Jobs in the Avant-Garde
Jobs in the Avant-Garde
✉️ Post office films, fictions enveloping fictions, and UPV on Letterboxd ✉️
Dear Students, Alumni, Faculty, and Trespassers,
First off, why not forward our previous Aki Kaurismäki-flavoured post to the Finnish film fan in your life?
Second, here’s what you’ll find in this newsletter:
Fictions within fictions: a new instruction on the ‘folly text’ - the imaginary universe that contains your film.
The ‘professional amateur’ link between the films of the 🇵🇱WFO and the 🇬🇧GPO.
Unfound Peoples Videotechnic’s new presence on Letterboxd.
Etc.
Yes: this time we’re opening the email with a new ‘How To’ excerpt from the UPV filmmaking knowledge archive. In this case, How To imagine your film-to-be as a fictional object in your personal universe. And how this process is subtly different to the use of a framing device. School gossip will follow at the end of the bulletin. How does that work for you?
New instruction: The Folly Text
Regular visitors to the UPV website enjoy the regular addition of instructional texts. Here follows a copy of the latest.
A film’s folly text is an ontological vignette. ‘Ontological vignette’ means a creeping thematic frame through which to understand the movie’s reason for being: the filmmaker’s personal, fictional explanation as to how her film came to be. ‘Came to be’ not as a story but as a thing: a light-object that moves and groans in time.
In short: a pretend idea of what the film is - between, above, and beyond its real existence as
A) a stream of sounds, images, and ideas the filmmaker desires to put together in sequence.
B) an admin-heavy set of creative tasks towards an unpredictable outcome.
The folly text does not describe what happens in the movie’s story (which may or may not already be sketched out before the creation of the folly text). The folly text describes how and why the story, sound, cast, image, odour, etc. happen in this movie. Not in a hard technical, pre-production sense, but as though the film is already a finished object to ponder.
The filmmaker begins the folly text with a single, speculative sentence or image. (“An orphaned episode of an unknown detective series found on an unmarked VHS tape.”) And expands from there with sentences and non-verbal ideas. There is a strong element of make-believe to the folly text, be it the concoction of an imaginary studio system or the rigour of academic rationalisation. (The former is preferable and the latter far more common).
But the folly text needn’t be a ‘text’ (letters and words). It need not take any definite form at all. The folly text often exists in a gaseous state. Mutable and ungraspable (changeable and slippery), it can expand to fill an empty room. Or an empty movie.
In fact, the folly text is often more exciting than the movie. Especially to the movie-maker. Unlike the movie, the folly text is unlikely to be ruined by making the movie. Indeed, the folly text may keep the filmmaker warm at night long after her movie has failed.
Ideally, the filmmaker develops or shares the folly text with members of the team. The filmmaker may also choose to share the folly text with the audience. The filmmaker may share this explanation through the paratext (such as the title or credits) or in the marketing. Just as the filmmaker chooses whether or not to share details about the catering.
The filmmaker has the right to keep the folly text to herself. Or, she may share it in a graspable or ungraspable way. This right makes the folly text materially different from the framing device. The framing device is something else.
Folly Text vs. Framing Device
How is the framing device something else from the folly text? A framing device is part of the structure and material of the movie. It may be a voiceover or a fictional academic introduction to a pretend ‘found tape.’ If the audience can’t access the framing device directly in the movie (or at least in its marketing materials), then it doesn’t exist; there is no framing device. But the folly text? The filmmaker has the right to keep it to herself. The only evidence of its existence may be circumstantial.
However, the folly text and the framing device can function together. In symbiosis. Filmmakers often use a framing device to convey an essence of the folly text to the audience. To give the audience an idea of the filmmaker’s idea of why the film is that way. (You may re-read that sentence).
What is the purpose of the folly text? Properly attended, the folly text will have a distinct impact on the movie’s sound, visuals, and current.
To keep the filmmaker and her crew ‘on track’ towards a fixed aesthetic, Or
In more extreme examples, to facilitate a Brechtian alienation effect by disrupting the smooth narrative/aesthetic rhythms of conventional cinema with a logic that is exterior to the movie object, Or
To create a fiction between the fiction of the watched movie and the ‘real’ experience of the movie’s production (in the world of Tescos etc.), ‘expanding’ the movie for the crew and/or audience, And
To create a fiction that interrogates itself; to split a fiction into interrogator and interrogated; to find a third place where truths may be located, Which is
To immerse the movie in, or expand it around, itself.
The folly text is a form of metadata. (Metadata is ‘data about data’ - for example, all those little numerical factoids you can uncover from a digital photograph). Better said, the folly text is a meta-sound-image. Or, with more precision: a meta-idea. The folly text is the story about the movie, the notion of the notion.
But the folly text is not embedded in the film file. It is embedded in the filmmaker. And she should try, by stealth or by force, to embed it in everybody else.
Instruction ends.
The Avant-Garde 9-5
I finally have partial access to the archives of the WFO (Wytwórnia Filmów Oświatowych). The WFO is the ‘Educational Films Studio’ belonging to Łódź Province in central Poland. A deadline for the essay film I am to make with these materials has also materialized. (The essay film will complement our module on amateurism in filmmaking).
And? The work of the WFO bears striking resemblance, in spirit and occasionally in form and aesthetics, to that of the GPO Film Unit - a documentary group that is well worth your further investigation.
The UK’s General Post Office established its own film unit in the 1930s. Yes, the post office! Its remit was to make informative films about postal work and, later, British life in general. As dry as this sort of information film may sound, the GPO Film Unit and its subsequent incarnations were hotbeds of avant-garde experimentalism.
These filmmakers were, by mode of employment, civil servants. But they were technically trained, (just about) sufficiently resourced, and full of ideas and passion for the young format - and potential art - of the documentary film.
The WFO came a bit later. And has lasted a lot longer. But its archive reveals a similar outlook: a hunger to re-imagine documentary language; an effort to exoticize the everyday; an equivocal approach to every subject (at least in theory; in practice, of course, such an approach carries a weight of ingrained preconception and prejudice).
The films share a passion for playfulness I associate with a certain niche of young film students:
Naive
Avant-garde
Experimental (trying out and including unconventional techniques)
Agitative.
These filmmakers were trained employees: ultraprofessionals. Yet they were able to use their employed status to scratch the itch of amateurism. The itch of amateurism? The nagging desire to play and explore out of childlike love for the form (or the tools or the team).
I’m sure lots of other countries have/had organizations like this. Has yours? Let me know! The UPV is expanding its knowledge base on this phenomenon all the time.
Or perhaps you have a day job where you embody these characteristics. In filmmaking or otherwise. You could tell me about that, too!
Letterboxd
The school now has a presence on Letterboxd. Do follow us - we’ll follow back anyone who appears to be a newsletter subscriber. You’re part of the UPV community, after all. (Send us a message if we miss your Follow).
We’ve migrated the principal’s reviews of several ex-Yugo region films to the UPV profile. Mostly obscure Kino Klub shorts, which we had to add to the Letterboxd database by hand! We will add newer, clearer texts from the growing UPV corpus. For example, here is last month’s Shadows In Paradise.
That’s all - except to say, if you haven’t tried marmalade lately, give it another go. It’ll turn your day around!
Thanks for reading.
~Graeme Cole.
(Principal)
Please support the school by forwarding this bulletin to curious colleagues:
Link Coaster
“After he set off the alarms at Coppola's Zoetrope a few times, it became inconvenient” | Extending artworks infinitely in all directions | “still finding reasons to fix what I did” | Feathers, glass, and tin foil, grids and weaves of all kind, leather, furs, and shiny cans | It doesn’t exist and it doesn’t make sense | 🎥 The story of an 'undersized' Cockney lad who joins the Post Office (extract) 🎥 | 👂 Listenography 👂
