◡◶▿ HOME10 | The beating bosom
👂 Press your ear to the silent home movie. School closure. Plus: Baltic Analog Lab deadline TODAY. Manel Raga Raga next month. Fellini Forever. | Renovating the Home Motion Picture Week 10
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!
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!
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?
Please share your thoughts, queries, and exercises from this week’s lesson in the comments.
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.
Class dismissed!
~Graeme Cole.
(Principal)
📹 Unfound Peoples Videotechnic | Cloud-based filmmaking thought. ☁️
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Or rather, when Yves Montand’s Adam’s Apple silently bulged in the subsequent moments since the spilled tobacco is synced to a muffled rumble.
Why expend energy making sounds that will be forever abandoned by their images?
Which may be fancifully defined as: the soil (humbleness or humility), bed (comfort or rest), roof (shelter or security), windows (embarassment, watching), and walls (embrace, capture). As you’ll know by now, if you’ve paid attention over the past three months.
Hi Graeme, I love your posts. Responding to your general query: do you know my recently published book FILMMAKERS THINKING from Sticking Place in USA? I think you (and some of your followers) would find it congenial. It’s available print-on-demand only, from Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/Filmmakers-Thinking-Adrian-Martin/dp/B0DKZSD2T6