in the movie just “are.”

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Bubble time

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

During an orchestral tune-up, musicians and audience hover outside of time. The game has not yet begun, but neither can the players turn back. So, the concert conductor has a special opportunity. She has the audience’s time and attention. And she can direct her orchestra to hold that tense, dispersed warm-up note - concert pitch - for as long as she wishes.

When constructing a movie, the filmmaker has this opportunity, too. The filmmaker has the audience’s time. The titles and opening sequences of the film may function like a tune-up. Focussing attention, setting the pitch, establishing tension.

How long might the filmmaker hold that preparatory note?

The audience expects the established tension to be deflated by a moment of catharsis or understanding. They expect the tension to be reinflated and redeflated across the movie’s duration. To inhale and exhale as the characters navigate cause and effect across diegetic time.

But the filmmaker is under no obligation to release this tension at all.

Rather than a line or a loop, she may make a bubble of time.

Stagnant time

Boris Lehman’s documentary Don’t Stagnate (1973) begins with a tune-up. A single chord drones on the soundtrack for minutes as Lehman’s subjects introduce themselves one by one: Charles, Cécile, Hilda, Michel, etc.

The sustained chord recalls the sound of orchestra instruments tuning up to a shared ‘A’ note, group by group: wind, brass, strings. Each of the documentary subjects also has their timbre. Their register. Their defining vibration (or wobble).

What is the documentary about? It orbits an amateur theatre group. The group is composed of “former mental patients brought together after their hospitalisation and some of their therapists.”

They have devised a play to perform. A play about a group of lost mountaineers. The lost mountaineers must decide whether to escape the purgatorial mountain inn they’ve found and attempt to return to the world below. Where war may or may not have broken out in their absence.

The subjects maintain each of their defining wobbles evenly for the duration of the edit. There are no revelations, no catharsis. No substantial conflict outside of:

• the perpetual inner conflict of the human condition, and

• the sustained web of conflict of social interaction and cooperation.

And certainly no resolution.

They just be. The concert pitch - their establishing note - is the thing.

That opening sequence tune-up drone soon begins to grate on the movie’s audience. A psychoacoustic effect. Or perhaps it is the unease of being held in an extended moment that causes the sound to grate. The uncanniness of unsatisfied patience.

But no one is more impatient, during the opening sequence, than the subjects themselves. Talking about their real lives when they long for the meta-being of the rehearsal room. The droning chord and montage structure of the opening sequence emphasise the soupiness of their lives. No continuity editing, no cause and effect, just the soup of existence.

“I wanted to express the idea of breaking free from suffering,” says Cécile, describing the development of the play’s plot. “…To not stagnate in this inn or in this club. To be able to leave it, snap out of it and fly away.”

But the form of the movie will not permit the actors exception from the stagnancy of routine. Most of a play is not a show going on but a rehearsal percolating in evenly lit rooms. For most of Don’t Stagnate’s 86 minutes, the subjects are trapped in ambient leisure time. Preserved in the amber of Tuesday night hobby club lighting. The film’s audience, too.

There is no indication how many weeks or months of rehearsal take place. Or whether each sequence was filmed before or after the next.

Rehearsing the climbing of the mountain, the subjects walk in circles around the room. The characters are tied to each other by rope. And the actors are tied by shared transport arrangements. Lehman likes to keep the camera still, even when the main action drifts out of frame. Emphasising currents that might otherwise be missed: Romain’s tapping foot, Robert’s nervous humour, Maurice’s vanity.

In the last half-hour, Lehman begins to layer in shots of the black box performance proper. The event of the show’s performance offers false hope of catharsis or resolution. But Lehman continues to cross-cut performance footage with scenes from the rehearsal.

Scenes on the darkened stage echo or prefigure the dialogue that continues in the amber rehearsal room. On stage, the subjects continue to grin out of character. The sophisticated young directors continue to whisper line prompts.

Actors, characters, and home audience alike remain in purgatory.

Between the prologue and the epilogue, neither the subjects nor the viewers have seen the sky, daylight, a horizon. And there will be no aftermath. When the performance finishes, Charles struggles to even leave the stage. Wandering around, looking for something he’s dropped, oblivious to the humming audience.

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

Time’s precipice

And so, echoing Daumal, Lehman leaves his Austin Allegro-era amateurs halfway up the hill, forever.

But despite the foreshortened arrival of the end of term, I trust that you - dear student - have made it to the peak of understanding or safely back to base camp. Wherever you want to be, really.

Let me know in the comments.

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Until whenever,

~Graeme Cole.

(Principal)

P.S. A final pertinent song recommendation before fading:

📹 Unfound Peoples Videotechnic | Cloud-based filmmaking thought. ☁️

Dear eternal filmmaking students,

Belgians! They’re back. There’s an exciting - exciting! - collection of Belgian movies and accompanying filmmaker interviews on Avila and Sabzian, respectively. Great! Do that.

But one film that’s absent is Boris Lehman’s Don’t Stagnate (1973). It’s also Belgian. Exciting? Excitement could well be its guiding theme! Although not necessarily its form.

And next week, all going to plan, Don’t Stagnate will be the subject of our lesson. In case you want to watch it beforehand. If you search for it online using its French title, you might find it streaming on an obscure Russian website. Which is weird.

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.

Today’s lesson is a big one. But it’s important. Especially if you’re thinking of making a Richard Linklater-type film about time passing! You should certainly spare a little of that time herein.

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First, we’ll quickly recap last week’s lesson on Modes of temporal expressionism. We learned how, when extrapolating the inner weirdnesses of characters and themes as outer weirdnesses in the time-physics of your character’s universe, you might:

• Apply these time weirdnesses only to one character (solipsistic temporal expressionism).

• Apply them as “the norm” in the character’s world (architectural) or as an occasional phenomenon that disturbs some characters more than others, depending on their personality (meteorological).

• Apply them to and through your production materials (film stock, call-sheet, labour, etc.) (mediaphysical).

• By god, you’d better be consistent! Principled! Or the whole thing (filmmaker-audience contract) might fall apart.

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Good good. And this week? We’ll explore how:

👦 Richard Linklater is just one proponent of the risky business of filming an actor-character across many years.

⚰️ This genre requires a contingent process that accounts for changes in the shape, velocity, and contractual demands of your long-term cast.

🚀 The genre may be considered a relative of “design fiction” for its play with consequence and its potential stretchability into the distant past and future.

⚡ Ideally, the filmmaker would have a time machine to film hard-to-reach temporal angles - but this would introduce a curious paradox regarding the filmmaker’s private life.

I recommend you print this one out and read it slowly across the week.

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Metabolist epic

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

Richard Linklater filmed Boyhood (2014) over 12 years to achieve the authentic audiovisual effect of his actors ageing across the movie’s story.

Likewise, his Before Trilogy (1995-2013) was both set and filmed at nine-year intervals.

In television documentary, Michael Apted filmed a group of seven-year-olds in 1964, and returned to them every seven years until they were 63.

When two filmmakers do it, it seems like copying. Three filmmakers doing it makes a movement, and an indefinite number makes a genre! Well, an indefinite number of global filmmakers have created movies like this. In fact, it is the basis of many a home movie. Deliberately or not.

The genre is “metabolist epic.”

But making a metabolist epic as a professional/commercial production is a risky business. Changes of a social, technical, and environmental nature are now very rapid.12 So rapid as to require a contingent or reactive process as a feature.

For example, Linklater’s ongoing, 20-year production of a new picture has already lost its lead actor in a manner that may not have occurred under similar circumstances in 2014 or 1964: he got “cancelled”!

The project itself was young enough that Linklater could recast and reshoot. But what should he do if his new lead becomes unavailable much later in the film’s metabolic process?

Metabolist simulation

A metabolist epic↑ is a movie that is filmed over a long period of time at intervals that more or less match the intervals in the narrative, so that the cast and environment age authentically.

The risk with this type of production is “unforeseen changes.” Unforeseen changes of a social, technical, or environmental nature may make the original script or vision unfulfillable.

One solution is to build a contingent or reactive process into the production of the movie.

But generative AI offers an alternative: instead of following an individual or family across a proposed timespan that is over-optimistic about your cast’s longevity, you can do it all with simulations. Indeed, you can simulate a period that is wildly beyond the plausible lifespan of your actor’s public appeal or humanity as a species.

For example: Richard Linklater might use an AI simulation to follow a medieval family for 1,000 years as the generations descend through the Renaissance, Age of Enlightenment, and modern period, to whatever this is. And beyond, if we make it. (Or he could simulate this beyond as if humans didn’t have AI or climate crisis and all the rest to deal with.3)

Or longer still: the epochal soap opera. Following a Paleolithic dynasty from the Stone Age to the far-flung future with realistic family resemblances and realistic intergenerational trauma.

Or as a piece of AI-generated design fiction about how the Hawke-Delpy dynasty might first precipitate and then (heroically) mitigate the end of humanity.

Linklater could reverse-generate this fiction back to Hawke and Delpy’s respective ancestors waving bones at a rival pack of prehistoric hominins. And then work through three million years of agriculture, coal, plastics, reality TV, etc., to a major turning point in a hotel room on the Peloponnese coast.4

The risk, in this case, is that the technology (or the planet) might get “cancelled” or otherwise fail before the simulation has run and been transferred to DCP for distribution.

So, how could Linklater design ‘a contingent or reactive process’ as a deliberate feature of such a movie? Either by:

• timing the end of the world within the movie to occur simultaneously with the end of our world outside the movie. (The ultimate expanded cinema experience.) Or

• having the simulation run its own personal apocalypse scenario and building it into the story.

Will the passing of time ring true in such a simulation? You can simulate causality. You can simulate evolution. But can you simulate regret?

Metabolist time-road movie production

A metabolist epic↑ is a movie that is set and filmed at matching intervals over a long period of time. The cast and environment age authentically. If things go well. But if something life-changing should happen to them, then the whole script could be thrown off track.

It may not be uninstructive to offer an imaginary solution: the imaginary solution is that the filmmaker might invent a time machine. And use it to leap back over generations of a family. (Preferably a family through which runs a strong visual resemblance). And then:

• sit with them across time.

  • (This will require the technology for the filmmaker to pause her own metabolisms). Or

• leap from generation to generation without too much sitting around and ageing at the end of shooting days.

  • (This is a good alternative if the imaginary time machine does not have the facility to pause the filmmaker’s metabolisms.)

It is quite clear that the best time to revisit this evolving family line would be at the first birth of each new generation. This would make a neat cross-section through the tiered cake of the family’s ancestry.

A sequence or sequel set at each ‘first birth’ event would provide adequate narrative information and cinematic drama concerning:

• the progress of the family,

  • its worries,

  • its conflicts, and the

• technologies and

• cinematographic disposition and

• hairstyles of the epoch.

The insistent recurrence of birth scenes across a movie or sequence of movies could become quite nauseating. This may or may not be the point. It also does away with the “will they/won’t they” romcom trope, which can be retired.5 (The babies are proof that they will and they did.)

However, this mode of filmmaking would also be vulnerable to a common filmmaking paradox: the risk that the lowercase events and pressures of a movie’s production are far more interesting than the Uppercase plot contrivances of the movie itself.

Consider metabolist epic veteran Richard Linklater’s imaginary time machine, for example. Consider him using it to cover thousands of years in a family’s evolution. Consider only his experience of the process. For example:

• Richard Linklater examining his wrinkles as he cruises in his time machine.

• Richard Linklater applying moisturiser in assorted bathrooms across human history.

• Richard Linklater feeling sort of left out as three million years of Hawke-Delpies age and expire around him.

Highly cinematic.

The issue with metabolism for time-travelling filmmakers is that you really need to see your subject’s metabolism through to get the full effect. But that the long-term nature of the project means your own metabolic tendencies may prove incompatible with those of the ancients and their descendants with whom you sit a while.

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

Closure

A quick bit of “housekeeping”: the present program on New Systems of Time will need to be truncated.

There will be just one more lesson after today’s. I’m sorry. I have had to take on additional duties around the campus. These additional duties make another month of newsletters quite out of the question.

Sorry, that also means that we didn’t cover “rhythmic templates” as I promised this week. That lesson is gone now. But it was essentially a summary of this.

The good news is that, because I am still able to deliver next week’s lesson, we will end on an even number. “Eight.”

~Graeme Cole.

(Principal)

📹 Unfound Peoples Videotechnic | Cloud-based filmmaking thought. ☁️

Dear eternal filmmaking students,

Today, we’ll continue our little course on New Systems of Time in the movies. We’ll continue with our third micro-essay on temporal expressionism. Which seems as good a cue as any to recap the second.

The second was last week’s Sidechaining inner time-worlds. And we discovered how:

• The filmmaker may venture into temporal expressionism by externalising the inner time worlds of her movie - freestyle, or in a more calculated fashion.

• When externalising and extrapolating inner time worlds in a calculated fashion, the filmmaker may use a technique called sidechaining.

• Sidechaining is the “hooking up” or “patching” of a variable within a movie to the way time functions within the characters’ universe.

  • For example, the level of peril or the loudness of the room tone may cause time to accelerate, coagulate, or syncopate in proportion to the trigger variable.

• The filmmaker may sidechain variables and time characteristics from multiple sources in the diegesis or even out in the world of the production.

Okay. Good. I hope you all tried a bit of that this week!

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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.

Expressionism in the cinema is the externalisation of a character’s or movie world’s inner emotional and intellectual passions. And temporal expressionism is when the filmmaker transforms the inner passions or inner tempos of the characters/universe into a complete, warped time system within which the movie’s world operates.

Today, we’ll look at four different ways the technique of temporal expressionism may function in your movie:

😷 Sick time as a single character’s affliction (“Solipsistic”).

🧬 Exotic time as just the way time is in this movie (“Architectural”).

🌪️ Occasional time phenomena as an irregular fact of life or Act of God in your hero’s neighbourhood (“Meteorological”).

📼 Over-emotional time seepages as a contamination between the characters, their fictional universe, and the filmmaker’s tools and materials (“Mediaphysical”).

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These modes may take a bit of processing to fully understand. But you need to know them. I presume.

Modes of temporal expressionism

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

Temporal expressionism is the conspicuous outer manifestation of the inner time worlds of a movie’s characters, objects, and places. Or even of production-world systems and entities.

It’s when these hidden time-feelings break out and go wild in your movie’s universe. Resetting the workings of time by their own mad metrics.

But there are different forms of wildness that these externalised time systems may take.

In relation to your film, temporal expressionism may be:

• Solipsistic. Only one character experiences time weirdness.

  • This character may or may not notice that time is being weird around them. Because such a character, usually the hero, is usually in a bit of a fug.

• Architectural. Time in the characters’ world happens to behave like this; it is just how it has come to function.

  • Effects that seem unusual to the audience may be emotionally disturbing but not improbable to the characters.

• Meteorological. Temporally expressionistic effects occur as occasional phenomena in the world of the characters (the diegesis).

  • Characters may notice the effects of temporal expressionism. They may notice that time is weird, or that time is affected by a variable, such as their feelings or the colour palette.

  • The hero may need to cope or engage with the effects of temporal expressionism along with his other primary narrative tasks. (E.g., combat with villains during a third-act time-blizzard.)

  • But a less observant character might not notice it all.

    • A hardy or withdrawn character may just ignore it.

• Mediaphysical. The inner time worlds of your movie’s characters, props, etc., affect or infect the modes of production.

  • Example “expressions” include: stretched videotape; digital scrubbing; modulated performances; modulation of vowel/consonant value in screenplay; poltergeists in the stereo mix.

    • This can lead to temporal feedback.

      • Temporal feedback may occur when the mediaphysical side-effects (outer expressions) of a character’s inner time world further trouble the character, prompting further mediaphysical expressions. Ad - quite possibly - infinitum.

Naturally, the latter three qualities - architectural, meteorological, and mediaphysical temporal expressionism - may be combined, exceeded, or altered.

But whatever the form temporal expressionism takes in your movie, consistency is key. The time-life of your movie is a vital aspect of its world-building. So, the audience will sense wanton variation as “cheating” by the director. (“Consistency” doesn’t mean time should behave the same throughout the movie, but that it should remain true to its underlying logic. Variations and deviances in the behaviour of time in your character’s universe1 should be justifiable. Justifiable within a coherent - if disorienting - meta-diegetic time system.)

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

Okay. Good. So think on!

Until next week, when we’ll look at some rhythmic templates for your movie.

~Graeme Cole.

(Principal)

📹 Unfound Peoples Videotechnic | Cloud-based filmmaking thought. ☁️

Dear eternal filmmaking students,

The previous newsletter was the 100th the school has sent! Were you counting? Did you celebrate? If not, don’t worry: in many ways, it means that this is the 101st. Nice number!

Let’s recap #100. “Temporal expressionism.” We learned how:

• Maya Deren said that when the filmmaker “externalizes an inner world to the point where it is confounded with the external world,” that’s expressionism.

• So, when the filmmaker externalises her movie’s inner time worlds, that’s temporal expressionism.

• Temporal expressionism is a great way to use the full capacity of your cinematic tools to create and explore movie worlds and personal hang-ups.

• In fact, maybe it’s the only decent way to approach the construction of time your movie and the production around it.

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We also had a word about Mark Cousin’s new language for award ceremonies and Rhayne Vermette’s dark (as in you can’t see anything) new film about the sun. If you would like to read about that.

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.

This week, we’re on part II of our “temporal expressionism” mini-series within our “New Systems of Time” daddy series.

And we’ll look at how:

💡 The filmmaker may express inner time worlds in an intuitive or more measured manner.

🌡️ When opting to extrapolate inner time worlds in a more measured manner, she may use a technique called “sidechaining.”

🔌 Sidechaining involves adjusting the behaviour of time in your movie directly in proportion to another variable, such as hero angst or yellow.

🍝 But if you sidechain more than one variable element, you could get yourself in a time-tangle!

After today’s micro-essay, there will be a brief discussion about the Richard Linklater Situation.

Sidechaining inner time-worlds

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

The filmmaker wields a kind of temporal expressionism if she:

• Externalises the inner time-world of

  • one or more characters or

  • other diegetic elements.

• And/or extrapolates this inner time world through

  • the outer world of the characters or

  • the movie’s production processes.

The filmmaker may express these inner time-world(s) using her intuition. Or she may engineer their outer expression in a measured fashion. For this, she may use the technique of sidechaining.

Sidechaining is the process of hooking up one variable element to control another value.1

The filmmaker may sidechain the diegetic flow of time to one or more characters. Or she may sidechain time or any other element of the diegesis, such as the weather or the music on a background radio.

For example:

• The tempo of ‘time’ in the world of the movie may be directly modulated by the hero’s nausea levels.

• Or as he gets happier, diegetic time stutters in proportion.

• Another: each time your character receives a violent blow, a ‘moment’ is released.

• Or another: the more intense the shadows grow, the faster the dolly rolls.

  • (Note that a mediaphysical marriage of this type has knock-on implications for the nature of the image volume.)

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Clearly, if the filmmaker sidechains her film’s time system to multiple characters or elements, there’s going to be a lot of pushing and pulling going on. One character creating time stutter while another is smooshing time all together; the dolly triggered to accelerate when the dolly operator has already had his coffee break triggered by a diegetic micro-event.

In this case, she needs to make some decisions. Uh-oh!

• Should the conflicting time pressures merge, clash, or mate?

• Are some characters’ time pressures stronger than others? Or does it depend on the strength of each particular emotion?

  • (Reminder: hunger is an emotion.)

• Does each time anomaly exist as a pocket or bubble around its source, or does it affect the entire diegesis?

  • What happens when the bubbles touch?

If the production’s decision-making processes are dealt with on a parallel timeline, these challenges can be processed as cleanly as any other creative choice.

But if the production’s decision-making processes are themselves sidechained into the movie’s time systems, the filmmaker could find herself hurried, interrupted, or left with too much (strange) time to think.

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

Next time | Temporal expressionism part III: Modes of temporal expressionism

Richard Linklater’s Tron: À bout de souffle

Here we go. Richard Linklater’s new pretend-behind-the-scenes-of-Breathless-(1960) (2025) is due out. Okay! Interesting. And it would actually be a cool idea if Nouvelle Vague tributes weren’t inherently nauseating2.

To Linklater’s credit, he’s approached the production in a sporting spirit. He’s dug out Raoul Coutard’s camera from a museum and even limited himself to the same number of ‘takes’ when recreating iconic scenes (from the perspective of the fictitious making-of crew).

Linklater also cast unknown looky-likey actors for the New Wave filmmakers and Belmondo & Seberg. The effect is hilarious and raises important questions about the use of looky-likeys in the age of AI. Certainly, Linklater has discovered a new region of the Uncanny Valley to explore.

And I was impressed that the movie’s “extras casting director” went out of his way to find looky-likeys for Breathless’s actual extras!

So it was heartbreaking to read that Linklater also pulled some David Fincher-style nonsense: dialling in a fake “cobblestones” filter for Breathless’s iconic final scene and “[digitally] paint[ing] away” unwanted backgrounds.

While this is not due the same criticisms as using AI, there’s definitely an overlap here. Mostly, in that it seems like an awful lot is lost by defaulting to a computer solution to a physical-realm cinematic challenge.

Particularly when you think of Chantel Akerman’s Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 60s in Brussels, shot in the 1990s and brazenly having its late Nouvelle Vague-era characters browsing through CD racks while talking about stealing records as boxy late-80s VW Golfs cruise by in the background. Brazen anachronisms are a valid New System of Time!

Akerman’s anachronisms could have been a good solution for Linklater: drop Godard’s atomic age production into 2025 Paris, or better still, Austin, TX. I imagine somebody’s already remade it in Grand Theft Auto.

Anyway, Linklater features significantly in a forthcoming lecture in our New Systems of Time series. So look out for that. If you’re not too annoyed already!

By the way, the Principal’s wife and I saw an exact looky-likey of a 50-something Gottfried John on the street a couple of years ago and stopped dead in our tracks. Foolishly, we let him get away - but we might have a gig for him now if you happen to spot him at the shops.

Tonsils

Thank you, students, for your well-wishes last week. Wasn’t tonsillitis. It was viral. But my doctor - who looks and sounds reassuringly like she has lots of books at home and listens to Radio 4 - told me it “could be just as awful as tonsillitis.” So your wishes were not misplaced.

~Graeme Cole.

(Principal)

P.S. Pertinent song recommendation:

Bill Nelson, “Acceleration”

📹 Unfound Peoples Videotechnic | Cloud-based filmmaking thought. ☁️

Late for class two weeks in a row! I’m so sorry. Last week it was the AWS outage. This week, the mailing system appears to have been bamboozled by the onset of the UK’s winter hours. Sorry sorry.

Dear eternal filmmaking students,

Filmmaking “class” is taking an odd shape over the next couple of weeks:

Today, we finally have one of our shorter micro-essays. Good. Better.

And next Monday, there is no class at all. Half term! Okay.

Following that, parts two and three of our mini course-within-a-course on temporal expressionism will hit your inboxes at the regular time. So, make sure you remember what you learn today.

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Do you even remember what you learned last week, in The hero’s cake? How:

• There are many ways to consider your movie a “slice” or “slices.”

• Some of them are to do with how you divvy up time.

• The time slices you include reveal patterns in the world and nature of the hero - and, by implication, the audience.

• But filmmaking offers a rare chance to experiment with wonky slicing techniques and variable time consistencies.

? I hope so.

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.

Weeks 4, 5, and 6 of New Systems of Time are on temporal expressionism. Today’s micro-essay is even titled “Temporal expressionism.” And today, we’ll learn:

👩🏻‍🦱 Maya Deren’s definition of expressionism.

⏱️ How this might be applied to time in your movie.

😱 Why you should apply temporal expressionism to your movie or colleagues.

⏳ What “one second” need never be.

Okay! It’s a short one. At last. You could accidentally scroll past it to this week’s “industry gossip.” So mind you don’t!

Temporal expressionism

Sorry, there’s no recorded version this week. I’ve got tonsillitis!

The expressionist filmmaker “externalizes an inner world to the point where it is confounded with the external world,” as Maya Deren has it.

So, a filmmaker wields a kind of temporal expressionism if she externalises an inner time-world. The inner time-world(s) of one or more characters or other diegetic elements.

Temporal expressionism occurs when a filmmaker projects these alien inner time processes out into her movie’s fictional world or the movie’s production itself. And lets them do their thing.

You could argue that this is the only sensible way to go about making a narrative film. One second need never be one second. The movies owe no loyalty to real-world time phenomena or conventional modes of timekeeping. But only to their latent pulses and impulses.

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

Next time | Temporal expressionism part II: Sidechaining inner time-worlds

Mark Cousins ruins award ceremonies for the better

I know video essays are the worst thing. A blight on the species. A shameful culture in which I am implicated. But this is kind of cool - if also absolutely atrocious:

Filmmaker and cinephile’s cinephile Mark Cousins will curate the 2026 European Film Awards ceremony as a “live film-essay.”

That’s right - instead of gags and applause, Cousins will unleash a three-hour stream of worthy clips, stark juxtapositions, and destabilising insights into the state of the form while gently nudging audiences not just to eat their cinematic greens but to carve them up neatly as they do so!

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The ceremony will do away with “award categories and acceptance speeches.” How the awards will be distributed across different departments remains unclear. No Best Writer or Leading Actor or Catering; instead, perhaps the first major Nebulous Film Awards will be shared vaguely across productions whose theme, vibe, or post-viewing jury pizza session made the jurors feel generous.

And how will the lack of categories, speeches, and those little prompt cards with gold stars on the back and the winner’s name on the front affect the celebrity audience’s drinking patterns? We can only speculate.

They’ve moved the awards earlier in the year and into the Oscar voting period, too. Hopefully, it may influence the outcome of the Academy Awards. The Americans mustn’t emerge unscathed from the torrent of post-Bazinian navel-gazing.

But European Film Academy director Matthijs Wouter Knol confirms that European cinephiles, and perhaps Europe more generally, have only brought this upon ourselves: “European cinema deserves a bold, mesmerising, and inspiring celebration that may well last three hours once per year.”

Yes, we do. We probably deserve much worse, too.

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Thank you, Student Amanda, for bringing this news item to my attention. And, for the avoidance of misunderstanding, I should say I am broadly in favour of this initiative/atrocity.

Levers in London

If you’re in London, I recommend getting down to watch Rhayne Vermette’s second feature, Levers, at the ICA this week. You should see it in the cinema!

I’m too sick to express quite what it gave. Photography as narrative. Colour as setting. Austere yet kitschy, and funny if you can stay awake. Best I’ve got right now is a “John Cage cover version of Chris Kraus’s Gravity and Grace.” On serotonin!

There’s some time stuff going on, too. Much of the plot seemed to take place simultaneously or on a refracted timeline. “The script was being written through symbols I was introducing and the relationships between the [tarot] cards,” Vermette told us at the UK premiere on Friday. “And so time just really kind of blew up, you know, like time really cycles through and intersects and is layered…”

She also told us:

“I’m not interested in like how you properly make a film. I’m not interested in well-made films… I only work with chaotic people, so we just kind of watch what comes from the chaos.” And, “We used Bolex cameras. Many of them were kind of broken and janky in their own way.”

Great! Instant UPV graduation for Rhayne Vermette.

Don’t feel bad about using the English pronunciation of Levers (to rhyme with “beavers”) at the ticket office. There was some talk of the title actually being the French word “levers” (to rhyme with “bleh-bleh”), but Vermette herself used “levers” (beavers) in her talk. “Levers.” Great title!

You know you’re in for something when you’re at the ICA and the man still feels obliged to warn you that the film he’s introducing is “arty.”

Okay. Enjoy your week off. Or don’t! None of my business. Sorry.

~Graeme Cole.

(Principal)

📹 Unfound Peoples Videotechnic | Cloud-based filmmaking thought. ☁️

Sorry I’m late for class. The mailing system was down this morning. It’s up again now. Great! And special apologies to all those students in the Americas who get up at 4.15am or earlier on a Monday to read my morning email. Sorry!

Dear eternal filmmaking students,

Okay! Hi. Down below today’s lesson, you can read:

• why a fashionable cup heralds the death of cinema, and

• how to access several thousand pounds in funding if you’ve never made a movie and have not yet written your script.

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Great!

But first, here’s a recap of last week’s lesson, Movies for airports. We learned how:

• Long before the little clocks on the front of VHS players, people used burning incense or dripping water to follow the time.

• The hypnotic/dazzling power of cinema was implicit in the play of light and sound of these ancient timepieces.

• There’s no good reason why you can’t program your characters and their props to tell contemporary audiences the time just as hypnotically.1

• True ambient narrative film should be both useful and ignorable.

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.

Good. And this week? Let’s see how:

🍰 Your movie is made up of slices - visual, narrative, and temporal slices.

🧇 This cross-section look at your hero’s world reveals patterns we miss in our daily lives

👩‍🍳 Movies are not real life, so messing with the recipe of this ‘marble cake’ structure can cook up curious new cinematic possibilities.

🔪 The filmmaker lets her hero see the cake slice at her own risk.

Great. Let’s crack on with week three of New Systems of Time.

The hero’s cake

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

In terms of the space and time a narrative movie occupies, it can be considered a slice or slices of life:

• A photon-thin sliver of recorded activity on the wall.

• A cross-section of the hero’s day, week, or life.

  • The cross-section may be more or less representative of the day, week, or life.

    • chosen at random, or

    • at clinically-selected intervals,

• The filmmaker’s selection of moments-of and angles-on an imagined world.

  • Extracted to convey a particular story or feeling in a particular way.

A movie is sliced this way or that, or this way and that.

This sliciness presents multiple cross-sections of the hero’s world to view.2 A chance to trace rhythms or narratives that might otherwise get lost in the cake. (More often than not, the movie is sliced to expose one particular, primary narrative.)

Perhaps this is satisfying because it helps the audience to trace patterns of causality that are more difficult to identify in their so-called real, or daily lives.

Certain patterns of causality are difficult to trace in our daily lives, because:

• We are in the middle of the cake - we are ‘of the slice.’

• The universe is infinitely complex: butterflies flap wings, synapses fire.

• (Our instinct to blame muddies the whole arrangement, too.)

But more adventurous filmmakers may include scenes or sequences that are not a strict continuation of the narrative’s flat cross-section. We may think of this as ‘dislodging a berry.’

Such berries, baked into the ‘cake,’ are discrete, springy, and self-contained but for a slight leak of coloured juice into the surrounding sponge. Their bulk and essence evade the slice of a blunt knife. And protrude beyond the ideal surface.

If it is dislodged and falls out, whole, the berry changes the whole hierarchy of the plate. The whole experience and understanding of the film, the hero’s universe, and his place in it. (This is the temporal equivalent of retrofitting an empty filler area in a movie’s set design.3)

Remember, the characters in such a structure are ‘of the slice.’ They cannot conceive of the berry’s existence, let alone the whole cake. However, if that leaked juice along the cross-section is caused by the knife (rather than the baking process), the hero is confronted by a mediaphysical rupture. The fact of being a movie character comes up against the hero’s experience of time. He must manage his experiences against the tang of leaking meta-temporality.

At this point, the analogy, and the cake, fall apart. And the filmmaker should pick at the crumbs, with a cup of tea, hovering slightly outside of narrative time.

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

Snakes & funerals vs. Giraffes & spaceships

Remember last week’s bombshell about the death of “plot-based media” and the TikTokification of narrative?

Well, today, I’ll direct you towards a piece that mourns the death of landscape orientation aspect ratios. Author Kelly Pendergrast traces the rise of the ‘Stanley cup’ TikTok video as living (portrait orientation) tombstone for the landscape-orientation period.

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Stanley cup-themed videos are now ubiquitous on social media. And these stainless steel travel mugs fit the shape of your phone screen as neatly as “snakes and funerals” fit the CinemaScope sprawl. For Pendergrast, they’re emblematic of verticality’s triumph. You now look dafter telling someone to turn their cameraphone sideways than you do filming with one longways.

And the “sequential micro-narrative (non-)structure of the feed” favoured by the TikTok generation echoes through the jump cut grammar of the individual TikTok video. This jump cut grammar is necessary because the portrait format doesn’t leave visual space for continuity editing (except, perhaps, for giraffes and rocket launches). “[M]eaning occurs by accretion,” notes Pendergrast, as “Stanley accessories pile on, one disconnected fragment after another.”

@itsemilyleahPack My Stanley With Me: to go on a walk (Everything is on my @Amazon &/or @LTK) #packwithme #tumblerpacking #stanleypacking #packmystanleywithme #asmrpacking #amazontravelmusthave #amazonmusthaves @Stanley 1913 pack my tumbler for a walk @Anthropologie

Tiktok failed to load.

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(The first example that popped up when I searched.)

TikTok grammar benefits from a “transitional object” (as clung to by children experiencing separation anxiety) such as the Stanley. The cup gives at least some continuity from shot to shot. Reassuring you through the trauma of the cut; perhaps reassuring us all through the trauma of cinema’s death.

Cheers! 🥤

Biscuits and a hug and £3-5,000

Here’s a nice fund for debut feature film or ‘immersive work’ writers in England: the BFI NETWORK England’s Early Development Fund offers “£3,000 to £5,000 to develop a treatment.”

They say that the “funding supports the early stages of development for debut long-form projects. It directly supports writers who do not yet have the first draft of a script.”

In other words: if you’ve done nothing and are not quite ready to do something yet, this is for you. I think we all feel a little like that. The funding should come with biscuits and a hug. Biscuits and a hug!

Next week: temporal expressionism!

I’ll leave you to it. 🍰 ☕

Class dismissed!

~Graeme Cole.

(Principal)

P.S. Here’s this week’s themed song recommendation.

📹 Unfound Peoples Videotechnic | Cloud-based filmmaking thought. ☁️

Dear perpetual film students,

I remember when my dad brought home our second-ever VHS recorder in the late 1980s. Among other startling features, when you powered it up, the display said “HELLO” - and when you turned it off, it told you “GOODBYE.” It was my first experience of expanded home cinema and my first experience with an AI therapist.

It is curious what we desire, what we need, and what pleases us in our developing technologies. Both as consumers and creators. The ever-informed and insightful Mike Gioia wrote about the new Sora generative AI video app this week. He believes its makers have hit a sweet spot between AI video’s promise, its reality, and our wallets. Uh-oh!

We’ll talk more about that after today’s micro-essay. Interesting! And relevant. It is relevant because today we are thinking about movies as an ambient presence in your life and in your living room. Specifically, about the movie-as-clock.

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.

Yes, last week’s lesson was about making time weird/weird time in your movie, but this week’s is about creating a supernormal relationship between your movie and the time that passes outside of it.

Last week, we learned how:

• A film is a self-contained universe - and the filmmaker sets the weather, the gravity, and the time system.

• Filmmakers tend to use their many tools to arrange normal time weirdly for their audience - but rarely make weird time normal for their characters.

• A smattering of alternative time behaviours might be used as a leaping point for imagining original narratives for diegetic physics.

• Such innovations needn’t be considered “science fiction” so much as “utilising the full potential of cinema’s unique storytelling palette.”

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But this week, we’ll consider:

☯️ The practical potential of your character’s pulses and the beating world around them.

🔥 The cinematic promise of early timepieces.

🔫 The genre rules of the ‘clock movie.’

🚉 Ambient cinema in everyday spaces.

You don’t have to use these instructions to build a clock movie. Maybe you’ll find a way to make your movie function as a SAD lamp, a star chart, or a lawnmower! I haven’t checked if that’s possible yet.

Movies for airports

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

In the very olden days, those who needed to follow “the time” observed the drip of a water clock or a trail of burning incense as they traced the creep of the hours.

The dwindling water or incense might be integrated with sound-making mechanisms to draw attention to intervals of note. Golden balls landing in brass cups. A little pizzazz on the hour.

With all this light, sound, movement, and pizzazz, it’s little wonder they didn’t invent movies sooner!

But looked at the other way around, it seems a shame that the apparatus of moviemaking is not put towards developing new timepieces.1

It is not impossible to imagine a narrative movie whereby:

• the pulse of the characters’ habits, feelings, tribulations, moments, waitings, and battles mark out the time in a manner that is easy to read or at least recognise.2

• the rhythms of light and sound serve not only the movie’s narrative and theme but the ‘real world’ schoolboy chasing his bus, the executive timing her TED talk.

We know from the design world that things that are useful are often beautiful. Useful things become beautiful by dint of the human assumptions and perversions of nature by which blank matter is made into or part of a mechanism.

We also know that there is no design without narrative and that true beauty is narrative’s residue.

But that any movie in which the underlying narrative is the filmmaker’s own quest to “create beauty” can never be truly beautiful.

Movies are not usually supposed to be useful or decorative. Even if some are vainly imagined to be activist or beautiful. But might the filmmaker set out to create their movie as a useful thing? And hope that the choices and mistakes she makes along the way imbue it with that residue, that aura?

To be truly useful, this clock film had better not be distracting. Instead, such a film might exist ambiently. Ambiently, because the action decorates the flow of time. Rather than defining a fixed wedge of time.

Time itself becomes not “almost a character” but “totally a setting.” This setting exceeds the interest value of the characters. Time does not exist to let stuff happen. Instead, the hero, the plot, and the action serve the purpose of marking or colouring time. Kiefer Sutherland’s 24 on a quiet day.

No single moment - no tick or plot twist - should be essential to appreciate the movie in full. The clock should be useful, not demanding. That a clock ticks on to itself when ignored is part of its harsh beauty. A symptom of its mechanisms and of human silliness.

It is a thrill to catch a glimpse of your watch carrying on regardless when you wake in the night. Or to watch a film at a time of day that society or your controlling sense of decency proscribes. And there is some sense of love or fellowship in “checking in with the hero” each time you check the time. Every time you want to see how long your dog has been in with the vet, or when your supervisor is due back from lunch.

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Music has its “night bus” genre, its “hangover at the airport, noise cancelling on, hoodie up safe space” albums. Why doesn’t narrative cinema?

True, ‘Slow’ movies drop us into an atmosphere for 80 minutes or seven hours. But a true clock movie like this should not be labelled slow (nor fast) unless faulty (note: those ancient water clocks ran slow as the water pressure diminished). It should not be labelled slow or fast, since it is harnessed to time itself. (To which time should it be harnessed?)

Despite its artistic and narrative value, this movie for airports should be useful without the need to follow an arc, no matter how slight.

However, it may slot in with the ‘transcendental style.’ The clock movie transcends plot or catharsis and settles on a different plane of being. It engages directly with the mechanisms of the universe. As Brian Eno put it about ambient music, you “get the impression that you’ve caught part of an endless process,” that the movie is “something that is going on anyway.”

Such a movie cares no more about its individual audience members than the wind, the wallpaper, the clock think about the humans in their embrace.

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

TikTok for slip-slop

So. Sora 2 is here. It’s OpenAI’s latest video generator. They also describe it as a “useful world simulator.” (Unfortunately, given the rate at which we’re burning through this world, the company’s concept of “world” is two-dimensional.)

Mike Gioia “worked in TV writers rooms, independent film, and technology” and now “sorta work[s] in all three of those designing AI systems.” In his new thinkpiece, Gioia suggests the Sora app exists on the time-attention-narrative matrix not as a direct competitor to handmade modes of narrative cinema-making but as an (un)natural successor to TikTok (let’s call it SlipSlop).

Why?

Sora’s strength (reports Gioia) is in producing standalone sketches rather than longer-form plots (for which AI remains a “clumsy tool”). But this (says Gioia) is not a limitation so much as good timing.

It’s good timing because Generation Alpha - smartphone natives born after 2010 - have grown snooty towards “plot-based media.” They respect the sequential3 micro-narrative (non-)structure4 of the feed. For emerging media consumers, the latter is natural and correct.

Further, Sora’s strength (reports Gioia) is in producing. “Media creation is fully recreational here.”

1. The user enters a simple prompt into the app.

   1. Potentially including their face (or a friend, fancy, or celebrity).

   2. The simpler the better - Sora has no time for ‘prompt engineers.’

   3. “There’s significant meta-prompting happening so that any user input is expanded into a high quality Sora prompt that will produce a good output.” (Gioia)

2. Sora cooks up a video;

3. the user re-prompts to extend or fine-tune their video and

4. eventually shares it directly to the feed, which is also in the app.

The point is the doing. The quest for the ultimate Sora 2 video exists somewhere between the quest for the ultimate wave and the quest for the ultimate last tweet, Instagram image, or doomy news story before switching off your phone at bedtime.

“You can be sub-literate and still create fun videos,” reports Gioia (and from this point in his article, I read the rest in the voice of Werner Herzog). It is easy to sneer, and perhaps we should. Let’s sneer! But OpenAI has tapped into the science of scrolling by hooking the user up to the mode of production; it’s as easy to make an attention-grabbing video as it is to hit that Like button.

So the Sora app is a toy. Nothing wrong with that. And it is not the first toy to have a terrible impact on the natural world nor to be vulnerable to - and maybe intended for - misuse5.

It’s a toy, not a hobby or an art. But a toy can become a hobby. A hobby can become an art. In the case of Sora 2, with its easy sense of power and its ultra-real moving images, plenty of users will wrongly imagine they’ve become hobbyists or artists.

But for those of us concerned with handmade modes of narrative cinema-making in the more-or-less physical universe, this toy is not a threat. It is a slight new mediaphysical vector to take into account when drawing up your cinematic universe.

The mediaphysical universe has shifted slightly with Sora 2’s manifestation/exploitation of new modes of attention: the atomisation of the grand narrative, the smartwatch feed as nickelodeon. I, for one, will continue to set my watch by the moon.

On that note, there are morning pastries to eat.

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Next week, we’ll talk about cake time. And I promise the emails will get shorter.

Class dismissed,

~Graeme Cole.

(Principal)

P.S. This week’s not entirely non-pertinent song recc comes courtesy of discovering that the writer of the theme to The Sweet East (the people’s One Battle After Another) played Billy Goat in OBAA. Knew there had to be a connection!

📹 Unfound Peoples Videotechnic | Cloud-based filmmaking thought. ☁️

Dear perpetual film students,

At the end of last semester, you may remember, I asked if you knew of any books that resonate with the theme and tone of this very mailing list.

Response levels were pitiful. That’s okay! I imagine most of you were already dreaming of the beach. However, I would like to draw attention to one newish book that came up: Adrian “” Martin’s Filmmakers Thinking.

Filmmakers Thinking “begins from a simple premise: that we do not take the ongoing reflections of filmmakers about their medium, their art and their craft, seriously enough.”

And, what’s more, the book “delves into a vast archive of writings (public and private), interviews, talks, and anecdotes to discover what filmmakers think about how to create cinema – and what cinema is, or could be.”

I cannot claim to have read the book yet myself. I plan to! But given that it’s called Filmmakers Thinking and that’s what you came here to be, it seems appropriate to tell you about it. Its foreword was written by Radu Jude, for goodness sake!

You can buy it here. Great!

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Okay. Now we’ll get on with the new term. Which is all about new systems of time, and how you design them to operate in the worlds of your characters.

This week, we’ll look at how:

🌏 Each movie is its own self-contained world with its own physical laws.

🔮 Like a little snowglobe.

⌚ There are many ways the filmmaker can adjust the event-substance of time in her movie.

🦫 Films that luxuriate in this snowglobeness of time are rare but, thankfully, repetitive.

Okay. And so.

Snowglobe time

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

A movie is a visual snowglobe. A self-contained and safely isolated landscape.

The characters are trapped in a glass ball. Usually, they do not realise this.1 Do any of us? When he looks to the sky, in character, the hero pictures something (or a nothingness) other than the filmmaker and her audience staring back at him from the heavens - his conception of the beyond is, too, bound by glass.

This glass ball of the filmmaker’s design has its own systems of topography, architecture, and meteorology.

But it also has its own, self-contained physics. A world system that recognises only itself. This includes a snowglobe mechanics of time.

The rate at which the snowflakes fall depends on the materials the filmmaker has used. And the vigour with which she shakes her little pet world.

But, this snow globe stuff is more or less an analogy. The filmmaker may design any kind of time physics for that would-be snowglobe. And not just a time physics that responds to the vigour of her wrist (which is, after all, metaphorical).

She has at her disposal not just fake snowflakes and fluids in a range of viscosities, but also:

• The omnipotent edit suite.

• Camera tricks and cinematographic variations.

• Props and sets designed to her specifications.

• Access to the ‘real world’ outside the studio with (limited) scope to make adjustments.

• The infinite and nefarious potential of the discovery, invention, juxtaposition, and modulation of sound and sounds.

• Variable voltage lights, wind machines, and vacuums.

• Trained actors.

• Soups and energy drinks.

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And, with those tools, the filmmaker can do far more than slow or hasten the fall of her snowflakes. She may (for example) change the nature of diegetic time2 by:

• Adjusting the relative speed between characters and/or machines, meteorological phenomena, light, sound, and any other screen or audio matter.

  • (The filmmaker must not forget to factor in the growth and decay rates of each element.)

• Adjusting the direction of time (forwards, backwards, and anywhere in between)

  • universally or

  • variably across

    • forms (e.g., people, the art of music, geology) or

    • elements (e.g., Jack, lower midrange frequencies, rust).

• Creating pockets or regions of variable time physics within the world’s broader time system.

• Applying novel patterns or rhythms to time as it affects one or more elements.

  • Or borrowing formal laws from existing genres (e.g., dub) or techniques (pointillism).

• Tethering time to one or more visual, sonic, kinetic, emotional, or imaginary values.

  • Or any other variable within or beyond the movie.

  • It is common to tether the perception and representation of time (but not diegetic time itself) to a character’s feelings or other perceptions.

• Introducing new side-effects or implications of time’s passage.

• “Concretising” time (or the movie’s particular understanding of time) through audio/visual manifestations (this is also known as “tinting time”).

  • Anthropomorphising time (but be wary not to let it forget its main responsibilities).

• Applying hyper-literally (even pataphysically) familiar alternative cultural readings of time, such as spectacular-time, time as river or daft parade, time as deity, or insensible adherence (of the movie’s time laws) to the zodiac wheel or other mandala.

• Inducing leaks, spillages, cracks, ruts, growths, or atrophies of time.

  • As a special event within the movie or as a general characteristic of the movie’s fallible time system.

• Rethinking clocks and the characters’ relationship to timepieces and, by implication, the nature and timing of meals.

• Reimagining ‘time’ without cultural or metrical reference to our time and its habitual velocities and patterns, but something quite otherwise.

• Fooling around with causality.

• Reimagining the “moment.”

(This list is not exhaustive, but it is long.)

These variations on conventional time can be subtle. They need not even be noticeable to the audience. And they may certainly be applied to otherwise ‘dry’ genres such as the Serious Drama or arthouse pastoral.

But it is rare for a filmmaker (outside of science fiction and fantasy) to reimagine their snowglobe’s time system so deliberately. It is rarer still for a movie to acknowledge or weaponise the fact that snowglobe time is snowglobe time; that it is discreet and particular to that world (even if it seems that time in the movie is more or less normal) and that this phenomenon is noteworthy.

But there are exceptions. Most notable are ‘stacked’ movies that re-use (or appear to) identical footage to loop or echo a chosen timespan across the movie’s duration, rolling out hours, days, or lifetimes like photocopies. Whatever the tale of this sort of movie, the hero’s true plight is that his routine has been printed to film. He has become the plaything of a filmmaker who is fascinated by routine or iteration. (Perhaps the filmmaker is sick of her day job.)

This ‘Groundhog Day’ trope is more common in science fiction than outside it.3 You could call any film that uses it a “science fiction.” However, in that sense, every film is a science fiction. Because not even the most sensible documentary can claim to channel the science (and time laws) of the world outside the movie without disparities, however earnestly the filmmaker believes they traced and represented reality.

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

Summer has been written over

Perhaps you remember that two summers ago, a Finnish friend foolishly invited me over to be cinematographer on her new film.

Well, this August, I was rushed back to Helsinki to correct my mistakes. Or rather, to make new mistakes, since we shot on Super 8, which cannot be overwritten once processed. Super 8 mistakes last forever, as I learned forever ago.

Meanwhile, my young daughter was also learning: she discovered the video function of her little point-and-shoot camera. And then she discovered ‘mistakenly deleting all her videos.’ Thus joining the great pantheon of filmmakers whose early works are forever lost.

Given that hers is a digital camera, I eventually realised that I might be able to rescue some of the data. Digital data of this nature is, unlike Super 8, gradually overwritten rather than outright lost. I discovered this too late, when she’d already taken a load more photos and videos, and the remaining pentimento of zeroes and ones proved impossible to reanimate.

Dozens of smashed snowglobes glittering on the runway.

I share this as a bonus lesson to you all.

How was your summer? Do any memories remain?

Let me know in the comments!

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Next week, we’ll (probably) talk about ambient and slow movies. They may not last forever, but they seem to!

Class dismissed,

~Graeme Cole.

(Principal)

P.S. Here’s a pertinent song recommendation.

📹 Unfound Peoples Videotechnic | Cloud-based filmmaking thought. ☁️

Dear eternal filmmaking students,

It’s autumn term at Unfound Peoples Videotechnic. Yes, we skipped spring and summer terms, but still. School semesters are tethered to the seasons outdoors1. If we named them sequentially, regardless of sabbaticals, it would now be spring term, and the mood would be very different. People would be confused.

The above preamble is pertinent because this term, we will explore unconventional modes of time and tempo in moviemaking.

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I know that you have a lot to do this term. I know you have a lot on your mind! So, I’ll keep the lessons - the emails - short. If you’re not careful, you might read right through one before your tea has cooled enough to sip.

Let’s start straight away with a short introduction.

An introduction to New Systems of Time

You already know (or are learning within this sentence) that you can stretch and compress and chop and fuse moments, minutes, and days in a movie. You really can!

Those techniques are about how you handle time in our world. “In the editor’s seat.” It is quite standard to convey normal time or the hero’s weird experience of normal time to the audience using cuts and jumps and modulations.

But how about when movie-time itself is alien to the audience - even if it may seem quite normal to the hero?

It is not usual for the dreamer-uppers of narrative films to dream up new systems of time for their film worlds. Some do! Most don’t. They portray the experience of conventional time recognisably, albeit diced and spliced so as the story fits the allotted duration of the movie.

It is far more frequent for the makers of abstract films to employ new systems of time. However, the audience might not recognise that they are watching a new system of time. This is because abstract films don’t represent the things audiences usually see treated by time, such as humans having a chat or dogs discovering bodies in the woods.

How might time mutate in your movie’s diegesis to better serve your purpose?

How might this mutant or alien time, as it operates on your characters, interfere with the mediaphysical2 properties of your movie-object - and vice versa?

The narrative or abstract filmmaker might:

• Anchor the flow of time within the movie world to another variable, such as light or anger;

• Do away with linear time (and its associated loop-the-loops) and experiment with bubbles and veins and other shapes and consistencies of diegetic time;

• Sidechain diegetic time to the production time that’s passing just outside the movie;

• Invoke supplementary time systems;

for example.

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You will need to find a way to represent your new time system through the existing laws of your own world and the edit suite. To make the match shots and jumps, the slow-mos and the montage sequences convey:

• not a flashy, cine-grammatical representation of ‘normal time,’ but

• how time functions differently within your movie universe’s environment, compared to its behaviour in one of our Tescos or black holes here on the outside.

We’ll have a look - or ten very brief partial looks - at some possibilities over the next weeks.

Maybe there will even be time for some industry gossip, funding opportunities, or pertinent song recommendations - if we can cover Time quickly enough!

This is not so much a pre-designed course as a batch of extracts from the UPV writings. Plus some other materials that I hope will inspire you as you make your Hollywood pictures, experimental videos, and grandchild Tik-Toks.

Remember, the best way you can support Unfound Peoples Videotechnic is by forwarding this lesson to your best friend. And your classmates, teachers, and colleagues. And the people on the bus.

If you’re new to the school, check out our writings on amateur filmmaking, rotting cinematography, mutant sound, labyrinthine set design, and daft software.

See you next Monday, 9.15 am, Greenwich Mean Time+1.

~Graeme Cole.

(Principal)

Dear eternal film students,

I thought to recommend you this interesting post from “ ” (?).

Lots to think about, but I'm fixating on a fact that he shared:

I didn’t know that. Set design as watermark! Trap streets1 of early cinema! Wisps of cigarette smoke forming a trademark!

Consider the implications of the film company’s logo appearing on on-screen cola bottles, aeroplane tails, tombs, and tattoos.

The company embeds itself in the world of the movie (its diegesis). Not as a narrative headline or (in)corporate antagonist but a background presence. Never mentioned by the characters. Noted only by the pirates, feds, and film nerds of our own world.

A fluid, trans-diegetic organisation that not only sells sugary drinks and flights to other parts of the storyworld but maintains offices *outside* of the movie, from where they stamp ownership all over the hero’s environment.

How could he know? How would we know?

Perhaps every studio hires a shadowy figure to provide IP security in-diegesis. To go inside and secure things. Maybe this accounts for plot discrepancies: a conflict of interest between the hero’s narrative and the undercover IP agent’s mission. Her mission as go-between for the (a) real-world and (b) diegetic incarnations of the Pathé Company or Disney or A24.

Anyway, I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that in the earliest movies, the motion picture companies would put their logo in the scenery to deter piracy.

I really, really hope to start sending regular classes again in September. Look out for me in your inbox. And look out for Castle Rock Entertainment in your coffee grounds.

Your Principal,

~Graeme Cole.

Dear eternal filmmaking students,

A load of Danish filmmakers published a new manifesto at Cannes. Great! Bit dry, though. So I’ve livened it up a bit.

The 10 ‘vows’ of their DOGMA 251 are pasted below. I have annotated them with my observations. And, in each case, my proposition for an alternative BadDogma 25 vow.

The Danish manifesto has a lengthy preamble, which I have not included here for reasons of space. You can probably imagine what it says.

I genuinely believe my alternative BadDogma 25 manifesto, written in 17 minutes, answers all the concerns of Danish DOGMA 25.

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If you came here expecting a sustained and cohesive manual for overhauling your craft, sorry. You can check the school’s previous pages for that sort of business! But if you find yourself in a filmmaking corner, try one or more of these bad dogma bones to shake yourself out - and let me know how it goes.

BadDogma 25 (Incorporating DOGMA 25)

The Danish DOGMA 25 manifesto in bold. My notes in italic. The UPV BadDogma 25 counter manifesto in bold-italic.

“THE VOW OF CHASTITY: I vow to submit to the following set of rules drawn up and confirmed by DOGMA 25:

1. The script must be original and handwritten by the director. We compel ourselves to write the script by hand in order to nurture the kind of intuition that flows most freely from the dream, channelled through the hand onto the paper.

Please don’t share your dreams. Better to write your script in the sand with your toes. This will engage your body below waist level, force you to compose your script with poetic economy, and get you out of the house.

Alternative Vow 1. Write the script in the sand with your toes, the crabs your fiercest critic and motivator.

2. At least half the film must be without dialogue. We insist on a cinematic approach to filmmaking, because we believe in visual storytelling and have faith in the audience.

This rule overlooks:

• silence-as-dialogue,

• dialogue as soundscape, and

• the artistic power of *sonic* “storytelling” in the cinema.

We also face a practical question. In what direction should the film be halved before applying the dialogue to it?

Conventional thinking would have us halve it temporally: the first half or the second half should be without dialogue, or every other minute should be without dialogue.

Why not a visual division? The top half of the image usually gets all the dialogue, right? How about “all dialogue must be emitted from the lower half of the image?” Or 50% of the characters must be mutes. Perhaps only half the frequency spectrum should have dialogue. Or three of the six 5.1 surround sound channels.

Alternative Vow 2. Only the objects are audible. Not so much as a breath from the humans. Object dialogue is permissible. And object breath.

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3. The internet is off limits in all creative processes. We commit to produce the films relying on real people within our physical reality – rather than in a digital one infused with algorithms.

Can’t believe it’s 2025 and we’re still distinguishing “physical” reality from “computer” reality. The only way to honour this vow with any charm is to absolutely corporealise the digital; to rediscover the blood, muck, dust, and bedsores of digital interaction.

We’re also going to need to ringfence what we mean by “creative processes.”

Alternative Vow 3. Everyone involved in the film must print their unedited browser history and hide it on set each morning before pastries. At lunch, all are to discuss what they’ve found and feed it back into the creative process.

4. We’ll only accept funding with no content altering conditions attached. We assume responsibility for keeping budgets down so the team retains final say in all artistic decisions.

This already exists, it’s called no-budget filmmaking, and the results are often startlingly unoriginal.

Alternative Vow 4. Accept every suggestion you hear - from your producer, your biological and sugar daddies/mamas, and your taxi driver. For therein lies the idiotic logic by which real life is organised and our culture has blossomed.

5. No more than 10 people behind the camera. We commit to working in close collaborations to build trust and strengthen our shared vision.

Easily skirted by casting the crew as characters or camouflaging them and hiding them in the picture. If you’re really serious about getting out of the safe zone, put your boom operator in the shot.

Alternative Vow 5. Have as many crew as you need, but they must be on screen at all times. Even if we can’t see them. Only the actors are allowed to cross the line to switch off the camera or operate heavy machinery. The editor should record the ambience of her edit suit in operation (including mumbling, farting, and smalltalk) and paste it into the film’s soundscape without self-censorship.

6. The film must be shot where the narrative takes place. Film as an art form becomes artificial and generic when we portray a location in a false light.

Putting my affection for the artificial and generic (and for false light) aside, this is another vow that requires some terms to be defined.

In particular, what do you mean by location and how do you know where the narrative really takes place? Which narrative?

Rather than settling for the surface ‘reality’ of your locations, I would advise all filmmakers to interrogate both their scripted and scouted locations to expose their deeper truths and artifices. And interpret them on-screen using whatever tools of filmmaking are most effective in the situation.

And don’t forget that scouting for a location is itself an act of artifice. The truth dances in daft disguises. Don’t mistake your earnest sensibility for a divination of reality.

Alternative Vow 6. Put your locations in drag.

7. We’re not allowed to use make-up or manipulate faces and bodies unless it’s part of the narrative. Just as we strive to maintain the authenticity of the location, we also want to portray the human body without a filter. We celebrate it – warts and all.

Sadly, submitting to such an anthropocentric view of cinema and storytelling is a concession to the very forces that DOGMA 25 seeks to refute.

Your main character is light, and light is also the primary make-up and personal trainer of each of your actors.

This vow also concedes to the long-dismissed myth that the photographed-here-and-now in some way equates to “reality.”

Alternative Vow 7. You’re not allowed to use make-up or manipulate faces and bodies BUT every actor must self-identify their most despised physical flaws (warts and all) and assign each its own discrete character. Each actor must switch between their multiple flaw-characters throughout the movie, without - let me remind you - adding make-up or prosthetic thingamajigs.

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8. Everything relating to the film’s production must be rented, borrowed, found, or used. We commit to making films using objects that already exist and renounce the ahistorical and self-destructive culture of consumerism.

First thought: Does this also apply to the catering department? Has there ever been a Danish film crew that was forage fed?

Anyway, recycling and upcycling is all good for the screen. However, this vow offers a rather sober view of resourcefulness. I’m torn, here, between vowing that only found objects can be used but they CANNOT play themselves (they must be reimagined or recombined into new objects) or:

Alternative Vow 8. Everything relating to the film’s production must be stolen.

…I’ll let your conscience decide.

9. The film must be made in no more than one year. We abstain from any lengthy processes that stand in the way of creative flow.

Impossible!

I’ve been thinking, for a while, of a film that updates itself. A Vimeo link or whatever to which new cuts or scenes can be added with release notes. Even better if multiple crew members (but neither the actors nor composer, for obvious reasons) have editing access.

The finished film itself is live and pending updates from the moment of conception.

Alternative Vow 9. Release everything now. Never finish. Tether your eternal publicity to the tides of your enthusiasm.

10. Create the film as if it were your last.”

Surely all but the most jaded or arrogant do this, anyway.

Alternative Vow 10. Create the film as though Roger Corman has commissioned you to make eight of these movies in the next two months and you’re half way through the process. (Create at least one additional secret film during production of your manifesto film, and don’t tell Roger!)

Afterthoughts

A manifesto tends to begin life as a rail against something, even if it manifests as instructions towards a positive outcome.

It is not a huge leap to assume that in their identification of targets, a manifesto writer can’t help but identify their worst criticisms or fears about themselves.

I have kindly chosen not to analyse the Dogma 25 authors’ neuroses from their manifesto.

I have attempted not to self-censor when my counter-vows have leaked my own inner turmoil onto the page.

Long-term UPV students will have noticed that ‘regular emails’ did not recommence after the spring break. Perhaps they will after the summer break. “It’s a mystery to me.”

Your missing professor & loving Principal,

~Graeme Cole.

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.

Dear film students,

It’s the final class of the year. We’ve had a packed 2024 at Unfound Peoples Videotechnic, eh? With modules on AI filmmaking, cardboard set design, a guest appearance from filmmaker Emma Rozanski, and the present program on home movies. And that long, leisurely summer break.

It’s time for another! Another year, and another break.

After today’s lesson, I’m on sabbatical until at least summer term. I may pop in with occasional emails - I already have one in mind! - and I welcome your messages. But there’s no new series until April, at least. (Paid subscribers: I have paused your payments indefinitely. And thanks, again.)

On that note, a question: Can you think of any books that remind you of this newsletter? -

- one of the things I will do on sabbatical is find a way to publish these micro-essays and more in book form. Can you think of a publisher who does things like that? Maybe you even know one personally. I can’t imagine what your social life must be like!

I will be forever grateful if you comment below or reply to this email with your tips on publishers I might approach. Or who might approach me. Forever grateful!

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Okay. On with the class. First, let’s recap last week’s lesson on home movie structure. We learned how:

• You can make only so many movies at home before you tire of the location.

• But instead of dismantling your home, you could dismantle your home movie structure.

• Peter Greenaway did it - he swapped chronology for alphabetization!

• Gustav Deutsch did it with the holiday movies of others - but lost the precious particularity of the incidental home movie sequence.

In today’s lesson, we will discuss home movie silence. When Robert Bresson pledged to “TRANSLATE the invisible wind by the water it sculpts in passing,” or Henri-Georges Clouzot blew the tobacco out of Jo’s cigarette paper1 in The Wages of Fear (1953), they may have been thinking of home movie silence. But you don’t have to worry about that since, below, we’ll discuss how:

😶 The silent home movie is the most intimate of the home movie forms.

🫂 The filmmaker can use silence to expand the contents of the home movie and its audience towards and into each other.

🎥 The effect is not the same in a Hollywood silent, which is far too vain and cultivated to admit true intimacy.

🫶 The silent home moviemaker makes a collaborator of both cast and audience - but at the cost of one precious detail.

There are also details of a couple of upcoming filmmaking programs from third-party providers - one of which’s deadline is today!

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Please forward this lesson to someone you know will appreciate it, and spend the next 4-5 months strategically sharing UPV posts from your personal archive 🙏.

Home movie silence

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

A mother and daughter reach out in the same moment to correct a second kid’s hair. A dog looks up and follows the flight path of a wasp or aeroplane that the camera doesn’t pick up. Cake-top candles auto-extinguish. Everybody grimaces in sync, for reasons lost to time.

The silent home movie is the most intimate of the home movie forms. The images invite cooperation. The silent home movie pulls the audience in to collaborate. To work on maintaining the intimate embarrassments of the home movie.

How can the filmmaker use home movie silence to capture the audience? By:

• inflating the circumstances of the home movie shoot through time and emotional space,

• drawing attention to the apparatus in the party host-rambler-parent-filmmaker’s hand,

• putting the filmmaker’s hands over the ears of the audience.

The audience must imagine the missing elements afresh. For a moment, the audience and the dog are one. A wasp or an aeroplane? The audience connects to the secret soundtrack of the silent home movie by tracing its visual rhythms.

Of course, the audience may also ‘play’ the secret soundtrack of a professional silent movie. But those industrial rhythms do not promote intimacy. They are deliberate and artful, and designed to communicate information. They keep the audience at the proper distance. The industrial silent movie is an “art of silent shadows.”

Meanwhile, the naive rhythms of the silent home movie remain subjective, personal, and organic: touching. The unrecorded sounds of the silent home movie are perfectly environmental and indeterminate. Neither planned, framed, nor curated; neither included nor excluded.

The silent home movie is an art of silent embarrassment. On the home movie set, uncles chat away direct to camera, ignoring its lack of sound recording faculty. Children yell to be heard. Gran, mysteriously, chooses to match the movie’s muteness by mouthing her words silently.2

Even those cast members who are oblivious to the camera cooperate in maintaining the home movie’s embarrassments. Stripped of their voices and footsteps. Humble but not humiliated. Captured/embraced. Shielded by the framework of the home movie format.3

Still, there’s one little intimacy the silent home movie audience may miss. The little sniffs. The little sniffs of the creeping filmmaker are lost to the silent home movie. Will your audience dare venture deep enough to trace them? Will you find a way to write your little sniffs into the silent frame?

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Manel Raga Raga in Tortosa

Since Unfound Peoples Videotechnic is going “on hiatus,” here are a couple of nice-sounding filmmaking programs you might attend to fill that gap.

First, my esteemed colleague - exquisite filmmaker and reputedly excellent teacher - Manel Raga Raga is aiming to influence your “process of research and construction of a specific cinematic voice, by investigating the dialogue that is created between a director and the reality in front of him, in the way in which he looks at it, listens to it and shares it.” At the School of Art and Culture in Tortosa!

It starts January 10th, 2025, and you can register right up to then if places are still available. I think.

Baltic Analog Lab deadline today!

“Baltic Analog Lab announces the fifth edition of our BAL Film School – an international five-month course in experimental analog filmmaking.

The school is open for both international and national participants providing regular online meetings with filmmakers and researchers from all around the world, teaching in-person as well as online workshops, and providing full assistance in analog film production.”

Extended deadline - but this is where it ends: https://www.balticanaloglab.lv/school-2025

Let’s hear some more from the BAL marketing team:

“This year for the full course participants, we will be providing three in-person masterclasses - two at BAL led by it’s founder Ieva Balode (February) and American filmmaker and magic lanternist Melissa Ferrari (May) teaching magic lantern workshop creating expanded cinema pieces to be presented at the opening ceremony of the Process Festival in May 2025 in Riga.

The third workshop will be held in Barcelona at our partner’s film lab- Crater Lab (March) with Yago Alcover teaching contact printing 16mm film.”

Fellini trouble

This screenshot appeared on Twitter recently. Let the records show I have updated our post on non-sync dialogue - Rhubarb - to include it.

Okay. That’s it. I’m off. See you in a few months!

Just one last thing. Do you know what happened to my own home movies from this autumn? It turns out my Super 8 camera was damaged. The claw ripped right through the first sprocket hole of my film stock without me knowing. And I spent the whole season happily shooting away while the film reel failed to turn - or expose - a single frame.

There are surely lessons to be learned from this catastrophe. But they’ll have to wait! For another term. Another embarrassing exposure.

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Class dismissed!

~Graeme Cole.

(Principal)

Okay. We made it over “darkness’s hump day.”1 In this hemisphere, anyway! And to week nine of our program on “what the incidental home moviemaker can teach the dedicated amateur and the industry professional. And vice versa.”

So, let’s pan back to last week’s lesson, Hobby horses. We learned how:

• The word “hobby” comes to us from the hobby horse: a broompole pony “pretend-ridden and maintained for pleasure.”

• The filmmaker who wishes to channel the energy of the pure hobbyist may pet and groom her tools as a child doth their hobby horse.

• Filmmakers like Gustav Deutsch and Carolee Schneemann devised elaborate shot framing techniques and technologies for their home movies…

• … as did Tony Hill, who emerged from his garage with a special satellite crane that slices right through space and time.

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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. We’re in the final two weeks of our Renovating the Home Motion Picture series. Better take a look at editing. And how:

🥱 It’s hard keeping the home movie fresh when the sound stage of your life gets stale.

🗂️ One way to look at your home footage anew is to remove the chronology and order your clips by category.

🏠 Peter Greenaway’s category of choice? The letter “H.”

🏖️ Meanwhile, Gustav Deutsch attempted to order everybody’s footage by category - and lost the home movies’ homeliness altogether!

By the way, if you are annoyed by emails from Substack saying things like “Graeme Cole posted new notes,” you can scroll to the bottom of them to unsubscribe from those notifications. Could be good. But never, ever click on Unsubscribe in an email from me. Like this one. Never!

You could click Share instead. ‘Tis the season:

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Read on. Perhaps with a mince pie.

Set and sequence

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

The home moviemaker might soon tire of her home interior and garden as a film set. Too many samey sequels! The home movie hobby became a house movie industry. A domestic franchise.

Of course, the filmmaker can make home movies elsewhere (on holiday, at weddings). But the problem remains the same. A family holiday is always the same place. Every wedding, too. Still, there are things to be filmed, in the house, on the beach, at the hall. So, how to keep that home movie fresh?

One way is to structure household footage as variations on a theme rather than a musty progression through time. A set rather than a sequence.

Birthday reels occupy this niche rather casually. The filmmaker-parent who digs out her Super 8 camera only for birthdays soon has a cycle of evolving rituals on film. Organised by the unique rhythm of the family birthday calendar. No editing required; non-edited in camera.

This rhythm can be powerful. A unique fingerprint for each family. Evident from the regular leap between seasons and growth spurts.

However, the overarching chronological structure burdens the birthday reel. Chronology is corny.

The filmmaker may better achieve a satisfying “set” structure for her home movie through editing. Chopping and sorting her accumulated moments. Better to break down that birthday reel into its component parts (candle-blowing, tears, etc.). And re-order them according to some other metric (luminosity, distance between camera and subject, passion, etc.).

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Peter Greenaway arranged his home movie footage to fit the category of Things that begin with H. Or occasional other letters. Forcing him to illustrate his H-words with loose associations from around the home and neighbouring woodlands. Choosing and reusing images from his “casual” home movie practice.

“The alphabetical index is an extremely primitive way of organising information, and in some ways is totally absurdist,” says Greenaway. “H is for Hitchcock, but also H is for home movie.” Footage accumulates and echoes according to a hyperlogic that resists reverse engineering. There is a system. But there is also a Dad.

When the filmmaker arranges her home movie like this, she becomes aware of the delicate balance between the personal/particular and the general/mundane. She might lose her humility if she veers from the particular. If she untethers the stuff of her home movie from its context. Its soil, its humus. There is a point at which it becomes “impossible to see the trees for the forest.” Sad to lose those trees.2

This happened to Gustav Deutsch. Deutsch applied the set structure to the holiday movies of others. Sorting and editing their clips by image detail and camera movement. Deutsch writes that, in Adria Holiday Films 1954-68 (The School of Seeing I) (1990), “the private depiction of an individual situation becomes a document of a general situation.” In doing so, the films reject their status as a home movie and become a mere documentary.

Adria’s audience - or the pupils of Deutsch’s School of Seeing - soon find themselves searching for human contact, human particularity. To discover that every Dad films every column the same way (or rather with one of three common camera moves) is far less interesting than to be reminded that everybody responds to being filmed in their beachwear the same way.

The differences between families become the same. The groove of multiple Dads’ horizontal pans across the waves feels inevitable; a cosmic repetition. The generality of the cosmos.

But to dwell on the same Dad’s eternal camera move a dozen times, or its waves, is to dig down into the family humus.

A lifetime of one family’s holiday movies as stacked sets: first the columns, then the strongman poses, etc. A supercut of Madame Ernaux’s meaningful glances to the middle distance. You might imagine a different set of truths will emerge. And a different set of deceits. Patterns of behaviour, patterns of shooting and not-shooting, patterns of swimwear.

Later, Deutsch attempted something more particular. He set categories for the actual filming of his own home movies. His “pocket movies.” Set pans or looking styles or topics of interest. Categorised before they were even shot.

But this determined camera lacked humbleness. It’s one thing to mulch your life’s footage, and another to set out with pre-mulched conceptions.

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‘Tis the season to dip your raw stock in acid

It’s Christmas this week, for some people. And for everyone else, as well! That seems to be how it goes.

has curated a list of avant-garde Christmas movies. You may recognise some of your favourite characters from this term at Unfound Peoples Videotechnic. Great! Super-relevant.

Not Reconciled

An Avant Garde Christmas Program

Holiday season at the Postal Service (my day job) has meant I’ve had little time to watch films and write. I’ll have some other posts up soon, but in the meantime here’s a short list of ten Christmas-relevant avant garde films. Sometime this weekend I’ll upload files for most of these and link them here to make them more convenient to find and watch…

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a year ago · 2 likes · Alex Fields

Unseen home movies of James Bond

Unseen home movies of James Bond!

And Merry Whatever The Hell This Is, if you celebrate:

It’s expanded, but it ain’t cinema!

See you back in school next Monday for the last class of term. “No rest for the wicked.” We’re going to talk about silence in home movies. Finally!

Class dismissed,

~Graeme Cole.

(Principal)

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.

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Hello, dear film students. How are you? I have that awful throat thing that’s going around. Awful!

But let’s press on bravely. First, a glance back to last week’s lesson on frame work. We learned how:

• The home movie genre is framed by the imaginary structure of the home, but the filmmaker must find her own frame for the actual shots.

• There are pros and cons to using a shelf, a cup, or a gran to steady the camera.

• The filmmaker might also consider buying a tripod to prop up her device and her confidence - and unlock a range of potential mishaps.

• It doesn’t matter if the film frame still ends up wonky, though. It doesn’t matter at all!

Okay. Following our look at common framing devices, today I want to add an instruction about uncommon framing devices. But to provide further context - and academic value - I will pair it with an instruction about hobbies. And hobby horses. And how:

🛠️ The hobbyist consumes and is consumed by the accoutrements of her hobby.

🎥 The hobbyist filmmaker may forget about “content” altogether in the quest for oneness with her tools.

🧪 Gustav Deutsch and Carolee Schneemann reconceptualised their home movie framing methods using a phantom dolly, a cat, and acid.

🏗️ Tony Hill’s camera rigs are more elaborate than most high-end set-ups - but he’s a hobbyist, dammit. And a home moviemaker!

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Great. Super. Support your school - share the knowledge ☝️.

Hobbyists

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

The word ‘hobby’ comes to us from the hobby horse. A toy horse made of broom pole and rags, pretend-ridden and maintained for pleasure. “Almost every person hath some hobby horse or other wherein he prides himself.” “Prance, hobby - hiss dragon, and halloo boys!”

A hobby is pursued for its own sake. Itch and scratch are one and the same. There is no personal or cosmic “call.” No dialogue. The hobbyist takes pleasure or delight in the process and perhaps the satisfactory completion of a project or cycle.

This mechanism is perpetuated with:

• minimal effort. Or

• hard efforts that go unnoticed, eclipsed by

  • the pleasure that is derived and

  • the hypnotic seduction of the activity.

The filmmaker who wishes to achieve this level of oneness should give special attention to her apparatus. Her fetish.

If she devotes attention to the mechanical processes and aura of her tools, the filmmaker may invoke a self-sufficient space of hobbyist activity. The activity - and the film - need go no further. Who cares if the movie turns out insular or self-indulgent?

Perhaps the filmmaker cares. In that case, she is not a pure hobbyist. Nothing wrong with that! She may instead harness the intense engagement of hobbyism towards other goals:

• Creating an aesthetic or metaphysical quality for her movie. Or

• retuning the quality of the time she devotes to filmmaking.

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The era of novel analogue consumer formats was a rich one for hobbyists. Those 8 mm and 16 mm hobbyists in oneness with their accoutrements. Clunking and clicking. Lost in a fantasy architecture of image-making.

Cameraphone moviemaking is rarely considered a hobby. It’s too casual! But add a selfie stick into the picture and the cameraphone hobbyist begins to take shape. Her stick wags and probes with purpose; its purpose is to wag and probe. The hobbyist has found her horse.

Uncommon home movie framing methods (spatial)

The home moviemaker is gifted with a broad instinct to record. But she may lack more precise techniques or principles with regard to framing her general subject. That’s okay! It’s a home movie!

Still, doubt over how to frame the time and space in front of her camera can lead to inaction. Conversely, the bolder home moviemaker may fire away with a lack of selectivity. Both may get more satisfying results with a more principled approach to framing the time and space around her camera device.

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Common stances include the handheld point-and-tap, the improvised stand, and the consumer-grade tripod. But more determined and determinate moviemakers have devised their own framing methods:

• Gustav Deutsch and the strategic manoeuvres of his “pocket movies.”

  • Manoeuvres such as “observation,” “panorama,” and “phantom dolly.”

  • Driven by principles such as “Passive observer,” “Nothing and nobody can stop the movement,” or “Dolly-shot into the unknown.”

• Carolee Schneemann imagineering her cat’s perspective for her sex reels,

  • “to present our coupled images in the contexts of the rectangles and the seasons surrounding us.”

  • Sticking things to her exposed frames and dipping them in acid.1

The hobbyist Tony Hill invented his own home movie rigs. Camera frames that swoop and spin and envelop. His mechanical frameworks might invoke a:

• cold third-party camera,

• tooled-up professional, or

• ethnographer of the home.

But they don’t. The metal beams and axles are an extension of Tony. Tony the Dad.

In Downside Up (1984), Tony’s satellite crane swings up from the earth, building momentum until it completes a vertical 180° and - through careful editing - continues to slice through family scene after family scene in a rotary motion.

But the operator, Tony, is not invading his children’s lives with his unwieldy crane. It’s simply what Dad was doing. What Dad was doing in that freshly sliced space, in that freshly sliced moment.

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Interminable

There are just two weeks left of term. Still, when you consider that means you’ll have lessons right across Christmas and up to the new year - still good academic value! Next week, we’ll learn a bit more about that Deutsch and those pocket movies - and how to sort and categorise your own random visual recordings.

Class dismissed!

~Graeme Cole.

(Principal)

Hello, you! Today, we’re going to talk about how to steady or unsteady your home movie camera: how to reframe your life and destabilise your gran.

But first, as is tradition, let’s briefly recap last week’s lesson on the phenomenology of the pinch zoom. We learned how:

• The home movie is the only genre where you’re allowed to touch the buttons for fun.

• The pinch zoom puts the filmmaker in a kind of ersatz touching distance to her subject.

• By combining the fingerprint and the finger gait, the filmmaker’s gesture becomes a multi-dimensional work of art - before you even see what she zoomed on.

• The prevalence of the pinch zoom suggests the human being - and its cinematic grammar - is evolving fast!

It was a long lesson. But a valuable one, I think. Do read and share it if you can.

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.

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This week’s lesson? A bit shorter and simpler. In a single micro-essay, consisting mostly of bullet points, we’ll cover some common home movie framing methods. Including how:

🍰 Since the home movie is a slice of your life, you’d better slice carefully.

🏡 The home movie genre is framed by homey themes - but the filmmaker must frame the actual shots herself.

🔭 Common framing methods range from the handheld to the window ledge-leaned to the hubris of the consumer-grade tripod.

🫨 Each method has its quirks and flaws - thank goodness!

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Could your students use this class? Of course, they could. Your dad? For sure. Send it on. And don’t forget Gran.

Common home movie framing methods (spatial)

See also: Common home movie framing methods (temporal)

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

The structure of the built “home” provides a frame through which the home movie may be defined, pursued, and understood. The bounds of the imaginary home fence off certain urges, intimacies, and humours.

But “home” is just a metaphor. You can make a home movie anywhere!

On the other hand, there is nothing imaginary about the need to find a spatial and temporal frame for your home movie. Not when your finger is hovering over the Record button. The home movie is a slice of your life; a very thinly shaved slice, but a slice all the same. Better slice carefully.

Common home movie spatial framing methods include, in order of physical instability, and with sundry notes on their faults and characteristics:

1. The handheld point-and-tap.

   • One hand or two.

   • Stability further compromised by:

     • occasional need to use nose or third-party finger to tap Record.

     • the jolt of thumb and forefinger impacting the device for a mid-take pinch zoom.

   • Mistakes in handheld framing - particularly on a lightweight device - tend to be evasive or indefinite. They get smooshed in with all the good stuff.

   • The selfie stick may belong to this category or #2 below, depending on the filmmaker’s disposition and athletic prowess.

2. The human tripod.

   • “no tripod has yet been built which is as miraculously versatile in movement as the complex system of supports, joints, muscles and nerves which is the human body” - Maya Deren.

   • The camera becomes one with the filmmaker, rather than an inconvenience best kept at arm’s length (see #1).

   • Well-suited to the Super 8 camera. The need to hold down the Record trigger throughout filming interlocks the mechanisms of the camera and its human. Creating a toe-to-lens filmmaking machine. A mecha-biomechanics of cinematography.

3. The improvised stand.

   • The cameraphone on a table, propped on or in a mug, in a shirt pocket.

   • (Inadvertently?) gives the stable objects of the home a point of view; a turn with the camera.

   • Characterised by a perfectly still frame that fails completely when jolted or when the filmmaker’s luck expires.

   • Or suffers the slow droop. Particularly when a cushion, soft toy, or sleeping grandparent’s pressed thighs have been harnessed for the job. Elegant and elegiac.

   • Smoothish motion effects are possible, too. The Super 8 camera steadied on the lip of an open car window like a panting dog.

4. The webcam.

   • If it wasn’t for fidgeting knees and under-hanging desk drawers, the webcam might be more stable yet.

   • Often used to frame the user’s identity through careful curation of the frame’s apparently incidental details (swotty books; trophies; the bare toes of a sleeping lover).

   • The mindful home moviemaker considers also what will be left in frame when the filmmaker leaves the room, neglecting to pause the webcam.

   • It is difficult to make a mistake with a webcam. Zero mistakes because zero options, zero manoeuvrability. It is possible for an error to occur. A failure of clip or hinge that leaves the frame dangling. A software bug or invasion by rogue avatar.

5. The consumer tripod.

   • Approaching the limits of the home moviemaker’s humility. Acquisition of a consumer tripod suggests a level of serious amateurism. A level of serious amateurism that is beyond the genre bounds of the home movie.

   • The tripod seems to remove responsibility for stability from the filmmaker. So, she may attempt additional reframings with a false sense of aptitude. Achieving such effects as:

     • the big jolt

     • the overshooting pan

     • the ebbing and flowing zoom-in-shot (betraying its operator’s hand)

     • the conspicuous mid-shot re-focus.

   • The consumer camera tripod is also prone to systemic errors (due to cheap apparatus or untrained operator).

   • Often wonky.

   • Sometimes sinking (inadvertent tilt).

It goes without saying that the stability of the visual frame - both visually and in its other qualities - is not a matter of quality or merit. The unstable slice may be just as fruitful. The instability is fruitful in itself. A nice wonky slice, in a landscape of crumbs.

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

Re*framing* the home motion picture

It’s not a bad name for an association for “the protection and valorization of family films and private audiovisual memories” - Re-framing Home Movies.

A bit like the title of our present module, right?

Anyway, the association’s second-ever conference, Home Movie Days 2024, takes place this weekend, 13th-15th December. Online. In English! “Three days of screenings, presentations, workshops and discussions.”

Oh, how I wish I could attend! But I have a family event over the whole weekend. I’ll be making my own damn home movies!

Still, you could attend? Right? It takes place on your computer, after all.

Next week, I think we’ll delve a little deeper into the issue of framing. Take a look at some avant-garde slicing techniques. Sounds good. Okay.

Class dismissed!

~Graeme Cole.

(Principal)

Dear film students - welcome back. Today, we will learn about the pinch zoom. Using your forefinger and thumb - or whatever’s available - to embiggen the image on your touchscreen camera device.

First: remember last spring’s set design module - Maps, Flaps, & Infinite Wallpaper? Well, the full annotated index to all 35 micro-essays is now up! If you’re new-ish, jump in via whatever note calls to you. If you were here at the time, why not revisit the things we learned and the fun we had?

And please, share the link with your colleagues and networks:

Okay. Now. Talking of the past, let’s quickly recap last week’s lesson on the Super 8 home movie. We learned how:

• Using Super 8 in your personal life forces you to learn the world - and your craft - at a different sample rate.

• The Super 8 home moviemaker records only the cookie dough of the cookie dough ice cream of life.

• She edits in-camera across months and years, balancing the pressures of the footage meter against unexpected new rhythms in her personal life.

• The last few feet of a Super 8 reel exist in a timezone of their own.

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Good. In today’s lesson, we will discuss how:

💁‍♀️ Filmmaking just for the thrill of caressing a touch-sensitive screen can be just as thrilling for the audience, as long as they’re there when you’re doing it.

👀 The pinch zoom is a highly personal camera move because it combines the fingerprint, the hand gait, and the crackle of the mind in action.

🆘 The pinch zoom is an “emergency close-up button” and a new tool for a cyborg movie culture.

🔍 The pinch zoom’s unique manner of magnifying or revealing makes it uniquely valuable to the home moviemaker.

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.

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Pinch zoom performance

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

The home movie, and perhaps the broader amateur movie, are the only filmmaking genres where it is excusable to use a technique for the sheer sensual thrill of touching the buttons.

Or, in the peculiar case of the pinch zoom, the non-buttons: the touchscreen and its images, both pliable and firm, yielding yet absolute; the cold glass and the power of selectivity.

The pinch zoom may also be the closest the photographer can get to her subject. She gets to caress, ply, or indeed pinch the situation in real-time:

• To sculpt her own “observer effect” onto a moment in history.

  • (A small, parkland creature in a noteworthy position. An unusual encounter between a human and the built environment.)

• And to take her own imprint.

  • (She squeezes the fuzzy image into her little box.)

But the pinch zoom also offers a sensual thrill to the casual onlooker. The technique has a rare quality: it is more delightful to witness a pinch zoom in action than to see the results in the finished movie.

Why such a delight to see those fingers in action?

The fingerprint is a trace, a slice of time left on paper or glass.1 And already adorable. But the pinch zoom animates the press of finger to glass and adds the rarely-observed finger gait of the filmmaker.

Further, the pinch zoom maps dynamically to the surface and guts of the phone, the unfolding scene in front, and the intentions of the filmer.

So, the pinch zoom is:

• thought,

• vision,

• gait,

• performance, and

• footprint

all in one. And all over the shoulder of the oblivious filmmaker.

The onlooker (of the filming, not of the film) triangulates the personhood of the filmmaker through these coordinates. Just as they might imagine the tiny thud and groan of the fingers across the glass. An intimate moment.

This onlooker may also triangulate (1) the filmer’s personhood and (2) the unfolding scene with (3) the onlooker’s own point of view on the scene. The onlooker’s visual and intellectual point of view and their feelings. All criss-crossed with those of the filmmaker.

Pinch zoom power

Nobody would film a whole Christmas play on pinch zoom. Nor a full biopic of a cheeky squirrel. They might grab a clip (pinch zooming just before or after pressing Record). Or they might pinch in and out during a longer take. But a full home movie? On pinch zoom?

No. The filmmaker uses the pinch zoom for the detail-in-time. Not to compose an integral rectangular image. Nor for any longer than is needed to catch a passing moment.

The pinch zoom is a tool of contingency. An emergency close-up button. Except that there is infinitely more personality in a pinch zoom gesture than a physical zoom button or lever. It transforms the fingerprint and the finger gait into a dynamic portrait of a scene and its observer.

The pinch zoom usually involves digital magnification. By putting this power in the filmmaker’s fingers, the pinch zoom may have two opposing effects:

• The pinch zoom gives the filmmaker the power of a god.

  • The power to grow or shrink her subjects in the (rectangular) micro-environment over which she reigns.

  • The power to expel or admit characters and details at the edge of the frame.

• The pinch zoom seems to magnify the filmmaker’s naivety.

  • By delivering a closer but smudgier and shakier image.

In short, the pinch zoomer is a kind of naive god. A cyborg of glass and fats and oils. She may consider her handheld audience to be cyborgs, too. Their brains remodelled by hours of distracted scrolling.

And yet this reveals the pinch zoom as an evolutionary development. The pinch zoom is neither purely digital nor purely naive. The pinch zoom has advantages unique to this moment in moving image technology and grammar:

• The filmmaker may be thinking of her cyborg audience of casual or hurried viewers. They need to be directed to the pertinent area of the scene. They benefit from:

  • the trajectory of a zoom that’s pinched mid-shot, and

  • the emotional engagement that comes with the filmmaker’s personal touch (her finger gait).

• They are almost certainly watching on a small screen. They benefit from:

  • magnification (as trajectory and enlargement).

• It compresses set-up, photography, and post-production into a live gesture. Assuming the image needs to be zoomed, the pinch zoomed video file is instantly ready for distribution.

  • (There are reports that certain naive gods have asked whether they can zoom out of the images again, after recording, having pinched with too much zeal. Such instances only add to the cultural power of the pinch zoom.)

• The pinch zoom is its own deadpan reaction shot, because it mediates the subjective/perspective through the mechanical/detached.

  • It offers the humour of the crash zoom (usually operated by mechanical lever) with added personality (a little delay and hurried re-framing as the finger and thumb flail).

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In particular, the pinch zoom movie is made to amuse: the revelation of a comic detail the viewer might have missed in the bigger picture; the magnification of an embarrassing moment that might otherwise have been just a minor Boschian detail of the everyday. The pinch zoom is a technology of humility, capture, and intimacy. Perhaps that’s why this technology is almost exclusively used by the home moviemaker.

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

Lehman et les films surprises

My favourite octogenarian Belgian film diarist, Boris Lehman, has a very brief exhibition with screenings at KBK in Brussels this weekend, the 7th and 8th of December. That’s 2024, if you’re reading this in the future.

You’ll find photos and posters. And Lehman himself operating the 16 mm projector, showing a program of films stretching back over half a century of his obsessive practice. Plus, something the Belgians are calling les films surprises. Whatever that means.

Let us know if you go! And did any of you go to the Rosenbaum gig last week?

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Unreliable you

Okay, the fine people at Deluge/Antimatter are calling for works. And I’m wondering, will you answer that call?

“CALL FOR WORKS: The Unreliable Narrator.

Deluge Contemporary Art seeks artists’ moving image works for an online exhibition in winter/spring of 2025.

From Mark Twain’s “lies, damned lies and statistics” to fake news and AI-generated falsehoods, untruths surround us. “The Unreliable Narrator” invites artists’ film and video that engage with this slippery notion—works that deliberately mislead the viewer, unwittingly promulgate misconceptions or manipulate narrative to hidden agendas.

Artists fees will be paid. Links and info by January 31 to ddb@deluge.ca or deluge@antimatter.ca.”

Okay. Great class. Well done. Next week? I think we’re talking about the home moviemaker’s use of the film frame to fence off bits of their life. Correct me if I’m wrong.

Class dismissed!

~Graeme Cole.

(Principal)

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Bonjour. Yes, that’s right - I’m fresh from seeing the legendary Denis Lavant present Leos Carax’s new mid-lengther, C’est pas moi, at the ICA. But more on that later!

First, let’s crack on with Renovating the Home Motion Picture. Last week, we learned how:

• The bits that don’t make it to the finished diary film - because you don’t film them, you cut around them, or forget to live them - may be the most important structural parts.

• The viewer makes meaning and implies the sub-life of the diarist through the gaps.

• (Perhaps the diarist does, too.)

• The committed diarist-filmmaker must grapple with the camera’s intrusion into the life she diarizes - and discover how to lead a “gappy life.”

Super. And this week? We’ll cover something I’m sure many of you know well: the peculiar durational inclinations of the Super 8 home movie. And follow up on some of last week’s talk about how home movies end.

This week, we’ll talk about how:

🏋️ The Super 8 camera is an essential home workout device for today’s digital filmmaker.

⛓️ The pressures of the format tend to result in an open-ended accumulation of short, intense shots - the undiluted orange squash of (a) life.

🏁 The Super 8 filmmaker is thrown off this rhythm as she spots the end of the 50-foot reel approaching.

🧩 She must consider her découpage on the fly - and across overlapping dimensions.

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.

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Great. And then, there’s a brief word about the Lavant affair, and some promising events occurring this week. That sort of stuff. But on with the lesson.

Shorter, bolder, stranger, clippier

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

As a professional filmmaker in a video age, you should at least be using Super 8 in your private life. If you are alive now, in the age of the camera phone, or previously in the age of home videotape moviemaking, just try for one home movie. For one trip, one summer, one birth. Or even “some” home movie, since the Super 8 home movie tends to exist as a continuum rather than a discrete unit.

Shorter, bolder, stranger, clippier: while the phone home movie might be 45 seconds and done, the Super 8 home movie is often an open-ended succession of three-, one-, eight-second clips.1

Practical and economic concerns drive the Super 8 home moviemaker to seek brief, dense moments.2 The brief, dense moments that encapsulate a broader situation. “At the very least, the home movie-maker [has] had to exercise their own selectivity,” writes Fred Camper. “Such films reveal, if nothing else, what the “filmer” (most typically, the father) finds worthy of preservation.” Unlike the videoer, who tapes everything, just in case.

This ‘father-filmmaker’ may also edit in camera. To the degree that she thinks about découpage3, the father-filmmaker must do so across the meta-production of her home movie. Predict and compose across multiple dimensions. Anticipating the intersections of actions, shots, sequences, and meanings, but also the unscheduled occurrence (over minutes or years) of: 

• major life events, 

• new characters,

  • guests,

  • added children,

• memory failure, 

• mechanical failure, and 

• other Super 8 projects.

  • Line manager’s wedding.

  • Junior’s low-altitude Western.

  • Something as yet undefined concerning the neighbourhood’s remarkable front doors.

  • (Swapping cartridges mid-reel is inadvisable. So, the single-camera family may accumulate footage from different Super 8 projects on the same reel. Interspersed between the footage of the home movie continuum.)

Regardless of whether she thinks about découpage, this home moviemaker must keep one eye on the meter. What’s left at the tail of her reel. So as not to reach the end unexpectedly. This is the exception to those short, sharp bursts of compressed life.

Knowing there are only a couple of feet of film left on the reel, does Father:

1. Design/wait for an eight-second shot?

2. Abandon selectivity? Let the camera coast on a long, diluted moment until the end flag flips up?

3. Fire the remaining frames off on an aesthetic whim (clouds, soap suds)? Or a non-duration-contingent home phenomenon?

4. Proceed a single frame at a time? Either:

   • clicking the frame-release button (used for animating; the frame-release button is often found faulty, if found at all).

   • attempting to expose a single frame with the shutter trigger (a risky business).

     • (Super 8 film is filmed in bursts as the finger holds down the trigger - rrrrrrrrrrrrrr. So, popping off a single frame - pop! - requires careful weighting, careful timing, “requires dexterity,” says Joseph Morder4. “When I succeed in making a single image, I am very happy, because I know it is very rare. lt is my caviar, my nirvana.”)

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Note that the single-frame option is quite a stretch. To pop off 48 consecutive stills. A structural and athletic stretch. Regardless of whether Father can find her frame-release cord.

And so, the home Super 8 reel - be it self-contained or part of a poorly catalogued set - tends to be recognisable not just by its short, bold, strange, and clippy body, but by its long tail. Be it sleek (an aesthetic splurge) or scaly (each exposure further intensified into a single frame or cautious bursts).

Or by its little docked tail. Where ‘Father’ failed to note her shortage of film and kept on shooting right to the end, and perhaps even longer, pressing harder to intensify the memory.

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

The Jonathan Rosenbaum Show

There’s an evening of 16 mm films in Chicago, tomorrow, Tuesday 26th November 2024, in celebration of the legendary Jonathan Rosenbaum, and powered by and . It’s at the Music Box Theatre and it begins at 7 pm.

Mr Rosenbaum will be there, answering questions and signing copies of his book, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, for which the event is named. A significant chunk of UPV’s U.S.-based students purport to be in Chicago; I expect you to report back on the event in the comments.

“Peter Bull’s The Two-Backed Beast, or The Critic Makes the Film (1978, 45 mins) is an experimental short film that finds Rosenbaum playing himself, being interviewed about a film that doesn’t exist,” says the blurb. “Bull proceeds to create the film that Rosenbaum describes. The alternating footage provides insight into these two different modes of representation.

“The Two-Backed Beast will be preceded by two films hand-selected by Rosenbaum himself: Michael Snow’s Breakfast (Table-Top Dolly) (1976, 15 mins) and Owen Land’s On the Marriage Broker Joke as Cited by Sigmund Freud in Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, or Can the Avant-Garde Artist Be Wholed? (1977, 18 mins).”

The Denis Lavant “Mr Merde-ivator” Stay Fit System

“There was a time when I trained a lot, walked on my hands, juggled, moved in all directions,” said Denis Lavant, in London, on Friday, to us all. “And there was a moment when I said to myself, I feared that the training would detach me, detach me from the performance, that I would become dependent on the training.”

An audience member had asked about M. Lavant’s workout regime. Perfect! Great question. This is a rough translation of M. Lavant’s answer, cobbled from the excellent interpreter’s summary and magic translation tools.

“So instead, I’m rather in my day to day behaviour. I train intensively if there is a need for something; if I need to go beyond something I don’t know how to do for a film. To speak a language, I will apply myself, or playing a musical instrument. If the character has a precise practice or profession, for which I have to provide the gestures in an authentic way - I’m going to train.

“But otherwise, on a daily basis, my practice is to be in the present as much as possible and, in fact, I don’t think of it as training, I am in a practice. As I play a lot in theatre, theatre is a practice in itself. And I behave, in life, in a physical way, because it’s my pleasure.

“The only thing I do is to walk. And to use as few modern comforts and aids, at all levels. Whether it’s vehicles - I don’t have a car, I walk. Or modern communication tools - they bore me.

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“It’s rather a state, actually. And in that state, I try to be available for what I have to do. That comes with age. But to play is the best practice that exists in the world. Because it’s to be on stage all the time, in the present, having the body and the mind, and the memory, all the senses, with a little spirituality. Simply to play like children. Children, they don’t train, they play, but spend a colossal amount of energy.”

By god, that’s relevant for the father-filmmaker trying to keep up with the tiny eyepiece of her heavy Super 8 machine -and the mysterious world in front!

Rebellious Research with Matthew Hawkins: Experimental Fiction Filmmaking

This looks good!

“Matthew will discuss his research practice in the area of fiction filmmaking, and his involvement in the founding of the International Network of Experimental Fiction Filmmaking…

“Experimental Fiction Filmmaking adopts an open and exploratory approach to film practice, drawing inspiration from creative traditions such as experimental film, art cinema, and expanded cinema.

“The practice is often underpinned by film theory and philosophy concerned with concepts of affect, interiority, representation and, more broadly, filmic grammar.”

It takes place this Wednesday, 27th November (2024), at midday, Greenwich Mean Time. On the internet!

Righty. Off you run to continue your “practice.” See you for Week Six next Monday - a lesson on fingers and thumbs!

Class dismissed,

~Graeme Cole.

(Principal)

Hello hello. Get comfy! We’ve had a few weeks away from this term’s module on Renovating the Home Motion Picture. The half-term break, followed by last week’s illuminating interview with Emma Rozanski, whose second feature is currently playing on cinema screens in Colombia. Did you read it?

So let’s briefly recap the last lesson in our home movie series, Shootouts with friends, when we learned how:

• Joyce Wieland and Hollis Frampton spent a trip to Toronto chasing each other with Bolexes.

• Their movie is an existential and action sequence thrill!

• The act of chasing each other with film cameras evoked essential aspects of the true home movie, such as capture and embarrassment.

• Wieland and Frampton achieved an enviable interlacing of life and art, lofty intellectual vision and stupid fun.

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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.

Great. Really good. Today, we continue our dissection of the home movie with a look at the diary film. And how:

💇 The cuts and omissions of the diary film may be their most eloquent parts.

🤳 A moment in Joseph Morder’s phone camera diary highlighted the worlds that live beneath the video stream.

🧟 The film diarist is a “Frankenstein of meat and machine, vanity, sorrow, denial, base instinct, learned grammars, and mediaphysical proprioception,” and

🚧 By putting her life on screen, the film diarist confronts the reality of her existential punctuation marks.

Plus: read to the end for an experimental Bergman/Moholy-Nagy double-bill at Harvard Film Archive, an opportunity to participate in Owen Vince’s new film project, and how to contribute to Julie Rodrigue’s documentary on feminist activism in France and beyond.

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Please, do the institution a favour and share this post with the lapsed film diarist in your life. If you don’t know which of your filmmaker colleagues that is, you could send it to all of them!

And in case it interests you - and it shouldn’t - our marketing department has established a 🦋 Bluesky account. In case it interests you. Perhaps they’ll use it! Perhaps they’ll forget.

The gappy diarist

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

An eleven-year-old boy’s “Good Behaviour Diary” began and ended with the single entry “Got ready for school.” It was found abandoned beside an industrial wheelie bin from which he was chased, one frosty Wythenshawe morning, after he elected to go scavenging instead of going to school. Could any diary object be more profound? 

Probably! But this diary wrapped in a drama exposes an essential facet of the diary film: what comes between the edits and after the end1 of a diary film may be more valuable than what makes it to the tape. 

The diary film’s edits and cuts (where it is chopped and what is truncated or unfilmed) may be profound for three reasons:

1. The cut is a fundamental tool for making meaning (and obscuring meaning) in cinematic grammar.

2. The moving image is recorded in the moment, so a cut is a rupture in the fabric of both the diary and the life which it records.

3. The diary film is recorded live and conspicuously, and recording may be stopped for moments of high drama, sensitivity, etc.

A safe example of the cut’s unique qualities in the diary film occurs in one of Joseph Morder’s video diaries: J’aimerais Partager Le Printemps Avec Quelqu’un. In the opening entry, Morder is learning to use a mobile phone camera. (It is 2007.) Learning to start and stop it. In a room. Each time Morder remembers which icon stops the recording, there is an in-camera jump cut to the moment he remembers how to restart it.

We’re in the real-time of the camera but not the life.2 The viewer’s access to the room is punctuated with ellipses. Blackouts that are triggered by Morder’s short-term memory kicking into action.

What is the life underneath the surface stream of the diary film? The viewer may fill in the gaps, through imagination or persistence of vision. Extending the implied action or narrative. But a diary is not a fiction film for which every audience speculation is valid. The diary film is both a subjective and concrete record of a finite reality. And the viewer soon finds themselves up against the functional limits of their imagination.

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The film diarist worldbuilds with slices of time. But also builds a shadow world of what is omitted. And when. The intimate, spontaneous, and often first-person unfolding of a diary film seems to make the audience one with the diarist.

But by cutting and omitting, the diarist-filmmaker makes the audience one with the diarist’s shadow self: a Frankenstein of meat and machine, vanity, sorrow, denial, base instinct, learned grammars, and mediaphysical proprioception.

This gravity of the diary film’s gaps pulls the experience of life - or of diarizing - inside out. The diarist-filmmaker is already one step ahead of herself, anticipating where in the present scene of her life she should turn the camera next. But she may also think in terms of the notches and blackouts in her stream of footage, since these are makers of meaning in film.

Every video diarist faces the question of when to stop the camera. And the analogue film diarist lives with the knowledge that she’s always running out of film. When to hold on for an action to play itself out, or an aesthetic event to resolve, or the time code to reach an even 60 seconds, or the filmmaker’s lucky number?

The film diarist must find a solution, since the fabric the diary and the life which it records are interwoven: how to lead a gappy life? Where to cut? Where to trim? How to add meaning through ellipsis? Tough questions. Maybe a nap would help.

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

Bergman’s Non-Verbals

“I collected non-verbal sequences from Bergman’s films: Persona, Wild Strawberries, all kinds of films,” said Dušan Makavejev of his Ingmar Bergman Dream Film Experiment. It is to be reconstructed at Harvard Film Archive this Friday. “I had something like seventeen clips and I tried to organize them into a one-hour Bergman film that Bergman never made. It was clips from his films, but it was all him.

“I didn’t do anything. I just found some order. We made a three-screen presentation, with black-and-white dreams in the middle and then two screens in colour after half an hour, but without words. There was a world appearing when you collected the clips and put them in order.

“Suddenly there was something going from sequence to sequence … I think I managed to get something that would look like a dream you can’t explain. The response was very interesting: there was a big silence. People would not dare to discuss it. It was a fantastic response.”

It seems the last time this movie-event was attempted was ten years ago, when a handful of students - of which I was one, in very much a supporting role - reconstructed it digitally then took it on the slow train from Sarajevo to Zagreb’s Galerija Nova at the behest of Tanja Vrvilo.

This week’s screening will be discussed by none less than Pavle Levi, and paired with Vlada Petrić’s similarly rare “Constructivist realization” of an ambitious Moholy-Nagy film experiment, Ein Lichtspiel: Schwarz, Weiss, Grau (1930).

All in all, the night will give you something to talk about with the family at Sunday dinner.

Awful Screen’s Fantastic Proposition

A couple of weeks back, I sent you some half-term reading written by Owen Vince, author of the Awful Screen newsletter.

Well, today Mr Vince is looking for filmmakers to participate in a new project. Here are the details:

“In this new experimental film project (The Film in Question; or, threno-die), I am exploring political violence and our filmic representation of political violence – as well as the ethical questions raised by such “imaging”. The final film will be somewhere between 60 and 90 minutes in length.

For the film’s second (of seven) chapters, I’m looking at the recent assassination of former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe; an event which was captured by many witnesses and subsequently distributed online. It entered the memetic at a startling rate at a time when acts of political violence (assassinations, coups, attacks, etc) appear to be on the rise, worldwide.

For this chapter, I’m inviting filmmakers to stage and film a non-violent re-enactment of the assassination; somewhere between an “interpretation” and the seemingly now defunct genre of the crime-scene re-enactment.

There are no specifications as to how this scene should be shot, as long as it is non-violent. I am not specifying the technology that should be used nor requiring absolute fidelity to the events – or its subjects or setting. A five-second iPhone video is as appropriate as a more elaborate re-enactment filmed on a high-end DSLR, etc.

Filmmakers are encouraged to bring their own formal approach to the event; there is no “correct” way to approach this call-out. The final re-enactments will be edited for the final film, and may ultimately be cut-up or interpolated in different ways during the editing process. Naturally, all contributors will be properly credited in the film and during its promotion.”

You can contact Mr Vince here: owen.m.vince at gmail.com

“In the streets, at night, the Amazons have been protesting against violence against women since 2019…”

Finally, my friend and colleague Julie Rodrigue is making a documentary about a group of feminist activists in France. There are just four days left to support the project on Kickstarter, so please go over there and right-click > Translate if you don’t read French.

Rodrigue’s movie will “bear witness to their efforts, their courage and the sisterhood within the group” as an “observation of feminist activism today in France, of the singularity of those who carry it, of its impact and its demands. It aims to question our representations and our reflections on the subject.”

Okay. That’s it. See you next week for part five of Renovating the Home Motion Picture.

Class dismissed!

~Graeme Cole.

(Principal)