◡◶▿ AMAT08 | Faulty
Having fun with faults, blame, and destiny on the film set. Plus: Isabella Rossellini live on animals! Alice Zoo! Fellini!| Advanced Amateury Week 08
Welcome, welcome. Settle down, settle in. Let’s sum up last week’s lesson, Error, in four bulleted points:
A filmmaking error is a structural or systemic hitch in the filmmaker’s kit, process, universe, or self.
Multiple errors in a film add a collective meaning to the work. This meaning might be a critique of a system of the filmmaker’s choosing (society, film industry, endocrine system, national rail network, etc.).
Each single error carries its own unique meaning, which appears graspable but extends into the cosmic infinite.
“System failure” is for our epoch what “doomed expedition” was for the Victorians - a daft and eloquent metaphor for the contemporary human condition.
In today’s lesson, we will discuss:
🔥 Don’t mistake an accident for a mistake: mistakes cause accidents.
🔭 Finding the source of the mistake or error that caused the accident can lead you to valuable material.
🤞 To remove blame from a film set, try surrendering to misfortune. Could be good.
🔤 Hollis Frampton’s categorisation and fabrication of the six filmmaking misfortune types.
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.
The learning starts after this line:
Fault
You can hear me deliver this lesson by scrolling up to the header and clicking Listen and/or the play ▸ button.
A bold word or phrase indicates that an instruction of the same name and concept appears elsewhere in this module.
An accident is a material event. The materialisation of an unintended outcome. The symptom of an error or mistake. Often:
An accident is the result of an error or mistake.
The result of an error or mistake is an accident.
The accident may materialise at the same moment that the error or mistake is made. In this case, the terms “error/mistake” and “accident” may be used as synonyms for one another. For example: the boom operator who droops into frame is making a mistake and an accident at the same time. Double-whammy! But everyone would usually just call it a “mistake.” “You made another mistake,” everyone would say.
Sometimes, these terms function as synonyms even when the accident occurs some time after the error or mistake. Lack of planning or preparation often works this way. The fault occurs before the shoot. On a piece of paper or in a chat. But the accident occurs right in front of the camera.
The crew and the audience might call the accident they see a “mistake.” Synonymous. But the mistake happened on that piece of paper long before the apparatus were put in place for the accident to occur.
Other times, the mistake and its resulting accident may lead quite separate lives:
Consider the spark who picks an unworthy brand of gaffer tape because he finds the label appealing. In this case, his mistake creates a fault line. Which finally gives way some days later, creating a spectacular materialisation event around the heads and feet of his colleagues. Nobody calls the medics saying, “Come quickly, our electrician made a mistake.”
Perhaps it would help the over-stretched emergency services if we could be more precise with our terminology when inviting them to the film set. But in any case, it is worth understanding the distinction if you intend to use blame as a creative tool.
Misfortune
“Misfortune” is often wielded as a vague euphemism for “accident.” The word is a useful tool for filmmakers and politicians. A useful tool, because it removes blame - or any substantial causality. Removes blame from the chain of events that led to an error or mistake and its materialisation as an accident. Misfortune puts the blame on the shoulders of chance or fate.
Hollis Frampton’s misfortune
Hollis Frampton utilised “misfortune”↑ as a euphemism for “mistake” or “error” or “accident,” with his familiar absurd humour.
We call Frampton’s humour absurd because Frampton embraced systems with a tight hug. A hard, tight hug that squeezed humour through the systems’ cracks, exposing the disharmony in the apparently harmonic arrangements that systems present. (Arrangements such as categorisations, technologies, systems of thought or knowledge, etc.)
And, in at least one case, Frampton turned the tables on misfortune1. He faced up to it with the good spirit and thick-headedness of the genius, the idiot, or the pataphysicist2.
How? He tried to reason with misfortune. Reason with misfortune despite the fact that this carefully chosen euphemism is known for being unreasonable. Unlike some of its close synonyms such as “error” or “mistake.”
Errors can be fixed (or systems maintained to pre-empt failure).
Mistakes can be avoided (or trained and rehearsed against).
(To some degree).
But misfortune is completely unreasonable.
You can post-rationalise misfortune, but you cannot talk it out of happening before it occurs. Because you don’t know it’s there until it lands on you.
Wrote Frampton:
“In the course of making any long, dense, and if you will “ambitious” work of art that functions within time and itself requires much time to make, a number of misfortunes are bound to occur.
“That number,” wrote Frampton, “is six, and the misfortunes are: metric errors, omissions, ‘errors’ [including mistakes], lapses of taste, faking, and breaches of decorum.”
(Frampton presents these misfortunes as a numbered list with insightful definitions. They’re worth looking up!)
“Since all these misadventures were bound to occur to me in making Zorns Lemma,” wrote Frampton, referring to a film he completed in 1970, “I decided to incorporate them deliberately. Then at least I would know where they were.”3
He created a working (or breaking) model for pre-empting each mode of misfortune. Six techniques for fabricating imperfections. One for each of the six categories of misfortune listed above.
Who knows if this is a true story or a playful excuse? Particularly since the “breaches of decorum” are all from Frampton’s isolated “original 1962/63 shooting,” which suggests his above statement is a false excuse rather than a true explanation for the “misfortunes” in Zorns Lemma. (Nothing wrong with that.)
And particularly since the absurd gesture of including deliberate “misfortunes” by no means guards against the occurrence of unintentional ones. They are, after all, in the clumsy hands of fate.
Required reading: Alice Zoo, Photography and the Illusion of Control
“The most I can do is work to make something possible…”
Alice Zoo writes with exquisite precision, incision, precarity, on photography, time, and space. Having stumbled on her INTERLOPER newsletter, I’m slowly working through the archive. You are encouraged to do the same.
In particular, there is Photography and the Illusion of Control: Accidents, mistakes, failures, and surrender, which I offer in lieu of a practical exercise this week.
It contains so many precious moments. A written “contact sheet” of holy accidents, great mistakes, and surrender. Read the whole thing backwards and forwards, hold it up to the light, rest your tea on it. Please consider it your mandatory homework.
Here’s a brief excerpt. But a brief excerpt really can’t capture the contours of the thing, so please read the whole letter. Okay?
“There are the limits of one’s own body. Perhaps it’s you that is tired, or grumpy, or ate something strange, or is feeling afraid. Perhaps you’re rushed, or can’t muster the will to engage properly. Perhaps you’re ill, or injured, or it comes to the end of the day and the moment when the other factors all coalesce is the point you lose momentum, missing the thing you might otherwise have caught.[…]
To photograph is to be bolted to time and to space. I can’t help but need to be present in the same time and place that my subject is. If my camera or my body somehow fails, then the picture makes a record of this failure. If all is in flow, then this is also what the picture makes a record of.”
Zoo’s failed reels and surrender call to mind the first days on the A Flea Orchestra In Your Ear set in 2010, when actors would arrive and spot this retailer’s sticker on boxes of expired Soviet Quartzchrome that were lying around:
It worked out fine! Never mind the 2012 UNIVERSAL EAR shoot, when the processed film disappeared in the postal system for six months, and finally arrived to sighs of relief, only to prove to have been… chemically unsound.
And poor Lockwood, whose personal mantra - heard from the insides of closets, behind plywood studio walls, under tables - was an affable “I’m letting go… I’m just letting go.”
Sorry. I promised not to reminisce during school hours. But perhaps it’s relevant.
Zoo’s Photographing Childhood is also a real poke in the ribs with a twig. Highly, highly recommended. Slowly. We’ve had to cut much of the childhood/naivety stuff from the present program due to constraints, so this is for the autodidacts.
Think of the child as filmmaker/vice versa while you read, and you’ll get an extra ⭐ in your exercise book.
Field Work: Isabella Rossellini, queer cuttlefish, Fellini
🐙 TONIGHT! The keen student who opens this email in a timely fashion catches the worm. Or at least the queer cuttlefish.
Here is notice that Isabella Rossellini will present, live, an “exclusive selection of short films from her acclaimed ‘Green Porno’ and ‘Seduce Me’ projects” live (on-screen) at the British Library this evening. (Monday.)
The talk, which involves other talkers too, will also be broadcast online: The Birds and the Bees…and Queer Cuttlefish!
Please forward this email to someone you know will appreciate it and share the link far and wide.
🎥 Here’s something relevant that Distracted Film posted on Instagram. Fellini!
Next week we shall mount the ramp from imperfections to shabbiness, by looking at authenticity, the “realistical fallacy,” and lens flares - the guitar feedback of the cinematic realm.
Please share your thoughts, queries, and notes from this week’s lesson in the comments.
Class dismissed,
~Graeme Cole.
(Principal)
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Or luck, or probability, or god, or thermodynamics or whatever.
Alfred Jarry, the father of ‘pataphysics, introduced it as: “the science of that which is superinduced upon metaphysics, whether within or beyond the latter’s limitations, extending as far beyond metaphysics as the latter extends beyond physics. Ex: an epiphenomenon being often accidental, pataphysics will be, above all, the science of the particular, despite the common opinion that the only science is that of general.”
If this is news to you, I encourage further research. You might start with Jarry’s Siloquies, Superloquies, Soliloquies, and Interloquies in Pataphysics.
Frampton praised ‘pataphysics for addressing “serious defections in physics and psychology” through its spirit of absurdist quasi-scientific speculation.
This seems relevant to mention: when I saw Zorns Lemma in Oslo in 2016, my companion slept on and off throughout - adding her own “metric errors” and “omissions.” She was an old friend I’d not seen for many years. It seems I’d mistaken her avant-garde personality for avant-garde taste.
We were seated at the back of the Cinemateket, so this may well have been the same occasion that I heard the projectionist snoring in the booth. Which was undoubtedly a “breach of decorum,” whenever it took place.
Come to think of it, I associate Oslo with sleepy cinema experiences. I don’t remember what we were watching at Kunstnernes Hus when a stranger, an older woman, slept on my shoulder for most of the picture, and then woke up and left towards the end. We never even saw each other’s eyes.
Thanks so much for this kind and attentive reading!