◡◶▿ ROTT11 | Definition
◡◶▿ ROTT11 | Definition
💭 Where does your movie fit in the gloop matrix? Plus: how to define "experimental film"; The Stone Tape on the big screen. | Rotting the Image Week 11
Dear film students, eternal or just passing through: please sit comfortably. Or sprawl!
This week, we continue with the disintegration of the image. We’re going to talk about “definition.” The highs, the lows, and the beyonds.
But first. Do you remember last week’s lesson on resolution? We learned how:
Image resolution concerns the release of an image and how it is rearranged elsewhere.
The resolution process involves a sequence of barely compatible people and machines.
The filmmaker must accept compromise as a fact of life - and embrace compromise as a power to be wielded.
When working with resolution, you should be wary of missing the forest (resolution) for the trees (pixels). Or fixating on both at the expense of the broader biosphere (movie).
Great. It’s all clear. In today’s micro-essays, below, we’ll plunge between the pixels. We’ll look at definition - which is quite a different matter to resolution. And yet, has quite a lot in common with it.
We’ll discuss how:
🚰 Image definition concerns the clarity of an image and the chutzpah of its details.
🖌️ The filmmaker modulates the definition of her visual strokes to create a “soup” of suitable brothiness.
🏰 The filmmaker might ‘lean in’ to the characteristics her movie’s definition to ensure these characteristics stand the test of time.
💭 The filmmaker might also change the definition of the non-image elements (theme, structure, humour) of her movie alongside the image definition.
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.
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Definition
You can hear me deliver this lesson by scrolling up to the header and clicking Listen and/or the play ▸ button.
People like to talk about the “definition” of a movie. They are referring to the clarity of the visual details. The assertiveness of each dot, patch, streak, and line. They like to rate this “definition” on a sliding scale. The scale slides infinitely in two broad directions.
For some reason, these directions are described in terms of altitude.
A movie where each hair on a dog’s back seems discrete and independent, sassy even, is “high” definition;
a movie in which the dog’s fur appears soupy and indistinct is “low” definition.
In a highly defined movie, every visual stroke tends towards independence. It feels like each highly-defined trouser button or beam of light might just get up and walk off into another movie. To prevent this, the filmmaker creates aesthetic unity between the visual elements. This makes each visual stroke feel at home and happy to get on with expressing what it is meant to express.
On the other hand, the visual components of a low-definition movie gloop together. Softly-defined image parts intermingle. On occasion, they crud. This can make a movie feel inert or unmotivated.
To get things moving, the filmmaker might introduce radically incompatible shapes and colours into her low-definition movie. Immiscible visual strokes. Or she might lean into the gloop. After all, if she chose gloopy visual materials, it was probably for a good reason.
Calibration-destination
Image definition is a spectrum. This spectrum stretches infinitely in two broad directions. High-definition images are clearly defined, and low-definition images are murkier. Neither direction (towards high or low definition) is “better.”
The filmmaker calibrates her movie’s visual definition up(-ish) or down(-ish). She thinks about the nature of her movie, her resources, and other factors as she does so. More extreme levels of definition have more impact (splodgy or sharp).
However, while the spectrum of high-low definition is, in theory, infinite, the filmmaker should be wary not to get dragged too far beyond the limits of possibility.
The filmmaker also considers the destiny of her movie. It is likely that people will transfer her movie between formats and environments for the remaining duration of human culture. Maybe longer! The filmmaker will only be involved in some of these transfers.
The filmmaker has limited control over future transfers of her movie. The transfer of her movie between formats and environments. And she has limited control over the changes in definition her movie will incur. So, the filmmaker might give her movie the power to ‘resist’ particular changes in definition.
For example:
Perhaps her 35 mm movie is likely to go “straight to VHS.”
In this case, the filmmaker may incorporate over-lit, high-definition sets and actors to retain clarity even as the image softens.
Perhaps her Super 8 movie is likely to be “reconstructed and restored” in years to come. The process might make her images crunchy and over-defined.
To defend against this, the filmmaker may create an excessively low-definition image to begin with, shooting in low light, with blocky actors and a smudgy lens.
The filmmaker cannot know the destiny of her film. Nor its various points of transfer along the way. She may create alternative versions of her movie to send out along different paths. But still. The best she can do is prepare her movie to travel boldly, or with bold murkiness, as best befits the movie’s nature.
Definition across elements
Image definition refers to the clarity of visual elements in a picture. But definition is a value we can apply to other aspects of a movie.
The strength of the gravity in the movie universe may be more or less defined. The characters (as a collective) or a particular character, may be more or less defined. The dialogue may be more or less defined, both as written and as spoken. That sort of thing.
The filmmaker may combine or juxtapose different levels of definition from one aspect of her movie to another. And these levels may fluctuate throughout. In both life and art, definition is rarely constant. It shifts, depending on culture, diet, the weather, and the company you keep. The filmmaker may imbue the different elements of her movie with the freedom or the curse of variable definition as they flourish or rot in time.
Please share your thoughts, queries, and exercises from this week’s lesson in the comments.
A definition of “experimental film”
I had the privilege of catching a raft of animations from Hong Kong at London’s marvellous Close-Up Cinema last week. The films were chosen by Max Hattler. Hattler is an intensely talented filmmaker and “neo media artist.” Most of the films were made by Hattler’s students in Hong Kong, and there were some animations of his own, too.
I'm still digesting the movies. Still digesting those films. But if you can find Hattler’s O/S (2023) to see somewhere, I suggest you do so. The film appears to be a methodical exploration of screen space, resolution, and rhythm. But in fact, it was composed as an optical score: the cascading video lines and reliefs trigger the musical soundtrack. Ace! (It inspires as a quasi-methodical exploration of screen space, resolution, and rhythm, too).
Anyway.
The event was compered with a fuzzy balance of expertise and affability by Paul Taberham. Taberham is an old friend I hadn’t seen for many years. Nice! He is also an Associate Professor in film studies at the Arts University Bournemouth, and has published on topics including experimental film, animation aesthetics, screen narratology, and cognitive film studies. !
During the Q&A, an audience member asked about “what experimental actually means in a film context.” Taberham adopted the question, and his answer was so clear and practical that I later asked if I could share it here. I’ll also include an addendum added by artist/filmmaker and teacher Katerina Athanasopoulou, who was in the audience.
Said Taberham:
“I'm obsessed with that question. And I, you know, keep trying to formulate an answer. And I think any definition you give has to have a little bit of slack, like on a rope. Because if you list out a series of essential criteria for membership, then you're going to find exceptions.
“But if you look at it enough, you can say, okay, well, often, experimental films will treat the cinematic frame like a canvas on which to have visual explorations rather than an imaginary window through which, you know, you see events happen. I like to think of experimental films as a sort of imagining board, if you like, almost like a Rorschach, where it's not going to hand you meaning, but it can sort of be a mirror and bounce back and see however you respond to it.
“I think there are other things, institutional things, like they're often self-funded or made by one or a small collective of people.
“And if I was to choose one thing that defines it for me, this is where I'm currently at. It's, if you think: what have people assumed about cinematic experience? What assumptions have gone unchecked?
“Like, for example, do we use cinema to watch a drama? Okay, well, what if we use it to create, you know, abstract paint? Or cinematics: what if we project a film on the side of a building? Or what if we use two projectors side by side? Or, you know, things like that. So, that would be it to me:
“Can you subvert unchecked assumptions and still have a meaningful aesthetic experience?”
Okay! We’re all about the assumptions here at UPV, as you know. Love an assumption. Got to chop n’ screw an assumption.
Said Athanasopoulou:
“For me, the answer to what is experimental film is actually quite simple, in the sense that it is not just film: any experimental process entails the possibility of failure. And says, I do not know what's going to happen.
“And that is also the paradox of an experimental methodology, because a method says that there is a road, there is an optimal path, and this is where it's going to take you. And the experimental says, I genuinely do not know what the end is going to be until I'm going to get there.
“But I feel that another way that experimental is defined is simply by being curated within an experimental program. So, in that sense, Yes, we don't need the synopsis [to appreciate watching an abstract movie], but the curation is already giving a view into it. And I think it's wonderful to still not know what experimental exactly is, because otherwise, it's not experimental.
“It doesn't know entirely, and it doesn't need to say it, it just needs to do it.”
Great. We’re all about the failure!
Stone Tape in the Field
Quickly, if you’re in Sheffield, or Yorkshire, or have a private jet put aside for obscure screenings: The Stone Tape plays at the Samuel Worth Chapel in Sheffield on the 20th December, 2023. As a one-off thing from the Sensoria festival.
Those who saw my lecture on sound at the Slow Film Festival in 2020 will remember me wittering on about it. Essential movie for sound students. And scholars of the hauntological! “Like far too few movies in the history of cinema and television, The Stone Tape (1972) is about the quest for a new storage format...”
Next week, we’ll learn about nothing. More specifically, the nothing between somethings. The kids are calling it “visual ellipsis”… and it’s waiting to suck you in.
Class dismissed!
~Graeme Cole.
(Principal)