果冻影院

This module is dedicated to thinking about film as a physical material.听 We will explore what 鈥渇ilm鈥� (aka celluloid, film stock, or raw stock) is made from and how its materiality has informed the production, distribution, and consumption of the medium. Although often conceived as a medium of light, film is in fact produced from a host of raw ingredients (such as cotton, silver, and gelatin) that imbricate its production within networks of industrial agriculture, extractive mining, weapons manufacture, and the global chemical industry. These ingredients give film unique physical properties (such as weight, scent, colour, flammability, flexibility) that have profoundly shaped how film is used in the studio, processed in laboratories, transported for exhibition and stored in archives. As a valuable substance traded around the globe film has been a subject of colonial regulation, military restriction and industrial monopolies, meaning access to this material has been determined by geopolitics, imperialism, and conflict. Throughout this module we will therefore consider how the material demands of making and accessing film stock have informed the aesthetics of cinema and the politics of its consumption. We will examine specific films that have been shaped by these material concerns and will also look in detail at artists and filmmakers who engage with questions of materiality directly in their work. Although the module focuses on analogue film practice, we will conclude by considering how the digital has not dematerialised the medium, but merely transformed the conditions of its materiality.