Wednesday 13 April 2016

Split Log 05

The birds are chirping, although there’s no sign yet of the sun. I envy them their circadian rhythms, behaviour as secret information. I have become convinced that my own rhythms have become faulty, my feelings – which perhaps I should have left at home – ebbing and flowing with the unpredictability of the capricious Dalmation winds. Meanwhile, my information sources are wholly orthodox: books, videos, the internet, the flawed recollections of other people. They are reforming as quivering inaccuracies in my mind and, occasionally, as words on the internet or out of my mouth.

Saturday, we officially – but without ceremony – inaugurated the Unfound Peoples Videotechnic at Kino Klub Split (a temporary lodging for a roaming academy). The opening lecture, titled Mythology of the Self, seemed to be well-received by our historic initial cohort. It was a relief just to get through the damned thing without running out of things to say or being assaulted or, worse, called-out. I hope it was of some use, but in developing a total filmmaking education program (indeed, it is billed as a radical de-programming reprogramming program) this first lecture can only be regarded as the damping of the nib. It was far too factual, if my opinions were admirably smeared into the raw information, and with too many references to the ‘real world’. In preparing (destroying) a limited edition .pdf of notes for participants to take away with them, I began to find a greater poetry in omission and deliberate obfuscation; words, as some wise old chap once said, are given to us to hide our true meaning. I’m running an artist’s workshop, not a cooking show.



My own studies, however, focussing presently on the Kino Klub movement, are drawn into a peculiar dichotomy of word and sound-image: the Klubs’ golden era, the hub of their collective thematic resonances, was half a century ago; the movies of the time are largely wordless, but are explained in a tornado of written manifestoes, articles and histories which variously overlap, correct and contradict each other. It’s most inspiring, all this writing, and a curious analogue to what would have been the equivalent had I ‘been there’ – conversation, both languid (lazy young revolutionaries pushing ideas around with twigs on the beaches of Split) and quasi-diplomatic (the minuted, numbered and catalogued ‘discussions’ of Zagreb’s smoky projector rooms). Of course, I wouldn’t have understood a word if I’d ‘been there’. Maybe that would have engendered a more appropriate feeling. Certainly, I’m enjoying (and understanding) the films more on a collective level, starting to feel I know the filmmakers (which I never will) better than I know the films (which I have watched repeatedly). Projections…

Your corrections are welcomed in the Comments box.


Sunday 10 April 2016

Split Log 04

Dazzled by words and light, unable to form the former or comprehend the latter, for now a synthesis of both in the precisely 11,000 as-yet unphotoshopped words below. Logging with words-words is proving somehow unnatural for now. Embiggen for detail.












Wednesday 6 April 2016

Split Log 03

Scouting for locations, feelings, in Omiš.





Sunday 3 April 2016

Split Log 02

The first Friday night at Kino Klub brings a screening of Duet for Cannibals, Susan Sontag’s take on the daftness of politicians and activists alike, starring a young Martin Freeman.

Afterwards, we discuss the movie (a Bunuelian Godard spoof?) with Kino Klub director Sunčica Fradelić. A bottle of slivovitsa is brought through from a smoky backroom where local musician and Kino Klub member Karlo Silic is routinely thrashing his colleagues at some esoteric card game. Such is the dynamic social tension that pulses beneath the surface of the Klub today. I am introduced to their pet Super 8 camera (just when I thought I got out of Super 8) and the possibility of 16mm is also dangled enticingly in front of my slivovitsa-reddened eyes.

Saturday is spent flipping through archive DVDs, reading up, wandering through Split: two millennia of settlement, obsessively traced on film by the Klub’s camera-clutching flaneurs who – as my meagre research so far suggests – preferred the body of the polis to cinegraphic contemplation of their own flesh.

Split presents itself as a languid port town in which countless concrete people-boxes have sprouted from beneath the extended back yard of the Diocletian Palace, the still-inhabited stone labyrinth which remains the social hub of the area today. Diocletian was the first Roman Emperor to voluntarily retire, and the people of Split have prided themselves on their laziness ever since. Beyond the palace walls, leather jackets and torn jeans form a triumvirate of distressed patinas with the ubiquitous concrete, and tiny dogs are de rigueur, perhaps as a device to draw attention towards the owners’ footwear, which is universally excellent.

The filmmakers of the Yugoslavian region didn’t get around to making their first feature until 1941. The first Tito-sponsored amateur film clubs popped up as classical Hollywood faltered and Cassavetes itched, the key second generation of the Split chapter emerging as new waves began to roll in Europe and elsewhere. The Klubs thus form a unique node between a very brief classical cinema, and both the cinematic and 'fine' art developments to come (perhaps best exemplified through the legendary figure of Zagreb's Tomislav Gotovac, who was muddled up both with the cinematic 'Black Wave' of the 60s/70s and the art scene over the half-century before his death in 2010).

My early impressions of the early Kino Klub Split filmmakers are of an equipe of antagonistic (not angry), curious (not academic) men (not women) with a self-imposed mission that I am not yet at liberty to disclose. As one band of curators points out, these filmmakers have been categorized under a number of overlapping terms – amateur, experimental, avant-garde, anti-film (mostly their Zagreb cousins), alternative film (Belgrade) – precluding, at least until much more recently, the label of ‘video artists’ because video (and possibly artist) is a dirty word. It is curious, then, to work with the club today, when everyone’s packing video, everyone’s an artist, and the former terms have lost their pungency.

Except, perhaps, for that of amateur, a word that adds legitimacy/democracy to the efforts of the casual masses and pride to the enthusiasts. I’ll continue in that spirit, as a kind of enthusiastic sponge, to be wrung out on film before the end of the month.


Friday 1 April 2016

Split Log 01

Arriving in Split as a self-appointed ‘failed-filmmaker-turned-guru’, I am to undertake a residency at the city’s historic Kino Klub, absorb the artistic and pedagogic technique of the ‘Split school’, and feed back into the loop with a series of workshops drawing on the Institute’s research and my recent studies at film.factory in Sarajevo (just 150 miles east from here). I will also mount some kind of film/video production inspired by or perhaps merely as a distraction from my quasi-academic work.

Secretly, it’s also a mission to make sense of a lot of fragments, scraps, vacuums and glitches that have accumulated in my already-ragged knowledge over the past couple of years and left me feeling more lost than ever. Combined with my pre-existing specialism in misplaced, damaged and impossible films, and a critical exoticism/guilty fetishism for the severity of socialist institutional nomenclature, the project has been christened as the Unfound Peoples Videotechnic.

Seduced by a stray quote from the Klub’s foremost historical figure, Ivan Martinac, I intend to spend the month on the (figurative) beach in a mood of “near insane contemplation”, knitting together some of those fragments into a workable comfort blanket with which to warm myself and those who would join me for breezy Split evenings and British winters to come. Perhaps I will remember to document my progress here.

I have also begun scribbling about some of the variously obscure/classic regional films I'm watching on Letterboxd. I'll try to pin them up here too.




Unfound Peoples Videotechnic at Kino Klub Split: Mr. Cole's new residency

This April, Institute co-founder Graeme Cole will hold an artist’s residency at Kino Klub Split in Croatia, supported by Arts Council England.

Mr. Cole will be introduced to local artists and institutions, and create new film and video works in the context of the rich culture of experimental film and video work of the former Yugoslavia region. He will also hold a series of free workshops for local film and video artists.

During the residency, Mr, Cole will research the structure and function of the Kino Klub model and use his findings to construct a program of workshops and resources to explore the language of artist’s moving image in the age of the ubiquitous lens. This aspect of the project will be developed into an itinerant absurdist filmmaking academy, hereby known as the Unfound Peoples Videotechnic.

Graeme Cole recently completed his MA in Filmmaking at Béla Tarr’s film.factory in Sarajevo, in neighbouring Bosnia & Herzegovina. He is an independent artist-filmmaker whose films have played at festivals all over the world. Working mainly with Super 8 and other consumer formats, Mr Cole’s films take the language of narrative-based genre movies and infect them with an absurdist sensibility. Meta-narratives and open-source laboratory work expand and re-categorize the parameters of his cardboard and fog universe.

Kino Klub Split was established in 1952 and its activity is recognized in public as one of the original entries in the history of Croatian non-professional, alternative, amateur cinematography. Kino Klub organizes weekly screenings and boasts a classical film school program covering audio-visual media, new media, copyright and amateur film and computer animation. The club cultivates an atmosphere conducive to creative growth, freedom of opinion and expression, and the conditions for free circulation and exchange of ideas and experiences.

Mr. Cole’s project is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

For more information on the April 2016 workshops and how to apply, please read on:
 


UNFOUND PEOPLES VIDEOTECHNIC presents
(Hrvatski)

UPV Videomaker’s Radical Deprogramming Program
“How to lose yourself, find yourself and lose yourself again.”

Artist-filmmaker Graeme Cole (UK) will hold a series of FREE interconnected filmmaking workshops during an artist’s residency at Kino Klub Split, April 2016.

The program is intended to reboot our assumptions and fetishize the tools and (im)possibilities of filmmaking in the context of the historic Kino Klub movement. Each workshop will consist of a lecture, creative exercises, discussion and screening.

Short filmmaking assignments in the form of audio-visual research will be set between workshops and reflected upon in class. The emphasis is on creating with the tools you have available (particularly camera phones and tablets), but Kino Klub will help facilitate filmmakers with other equipment where necessary. These assignments are intended to be completed as ‘homework’, but Mr Cole will be available for support where possible.

At the conclusion of the program, we will hold a presentation in which each participant will screen their work to an invited audience and we will preview Mr Cole’s residency project.

Local filmmakers and visual artists are invited to apply for the workshops, which may be most suitable for those who are just starting out or who have made a couple of films already. Please email a couple of lines explaining your experience and your interest in the program to graeme (at) zoomcitta dot co dot uk and include links to your work if possible. Alternatively, please contact Sunčica at Kino Klub on 0918965860 (Limited to 5 places).

Week 1 – Saturday 9th April
*Mythology of the Self *
There is no autobiography, only automythology.

This module looks at the personal voice of the filmmaker. Taking the genre of ‘essay film’ as a starting point, we will explore how the filmmaker relates to their surroundings and personal history, and how best to transform, disguise, exaggerate and lie about their feelings through art in order to reach more fundamental (and entertaining) truths.

Week 2 – Saturday 16th April
*Rotting the Image*
The odour of a film’s look.

All too often, lazy imagination, cinematography and post-production can result in a visual quality that posits dull or unmediated visuals as code for some kind of yawn-worthy ‘realism’. In this module, we will debate whether or not the moving image exists as an ‘object’ in the age of digital code, whether we should pretend it is anyway, and how it can be decomposed to evoke evocative new so-called realities.

Week 3 – Saturday 23rd April
*Something About Sound Design, Gardening & Mutants*
How to control sound, and how you can never control sound.

Admitting that sound is our enemy can be the first step towards learning to manipulate it against the audience. In this module, we will look at ways of artificially introducing sounds into the environment of our cowering images, and how to use alternative sound structures, associations and textures to infect the minds of unsuspecting ‘viewers’ through their ear-holes.

Week 4 – Sunday 1st May
*Setting Your Attitude In Stone*
Manifestoes, obstinacy & self-flagellation.

Every film needs a manifesto. You need a manifesto. Your wardrobe needs a manifesto. Your hairdresser requires precise instructions. This module will take a look at existing and implicit artistic manifestoes, and examine their power both as liberating tool and comforting straitjacket. Finally, we will categorize our own valuable faults and habits in the light of what we have discovered over previous weeks.

On weeks 1, 2 and 3 you are invited to join Mr Cole on Sundays to test our theories and collaborate on a new video work.