UNDERAPPRECIATED MOVIEMAKER: Florian Cramer
"Not belonging has been a traditional motivation for zine making. But how to make zine flicks in a void? - I don't blame anyone for the underappreciation of my flicks, just as most zine makers neither expect nor want large-scale exposure of their work. Therefore, I'm not sure whether I belong in an underappreciated moviemaker festival. Writing this, it strikes me that even their enumeration as individual movies may be wrong. I now consider retroactively making them single issues of one zine." - Florian Cramer
[tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE note: In order to inform the interested public who the UNDERAPPRECIATED MOVIEMAKERS are whose work will be screened at the UNDERAPPRECIATED MOVIEMAKERS FESTIVAL. I've asked all the participants to date to provide:
1. a bio (short or long, you decide - short ones, obviously, tend to be read more)
2. a picture
3. a list of your works (either complete or selected - but make sure you list your earliest movie to substantiate that you've been at it for 30 or more years)
4. 1 or more links to relevant websites
5. AN ESSAY EXPLAINING WHY YOU'RE UNDERAPPRECIATED (This is very important. What I'm hoping for is not only an explanation of why you feel underappreciated but what it is about you & your work that you think leads to people neglecting &/or rejecting it. This can be a socio-political-cultural analysis of what might be shortcomings of our society.)
Florian has been the 3rd to reply.]
Florian Cramer
1. a bio (short or long, you decide - short ones, obviously, tend to be read more)
Florian Cramer, participant observer. Mostly known (& appreciated, no complaints here) as a writer/lecturer/theorist in between the arts/media/politics and in between institutional and DIY culture working at Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam, Netherlands. Less known and maybe underappreciated as a DIY filmmaker.
3. a list of your works (either complete or selected - but make sure you list your earliest movie to substantiate that you've been at it for 30 or more years)
1986 - 3 Lamp Events (Super 8 color, 0:52), https://vimeo.com/8793831
2009 - Coraria (video on floppy disk, 2:09), with Cora Schmeiser, http://floppyfilms.pleintekst.nl/coraria/
2011 - Neoist Ritual: How to Make a Stone Circle (Super 8 b/w, 4:29), https://vimeo.com/18295320
2011 - atTAYic archive (Super 8 color, 19:38), with The Administrator of the Attic Archive, https://vimeo.com/16372220
2012 - Pomona Science Fiction Club (Super 8 color & b/w, 6:40) https://vimeo.com/26920718
2012 - Neoist Exercise: Don't blink for the duration of one roll of 16mm film (16mm b/w, 2:47), with Istvan Kantor https://vimeo.com/33176718
2013 - Stone Circles in Berlin (Normal 8 b/w projected as 16mm, 3:08), with Graham Harwood and Stewart Home, https://vimeo.com/60590096
2014 - Who's Afraid of Hans Clavin (HD, 2:50), with Hans Clavin and GJ de Rook, https://vimeo.com/86219765
2015 - Upsetter (35mm color transferred to video on floppy disk), with Lee Perry
2015 - Local Impro Snodge (animated GIFs/HTML5, infinite), with Saskia Venegas, Henk Bkr, Philipp Ernsting, Red Brut, Gonçalo Almeida, Lukas Simonis. http://cramer.pleintekst.nl/deplayer-impro-snodge/
2015 - Sunset Boulevard, A Neoist Research Project (Normal 8 color + digital transfer, 2:21)
2017 - Mila (16mm b/w, 1:31), with Mila Milan, https://vimeo.com/237993142
2017 - Imagine Imogen (HD, 3:36), with Ergo Phizmiz & Lukas Simonis, https://vimeo.com/241559457
2018 - Sound Poetry Is Embarrassing (HD, 8:14), with Duncan Harrison and Marc Matter, https://vimeo.com/252071506
4. 1 or more links to relevant websites
https://vimeo.com/fcr
5. AN ESSAY EXPLAINING WHY YOU'RE UNDERAPPRECIATED (This is very important. What I'm hoping for is not only an explanation of why you feel underappreciated but what it is about you & your work that you think leads to people neglecting &/or rejecting it. This can be a socio-political-cultural analysis of what might be shortcomings of our society.)
My moviemaking falls into a void. I consider it zinemaking in moving images, zine flicks. But there is no equivalent of zine culture in filmmaking - nothing equivalent to zine fests, exchanging zines among zine makers, zine libraries etc. My zine flicks have been made in a too quick-and-dirty way to count as "experimental"/"avant-garde" film and be submitted to respective film festivals. They often use ephemeral media, such as animated GIFs or floppy disks, that don't fit filmmaking categories. They are not handmade enough, and again too quickly made, to count as "handmade film". They are not "video art", because they're not installations and avoid video aesthetic. Many of them are records of performances, edited and published only one day after, in the same way in which punk zines were written directly after a concert night and xeroxed and shared the next day on the next punk event. So they are not proper "documentaries" either. They mostly end up on the Internet but aren't "vlogs" and don't find a sizable audience there.
I am not even sure where there is a good way of watching them: they do not belong into a cinema, they do not belong on television, they do not belong into exhibition spaces, they're not meant to run on outdoor displays in public space, they're quite disconnected on Vimeo.com (that wannabe filmmaker site that may soon go out of business) and don't belong on sites like YouTube either. I would like to publish cheap paper zines containing them, with the flicks running on their pages (but not as a flipbook). I did look into using video greeting cards for this purpose, but they're prohibitively expensive.
I would like to see a zine culture of moving images. There have been close approximations, among others with Kurt Kren's and (to a lesser degree) Jonas Mekas' 16mm films, with punk-cultural and related Super 8 filmmaking in the 1980s, with the contemporary, diary-style videomaking of my friend Wilhelm Hein that runs parallel to his and his partner Annette Frick's zinemaking.
All established systems for moving image production and consumption are fucked in the 21st century. Film theaters only existing for nostalgic and marketing reasons and with few exceptions show films whose formulaic scripts seem to have been written by algorithms (no matter whether they're "blockbusters" or "arthouse" films). Film festivals are a closed circuit and social bubble. Handmade film labs are initiatives I sympathize with a lot - being even a member of one -, while seeing their fetishization of the analogue as problematic if not reactionary, similar to earlier fetishizations of painting for its materiality. Online video is the second coming of reality tv optimized through behaviorist algorithms. When one resorts to non-profit alternative video streaming platforms, it still requires network connections that are too expensive or too unreliable for many.
Each of these systems is a reflection of, or reaction to, the industrial structure of moving image making. Only that the two choices of industry and artisanship are false alternatives (and reflect no progression in thought since the 19th century, where this conflict manifested itself, among others, in the establishment of middle class culture and in the Art and Crafts movement). Zinemaking was & still is ahead in its tactical use of low-cost print techniques. The closest approximation in moving image making is person-to-person file sharing via USB sticks (such as, among others, in the "weekly package" in Cuba) - a technique that is almost as cheap, capable and uncontrollable as xeroxing.
Not belonging has been a traditional motivation for zine making. But how to make zine flicks in a void? - I don't blame anyone for the underappreciation of my flicks, just as most zine makers neither expect nor want large-scale exposure of their work. Therefore, I'm not sure whether I belong in an underappreciated moviemaker festival. Writing this, it strikes me that even their enumeration as individual movies may be wrong. I now consider retroactively making them single issues of one zine.
idioideo at verizon dot net
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