◡◶▿ ROTT04 | Substance

👻 A not-Halloween-themed micro-essay about your film as a ghost. Bourque/Maddin/Sabatier. Plus: Radu Jude, Jia Zhangke, Bi Gan, Laura Citarella, and Meltse Van Coillie. | Rotting the Image Week 04

Unfound Peoples Videotechnic (UPV) is a roaming absurdist film school. You’ve found us amidst a weekly program of micro-essays on the ‘odour of a film’s look’: how to creatively mis-use cinematography and all your other tools to give your images life and, inevitably, death.

You are very welcome to dip in or sign up. 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.Oh, god, it’s another week!

Welcome back to our little global film school. And to our 12-part dissection of the quality of a movie’s image.

First, a recap of last week’s lesson, Volumes:

• The image volume is the boxy-looking thing that lives behind the image surface.

• It looks like a space, but it is a flat image in a state of perpetual mutation across two dimensions.

• The filmmaker must concoct a new set of physical laws for this space-like flatness. Every time.

• The viewer is also a ‘volume’ - but, as far as anyone can tell, one that occupies at least three dimensions - and could be hugged, with the appropriate permissions.

Today, we begin looking at the substance of the film’s image. But we begin in a state of pre-substance. What if your film isn’t a solid object at all?

In particular, we’ll cover:

🐛 Your film reconsidered as the flap of a butterfly’s wings.

👻 Your film reconsidered as a ghost.

🧟‍♀️ Your film reconsidered as your audience’s neural waves.

🇧🇪 Yet more “Belgian comedy” talk (25 international recommendations).

I did not time this email for Halloween. It’s a coincidence that I’m talking about ghosts in late October. Anyway. Please forward it to the haunted filmmaker and/or social network in your life.

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A process object

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

Is your movie an object?

The audience will experience it moving in time. The projection or playback will have parts that move, or at least heat up. Cause and effect. So perhaps it’s a process.

Or perhaps it’s another kind of process: from conception, to production, to delivery, and reception. Lots of moving parts if you include all of that as “your movie.” Lots of heat!

And then, there’s how it exists in an ever-decaying state in the minds and bodies of all who encounter it. Another process.

Or, the places it takes you and your crew. The changes it makes to those who see it or who encounter those within whom it is decaying. The social and environmental dominoes it flips over - prompting overdue phone calls and waking caged budgies. Are these part of your movie-as-a-process, or a result of the existence of the movie-as-object?¹

But these are just technical aspects. Do you feel your movie to be an object? Should you? How does that affect the materials you use to fabricate it? And the way it will break down in nature?

Ghost cinema

As the filmmaker formulates the odour of her film’s look, her thoughts may turn to the ‘substance’ of her movie, including:

• What she pretends it is made of,

• what it is physically made of, and

• the material nature (real and imaginary) of how the movie is delivered to audiences.

Her thoughts may turn to the supernatural.

When you see a movie in the cinema, it journeys as dusty light over your head. Illuminating the invisible and re-animating cold-stored actors. Classic cinema was necromantic, stealing souls and projecting them elsewhere. The haunted projector switches on and off by itself; the scenery crackles and the image surface oozes.

A bold word or phrase indicates that an instruction of the same name and concept appears elsewhere in this module.

If you see it on television, the same movie journeys as invisible signals in the air. Since its birth, television has been associated with the idea of the spectral intruder; information as ghost, or ghost as information. The movie enters homes, lurks, regardless of whether you switch on a receiver. Watching a late-night TV movie can be the only way to lay the movie (and yourself) to rest.

Wi-Fi waves are more cynical, less innocent or tragic, than television’s spectral waves. In the public imagination, they are a conspiracy - more or less sinister - of corporate, government, or even alien (or hybrid) agencies.

But still, by TV signal or Wi-Fi, most of the movies you’ve watched over the past decades have journeyed to you invisibly through the air. Fighting for space with ghosts.

Following this notion, the filmmaker may decide that her film cannot be an object. Its odour might hang like a presence, not stink like a thing. She might embrace the hauntiness of her picture. Exaggerate or fabricate the visual traces of its immateriality.

Or the filmmaker might forget about it. Maybe she doesn’t believe in ghosts. Or she would rather consider this particular picture as a concrete object.

Never mind; the ghosts will still find their ghosty way.

Undead cinema

When the filmmaker begins to formulate the odour of her film’s look, her thoughts may turn to the ‘substance’ of the movie, both real and imagined.

She may imagine or construct her film as a latent force awaiting release or activation.

In which case, she must determine the nature of the real or imaginary material in which the movie awaits.

Louise Bourque found Self Portrait Post Mortem (2002) undead, somewhere between the film material itself and the bio-chemistry of her garden soil.

She had buried “random” footage from a previous project under the ground. “[W]ith the ambivalent intentions of both safe-keeping and unloading.” When she dug it up, Bourque found the material to now consist of decaying chemical imagery. Decaying chemical imagery framing images of her own face.

The movie, as Bourque presented it to the world, was waiting in the film stock. Waiting in the earth. Waiting to be dug up and cut up.

Roland Sabatier left it to his audience to mentally supply the images, sound, story, odour, etc., of his ‘movie,’ Les Preuves (1966). In 1966, analogue film travelled as reels of polyester in piles of heavy cans. For Les Preuves, Sabatier supplied just a film can for the audience to observe while they imagined the movie. The movie was inside; not inside-inside, but inside.

(Replicas of the can were later made. Whether they suffer from generation loss is not known.)

Where does Sabatier’s movie exist before the audience imagines it?

• In the can,

• in his (late) mind,

• in the audience’s mind, or

• in the culture?

Consider algorithmic cinema. Cinema that the audience generates through the act of watching. (Or which, using modern generative software, raises movies that have long lain dormant. Lain dormant somewhere between the collective imagination and the ancient mineral deposits from which microchips are built). Does the film exist before you do the maths?

Seances (Creators: Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson, 2016) provides a jigsaw of ancient film titles and newly produced scenes they inspired. Clicking the link generates a new selection and arrangement of pieces of title and scene. Each new movie plays once and then disappears forever.

Disappears where?

The weight of the pixel

The concept of the discarded photo is itself now discarded, obsolete. Unwanted snaps are disintegrated at source. Deactivated pixel by pixel. Nobody stumbles on discarded photos anymore.

But this does not mean the pixel has no physical presence. To generate, maintain, and even to deactivate a pixel requires ‘stuff.’ Matter is mined. Energy is burned.

This information is commonly known. It makes it into think-pieces in Sunday supplements. But it is not part of the broadest imaginary. It does not hang heavy over the aisles of the digital cinematheque.

What a missed opportunity!

Does your audience:

• know

• think

• feel (sense)

the physical impact of digital storage, distribution, and projection of your movie? And of its regular disintegration on disparate hard drives?

This is not a question of the filmmaker’s responsibility to the planet’s ecological well-being. (That is a matter of her own politics).

The point is to flag the weight of your digital images and the digital actions with which you construct them. A digital artefact may feel as light as a feather, as ephemeral as a rainbow. But what a feather! What an atrocious rainbow! What a peculiar and very real odour they emit!

Exercise: Object process

Please share your thoughts, queries, and exercises from this week’s lesson in the comments.

Top international filmmakers lured to Belgium

I’ve mentioned this to some of you before. But now I want to make sure you all get the note: Meltse Van Coillie has a new short film on the internet.

I want you all to get the note, because I saw another new-ish (2022) movie from Van Coillie and her collaborator Harm Dens at the Slow Film Festival in Leytonstone this weekend. Nocturnus. This was after I witnessed their Elephantfish at the same festival, in a different place, in 2019.

They’re so good!

“Here goes Professor, banging on about absurdist Belgian cinema again,” you’re probably whispering to each other. Or passing it around on little digital notes. But notice Van Coillie’s timing in the new film (Chamariz). Notice how she makes natural daylight hilarious.

Chamariz was commissioned for the 50th anniversary of Film Fest Gent. The festival commissioned 25 filmmakers to work with 25 composers on new shorts. Radu Jude, Jia Zhangke. Bi Gan, Trenque Lauquen’s Laura Citarella. Terence Davies. LOTR’s Howard Shore, Drive My Car’s Eiko Ishibashi, and regular Béla Tarr collaborator Mihály Vig.

Great!

Next week, we’ll look at thingness. How to formulate the odour of your film’s look when you consider your film to be a ‘thing.’

Class dismissed.

~Graeme Cole.

(Principal)

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1. (You needn’t be so specific in your treatment. No funding agency assessor wants to imagine your film threading its way, unidentifiably, through their personal life).