Thematic-Do It Yourself Film

Thematic Project Seminar 4: ‘Do-It-Yourself Attitude As Strategy For Innovation‘

The Garden of Earthly Delights 1981 — Stan Brakhage

In the world of contemporary celluloid practice a "model of self-skilling," is now necessary to create the conditions to allow the continuation of photochemical filmmaking among future generations of artists. While the film industry collapses all around us, this Do-It-Yourself attitude gives a chance to reinvent the medium in an image that was neither intended nor desired by it’s commercial exploiters.

Although film is now largely considered insignificant and ill-suited to a modern society of efficiency, instantaneity, and convenience, its cumbersome machinery, awkward manual interventions, and time-consuming processes nonetheless remain a desirable form of image-making among large numbers of contemporary artists.

We are now at a time that alternative infrastructures and practices allows artists to control and reinvent every stage of the once-industrial process of production.

The new sense of freedom and liberation to which this shift has given rise reframes film as a field of discovery, a photochemical playground that offers itself to the artist in the rawness and malleable nature of its physicality. It is this fascination with materials that increasingly characterizes celluloid film culture, particularly through engagements with the past as a means of reinvention and projection towards a potential future.

TOPICS
Frugal Filmmaking
Minimal resources and little specialist knowledge A hands-on introduction into the world of modern Do-It-Yourself filmmaking and its distinctive appearance. To include: film as photochemical playground; the paintable nature of films physicality; exploring the areas between the image area and the sound track on the film strip, exploring the relationship between light projection and sound reproduction.

Structural Materialism
We will interrogate the process of the film's making: looking critically at the devices involved and how we can demystify the film-making process.

Politics of resistance: what does a post-film, filmmaker environment look like today?
DIY in approach and anarchistic in spirit, the ever-expanding community of artists working with celluloid represents a politics of resistance, a devoted and forceful opposition to the capitalist narrative of progress.