◡◶▿ HOME06 | A phenomenology of the pinch zoom
🤞 The finger gait of naive gods. Plus: Artist fees for unreliable movies. And Boris Lehman's tinned surprises. | Renovating the Home Motion Picture Week 6
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.
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.
My dear friends, this little film school relies on your nourishing shares to grow. Please forward this email to someone who’ll cherish it - or share the link with your whole beautiful network!
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).
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.
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?
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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Although the fingerprint is also subject to the pull of time. It fades or smudges. The real finger ridges thicken or scar with age. Tromboning away from the trace they left.