I had the idea for my object-based microteaching session very early on during the course. In choosing the object I was influenced by my experiences over ten years as a cinema projectionist, my Master’s thesis in Cultural Studies, and by interactions with students and lecturers in a film context. The latter exposed me to how the experiences in the projection booth and my subsequent studies had proposed to me an abstracted way of viewing the art form through the lens of the technologies of production and presentation, and their histories. The mirrored modes of production (now no longer so immediately physically obvious since the digital revolution within the discipline) are what drew me to the material as an abstract for my studies, but they also stripped away for the mystery that often clouds such disciplines through the specialist languages that surround them, both academic and technical. There is something familiar yet unfamiliar about a strip of celluloid. This is how I felt about it upon first encountering such objects in the early noughties; reminiscent of the days of 35mm family photographs, but carrying something other, something more.
I chose the random piece of celluloid, from various cuttings I have in my possession from this former life, with a confidence that the exploration of this object, both familiar and alien, would open questions that would unlock access to the simplicity of the interaction between sound and image.
I provided a magnifying glass and placed the strip of film in the corner of the room by a window, suggesting that by holding the object up to the light of the sky it would be easier to inspect, but gave no further direction, asking instead for the group to get into pairs after observing the object and to discuss what they could see. I gave them two minutes to do this. It was very exciting to see everyone engaging so fully in the task and interesting to hear the different aspects of the images within the strip that people were trying to decipher. Most of the conversations were around who the character in the image was, what type of film it might be, and whether this was from a film. I asked the groups to feed back to the room what they had found. I then asked the group to revisit the object a second time. I had intended to ask them to this time consider the function of the object, but instead, in the moment, feeling a bit nervous and unsure of whether we would naturally get to the subject of the soundtrack within the frame, I asked them to consider whether there was anything that they didn’t understand about the object. I regretted changing this immediately as it felt both horribly leading and vague. My original question is what I should have gone with, on reflection, but I lost confidence in the process. Once the group was back together after the second visit the discussion was less fluent and so I explained the change I had made and discussed what I had been trying to draw attention to (the soundtrack). This opened the discussion into more of a Q&A about the object, which I then realised should have been the desired destination from the start.
The feedback I received from the group was very constructive. People generally really enjoyed the opportunity for a second visit to the object, but the interaction would have benefitted from being able to explore it together afterwards, perhaps with a projected image of the object on a screen. It was also suggested that a purely haptic experience could have been incorporated. Generally, the process seemed to be something that would work well as an introduction to film and cinematic technologies, but I needed to be confident about this as a finishing point for the session and allow it to get there naturally through a Q&A at the end.