◡◶▿ HOME05 | Shorter, bolder, stranger, clippier
🎞️ The peculiar timescape of the Super 8 home movie. Plus: The Denis Lavant Workout. The Rosenbaum Show. | Renovating the Home Motion Picture Week 5
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.
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.
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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:
Design/wait for an eight-second shot?
Abandon selectivity? Let the camera coast on a long, diluted moment until the end flag flips up?
Fire the remaining frames off on an aesthetic whim (clouds, soap suds)? Or a non-duration-contingent home phenomenon?
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.”)
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.
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.
“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
“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)
Defining the beginning and end of a home movie in either digital or film format is difficult. But it’s harder with Super 8 it’s even harder. You accumulate literal “footage.” Material by the yard. Deleting is impossible. No shot ever feels quite discrete. They belong together, as does the leader material at the start and end of the reel. And whatever comes beyond those.
Defining the beginning and end of either process, too - but that’s normal in filmmaking
The father-filmmaker may also lever down to a lower frame rate to save film stock. She invented the technique, after all. Shooting at 18 or 12 frames per second delivers images that run faster than real time - further thickening Father’s choice of the densest moments to record.
Découpage: the overview of how shots and other elements will be pieced together to create meaning or order or other alchemical produce.
However, perhaps a home movie where the “découpage” was considered is not a home movie at all; there isn’t much that’s humble about découpage. Or could we work towards a Humble Découpage?
In an interview with Dominique Bluher.