◡◶▿ MAPS06 | Infinite wallpaper

🧻 Remapping filmic spaces - Enclosing mental spaces - Unlocking the cosmos. Unhinging the intern. | Maps, Flaps, & Infinite Wallpaper Week 6

Jun 03, 2024

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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.

Good morning! Please sit comfortably. Begin your croissant. Odd filmmaking class is about to start.

Last week’s lesson was on the set design technique known as clunkyism. Briefly, here’s what we covered:

Clunkyism developed as a mental coping mechanism for a lost filmmaker with fading memories - but soon infected the practice of film set design.
The clunkyist identifies every component of a film set as its own thing with its own source; it needn’t look like it belongs.
These elements are further “clunkified” by being wrapped up or replaced with incongruous alternatives, and juxtaposed crudely with the other odd things of the set.
This method may be “sarcastic about certainty,” “sad about memory,” “resigned about filmmaking,” or just cheap, silly fun.

Today, we’ll learn about a powerful but undervalued decorative and conceptual material. Wallpaper! And, in particular, we’ll cover:

🏚️ The problem of walls, which fill so much of the average cinematic shot, and which need to be covered.

🧻 The multifarious power of wallpaper, which is extendable, structural, decorative, and may be hardwired to the cosmos.

📜 The comparative weakness of other wallcovering options.

🤯 The mental and emotional risks (and potential) of gazing for too long into the infinite shroud.

Please share this lesson to get the good word (wallpaper) out there. Enlighten your filmmaking colleagues. Dazzle your interior designer. Scare your art students.

Let’s go.

Wallpaper

You can hear me deliver this lesson by scrolling up to the header and clicking Listen and/or the play ▸ button.

Statistically, walls take up the majority of the movie screen canvas. An interior mid- or wide-shot will mostly be walls. Only in a close-up do walls cede their domination to another type of visual matter: the face.

Over the years, filmmakers have tried to obscure the walls with other visual matter. Have you ever seen a film where the characters wear large hats indoors? It is probable that the filmmaker was insecure about walls.

The surface of a wall tends to be plain or follow a repetitive pattern. Only in unusual cases will the wall itself have irregular features. And such a feature is most likely to disrupt an underlying pattern. Still, there is a lot of surface to adapt to the needs of the movie.

But there is one affordable solution. A solution that allows the filmmaker to exploit the aesthetic, thematic, and cartographic potential of those vast surfaces. The solution is wallpaper.

The base unit of a wallpaper design is a repeatable motif. The base unit repeats again and again at the whim of the decorator or set designer. The motif can be repeated to infinity. Or it can end abruptly. Still, that abrupt ending may be neat or jagged - a cut or a tear.

The set designer can evoke many types of feeling, meaning, or space with wallpaper:

by the extent of their wallpaper and how it begins and ends. (If it begins and/or ends.)
through the nature of the pattern itself: the motif and how the motif is modulated across the wall.
- (The path of the motif needn’t obey its own design rules. Deviations and anomalies may hint at an alternative realm of physics within the world of the movie or its wallpaper.)
not to mention texture and colour.

Evgraf Fedorov proved that there are only 17 fundamental wallpaper patterns. Seventeen ways a motif can repeat to infinity. Scholars will note this figure matches the number of movie character types that Volodymyr Nanneman assumed were possible. However, this appears to be a coincidence.

Wallpaper or not

Many a brawl has broken out regarding the definition of wallpaper. The wallpaper student must confront this issue the moment they sit down to begin their studies. The wallpaper student may encounter:

Small, cut-out motifs
Friezes
Paper panels
Posters
Ceiling papers
Free-hanging paper decorations
Woven grasses
Embroidered draperies
Other things

In each case, the student must decide for themselves whether the phenomenon they encounter deserves to be categorised as wallpaper.

In filmmaking, this dilemma is intensified by the illusory nature of set design. “Illusory nature of set design” means that film set materials are often made to look like other materials. The set designer needn’t make her wallpaper out of paper. And if using wallpaper, it needn’t appear to be wallpaper in the movie. (It could be brickwork or sky, for example.)

The set designer will maintain tighter conceptual control if she defines wallpaper in its most conventional sense. Rolls of paper, neatly hung. A repeatable motif as its base unit; repeatable to infinity; only the set designer can make it stop.

Conventional wallpaper resonates with the shapes, surfaces, and other structural fundaments of a movie - whether ‘playing itself’ or appearing to be something else. By comparison, cut-out motifs, friezes, paper panels and such are frivolous things.

These frivolous things may be used for decor or as more or less important narrative details or wormholes. But only conventional wallpaper echoes the structures of the studio, the set, the diegesis, the audience, the mind, and perhaps the universe.1

Wallpaper sense

The set designer will maintain tighter conceptual control over her scenery if she defines wallpaper in its most conventional sense. Rolls of paper, neatly hung. A repeatable motif as its base unit; repeatable to infinity; only the set designer can make it stop.

The mental and cosmic resonance of such wallpaper is powerful. It should be wielded with care on set and on screen.

Wallpaper has often been associated with or blamed for:

Irritation
Loss of sanity
Disorientation.

The Curse of the Phantom Tympanum (2019) featured wallpaper that fit this definition. Conventional wallpaper, neatly hung. A repeatable motif as its base unit; repeatable to infinity. The wallpaper was copied by hand from the wallpaper at the Palais Jacques Coeur in Bourges and hung in a studio recreation of the palais, a five-minute walk from where the original still hangs.

Set designer Aleksandra Niemczyk and her team created several strips of the wallpaper. The strips met each other at artificial corners to create the illusion of a room. The same set of strips was also used in a row to create a corridor. The same row was used to evoke different parts of the same corridor. But the viewer understands them to be different strips in a different part of the corridor thanks to:

The infinite repeating nature of wallpaper, which demands additional context (light, sound, or object) for orientation.
- (Wallpaper repeats infinitely because it starts with a base unit. The base unit repeats again and again at the whim of the decorator or set designer.
- Any instance of the base unit may be mistaken for, or easily disguised as, another.
  - (Unless the characters learn to alter them as they orientate themselves - which is another matter.)
  - (But let’s note that picking at wallpaper alters - imbalances - the structural integrity of the scheme.))
The mapping effect of continuity editing.

The set designer utilised an entire intern to paint the wallpaper design onto plain paper strips. The intern painted the paper the same colour as the wallpaper in the Palais Jacques Coeur: red and gold. Painting the wallpaper involved several days of repetitive work. Painting between the lines of a stencilled pattern.

Unfortunately, the movie was then filmed in black and white. The scenes featuring the wallpaper were then digitally re-colourised. When it was time for the intern to return to his home town, he was asked if he intended to return to Bourges. The intern replied, “Jamais!”

However, the intern’s paint job was no fool’s errand. Wallpaper must be coloured, even if it is to be filmed in black and white.

The desaturation and re-saturation of the palais wallpaper was not an act of folly. But it was an absurd act. The act imbued the wallpaper with absurdity. Absurdity all over the walls.

Outside

Next week, we’ll go outdoors. Next week, we’ll learn about the city!

Class dismissed.

~Graeme Cole.

(Principal)

📹 Unfound Peoples Videotechnic | Cloud-based filmmaking thought. ☁️

I know some of you will argue that certain forms of woven grasses could do the same. Sadly, there isn’t time to explain why you are wrong.