Mr Cole's roaming absurdist film academy, Unfound Peoples Videotechnic - essentially a splinter organisation from the Institute proper - is currently delivering a free, weekly program of esoteric filmmaking knowledge via the Substack newsletter platform.
You can subscribe for free here:
https://unfoundvideo.substack.com/
The current program is called Advanced Amateury: Clumsy Loving in the Age of Competent Content. Future programs, should they be forthcoming, are likely to cover sound design, image rot, and other essential aspects of filmmaking, in a manner intended more to inspire than to instruct.
Here is an excerpt from lesson one of Advanced Amateury:
It’s a slick century. Everybody’s producing ‘content.’ Pros and amateurs fetishise clean edges and stock affectations. The language of authenticity has been shrink-wrapped, digitised, and delivered by 3D fax machine.
Amateurism is often defined as a lack of professionalism. But even the non-professional defaults to professionalised tendencies. Amateurism may be defined by its lack of infrastructure. But way out beyond the movie industry, the artist-filmmaker is tempted to toil towards the freshly-showered images of Hollywood and Indiewood.
Couldn’t we reveal more by channelling our inner shitness? Aren’t we wasting valuable energy trying to cover up the cracks in our reality? The misalignments in our imagination?
To be crap requires the power to resist. In these conditions, it takes courage to allow your ineptitude to show. But might the filmmaker go further and cultivate a practice of worse-ness? Embrace the messy principles of love and humility over profit (of whatever kind) and vanity?
A bold word or phrase indicates that an instruction of the same name and concept will appear later in this module.
Not to fake it/slum it. But to advance (or perhaps settle in to) a working appreciation of all that is:
- vulnerable
- naive
- inept
- broken
- broke
- poor
- wrong
- inconsistent
- incoherent, and
- bad taste
about your practice, your crew, your resources, and your environment.
What tools are available to the sincere amateur-filmmaker? Or more precisely, how can this figure make a tool of anything and everything? What techniques are available for drawing out the messy business of love, tenderness, and symbiosis in filmmaking?
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