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| READ FRAME TYPE FILM: Or, Written On The Screen |
READ FRAME TYPE FILM: Or, Written On The Screen, by Enrico Camporesi, Catherine de Smet and Philippe Millot, MUBI Editions, RRP £45, ISBN-13 : 979-8991658010.
READ FRAME TYPE FILM (and the capitalisation is important) explores how text and film interact: how film uses text structurally, visually, technically and to various ends.
Covering just 24 films, that number perhaps immediately familiar for its connection to frame rates, the persistence of its vision is in the depth with which it focuses.
This is a succession of curatorial decisions. MUBI's as publisher, Enrico Camporesi, Catherine de Smet and Philippe Millot as authors, those before them who assembled the 'film collection of the Musée National d’Art Moderne – Centre Pompidou in Paris', and in those sets of sets the 24 filmmakers (or -users) whose works have been selected to become the meat of this metatext.
A potentially indicative sentence: "Our eye and attention circulate within an image as if in a deter- minist chaos, like a ball of yarn with an eternally unpredictable arabesque." (page vi)
I have left the hyphenation in as an indicator of some of the text's many vaguaries. Intent on ways of seeing and reading the text is presented as blocks framed on the page with interjections and interlocutions and interrogations in the interstices. Later entries are columnar rather than monolithic, though in their circularity I'm minded to make allusions to henges (and the corresponding etymology and inaccuracy of what that might conjure and what it doesn't mean). The book bundles into these boundaries subsections and digressions, footnotes and references, a fondness for marginalia whose scriptural precedents are perhaps less the idle illuminators jousting snails than the geometric commentaries of the tesselating Talmudic Tosefot.
I quote again (page ix): "In this book, the illustrations have no captions;in a sense, the whole text could be read as a lengthy, continuous caption — or perhaps a commentary, a gloss, an anthology of marginalia. The text oscillates between scholarly insights, typographic attributions, and visual intuitions (by means of analogies and comparisons). It hesitates on the border of digressions. It pauses, suggesting hypotheses that others might want to discuss, confirm, or object to."
Those words are commentary around Pierre Alferi's opening essay, the 'cinepoet' writing after typographer Robin Kinross' foreword. Many hands make light work and the later pages are drawn from light tables, fresh photography of archive cellulose to make pictures from these pages. The thick black (and grey) text on that stark whiteness makes merry with monochrome while discussing colour-plates and printing in acts of arbitrage between pictures and a thousand words.
This is weighty stuff: there's Duchamp, Deleuze, Derrida, and philosophers and artists from elsewhere in the alphabet too. Among its other quirks, it gives its indices before its table of contents, of folk, films, fonts and their foundries. I think 87 of those movies in the middle, the 24 upon which we focus either teeth that move the others on or driven by the sprockets of those in other brackets.
The films usually get four pages each, or two sheets, the spread and its wings. For some this might be six, including A Sixth Part Of The World, which is by some measures one 24th of the work. Among these pages all manner of recursions, including in this book a discussion of one by Michel Aubry based on Vertov's film.
READ FRAME TYPE FILM becomes a catalogue of a particular window upon film writing, a lens to a literature. It's definitely one of its delights. Its density is almost fractal. Within every detail another one waiting to be discovered, and within that another, and on and on and down and down. The films it covers are unlikely to be household names though there are undoubtedly domiciles where Fisher, Eisenberg, and Wieland (no name a few) are habitually referenced.
With its subjects drawn from art films and the experimental, it is likely to be of interest to anyone who's sought out Edinburgh Film Festival's Black Box programming. Its deep focus on type and typography means it's worth pointing out to anyone who has a fondness for graphic design. The writing's tone and the voices of its contributors are earnest and erudite, even esoteric, and anyone whose first exposure to 'phylactery' was roleplaying rather than rabbinical is likely to enjoy it. There's a charm and a wit to it all, a playfulness. Art film and art books are genres unto themselves, and if you've ever tried to figure out how to transport something from a museum bookshop this is probably one for you too.
The deep focus on the material, in both senses, is where my only reservations come in. Eye For Film were given access to a digital copy, a pre-print PDF. It makes reference to papers (by GMUND) and flaps that I can't speak to. I've seen images of the actual object, a hardback whose box and sleeve form part of its physicality. We still say 'film' when we mean digital work. At more than a kilo in weight it's not quite a coffee table book that could double as one, but it's not light reading. Its structure does allow one to dip in and out. Though it presents its films chronologically, there are more conversations within the entries than between. They do reference on another, and it's undoubtedly easier, though less pleasurable, to flick back and forth with a mouse.
MUBI join a list of other film firms who've diversified into publishing. I've a number of A24 titles, and their production values would seem to have been blueprint to MUBI's intent. TASCHEN remain the gold standard for ludicrous books of this type. Their Helmut Newton's SUMO cost as much as a Skoda Fabia but did come with a 'free' Philippe Starck bookstand. With a notional price of £45, I can't speak to its value, as my 'copy' was provided for review. I will say that buying directly will undoubtedly help make the argument for MUBI to persist as a publisher, and from the quality of this début that's something to encourage.
This is MUBI's first book, and is intended as not only their début as a printhouse but the start of a series, Projections. It will (they hope) be joined by books in three more sets: Auteurs, Internegatives, and Lights!. This is of a series with film in culture, history. The other series respectively collaborations with filmmakers, a strand that will republish or translate rarer texts, and finally books that build on MUBI's own works. That last holds specific promise, as beyond their streaming platform MUBI have helped through release or production to bring to screens films like Decision To Leave, The Substance, and Gasoline Rainbow.
