Strangled Celluloid

Film as it shouldn't be

I’m obsessed with film and filmmaking but sometimes there’s an expectation that film has to be a certain thing. It needs a Sid Field story arc, a cat needs to be saved, it has to be shot on an Arri, and last 90 minutes (or 160 these days). It needs to be condensed down into a one sentence logline and you need at least half a dozen successful comparables from the last 18 months to get a greenlight.

What a waste of possibilities.

Historically Hollywood like all good hegemonies has survived by hoovering up auteurs, mavericks and maniacs from other parts of the world, shaving their rough edges off, and bunging a few million in their pocket to make something commercial.

Now, I’ve nothing against commercial film at all (or a few million). I think films should be judged on the merits of what they are trying to achieve, not be cross-compared as part of some vulgar bourgeois class signalling system*. But other options are available.

*subtitled movies are not inherently better. The French make shit films too.

I’ve been reading Walter Murch’s latest book, Suddenly Something Clicked (2025). Murch is a man who loves the form of cinema. It is an excellent book written by an Oscar winning maverick. In one chapter he mentions a film I’d never heard of, Decasia (Morrison, 2002). It’s a film made up from found footage of off-cuts and degraded old film. I watched the trailer and immediately I fell in love with it. My brain started pinging with possiblities - particularly for the feature I’m working on Genesis.

Have a look:

This to me is cinema. I am a sucker for the uncanny and anything weirdly transcendent. But there’s a wider point. Cinema is a young artform. Someone who’s name I forget said it’s the only artform where we know it’s origin story (debatable but useful as an idea). There is so much that can be done with the moving image that we haven’t even touched on yet. AI will bring who knows what into the mix but that’s another discussion.

What’s important to me here is that I love breaking things and using them in ways they aren’t supposed to be used. Years ago I worked as a tech in a college and used to manually edit documentary footage from the large college VHS library together with various crude blending options, mixing it wiht stuff shot on DV cam, trying to garble stuff until it was unrecognisable and new images came out. I’m not sure how successful they results were (except once when a “face” that didn’t exist appeared for a couple of seconds) but the approach has stuck with me. Decasia touches on that and it opens up possibilities. It shows how what others might discard as broken can be turned into gold.

How can the material of film itself be used as part of the film’s meaning? In early days (Dziga Vertov, etc) Soviets and others explored cinema as form but they tended to stop just at the level of form as an abstraction. Going a bit deeper, form can inform or ehnance story. In this sense there have been some interesting uses of how video tape could be used to enhance a film. Mark Kermode, in his notes for Ringu (Nakata, 2000) said it was a film that worked being watched on VHS as it was about a cursed VHS tape itself. There’s a moment in the film where the protagonist, Reiko and her ex-husband, Ryūji, examine the edge of the tape in the overscan area, finding hidden visual details. It brings the physicality of the medium the viewer is watching on into the story. Similarly, the ending of Censor (2021, Bailey-Bond) slowly constricts the aspect ratio, moving from 16:9 to 4:3, matching the format of the traumatic horror/snuff film the protagonist is being sucked into.

Going back to re-purposing old film, Martin Arnold has made some incredible short films using old footage. In Pièce Touchée (1989) he creates a 15 minute short from a few seconds framents of footage from the 1950s. It’s almost anti-content in a sense but it’s mesmerising:

There is also Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998) which is where I first discovered him at a short film evening in London a decade ago. Now I’m sure this kind of thing doesn’t appeal to everyone but if you love cinema it’s important to love all of it. Especially if you’re a filmmaker. You never know where you might get inspired.

Years ago, I shot something for the Dutch National Ballet to promote their production of Romeo and Juliet. It was simple. A male and female dancer (separate) against a plain background. This was then projected on buildings around Amsterdam at night. While editing and skimming through footage I became obsessed with how the jerky movements of the female performer looked and, with a track from Union of Knives, cut together a spec video (which the band liked). This is over 20 years ago so low quality but I think the idea still holds up.

Years later I saw Lynch (guru) using a similar effect in the second episode of Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) - not original sound:

So what am I saying? Love cinema, love what it’s not supposed to be. Try breaking things to come up with something new. And play.

Keep making films.

Bobby

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