diamonds from ash

i’ve been meaning to post about my dreams for a while but haven’t gotten around to it for one reason or another. but i’ve been stewing over one for a couple days now and i think it merits some sharing.

ever since starting progesterone i’ve had some absolutely wild and vivid dreams, and often they’re easier to recall as well. it’s still not a guaranteed thing but it’s gotten to the point that i keep a notepad and pen next to my bed just in case my brain cooks up something interesting. but, more to the point:

i dreamed about a few different things, as often happens. but the one i want to write about is a world that understands and employs the concept of binbou-cam.

binbou-cam is not a real thing as far as i can tell; i asked the person i trust to know things about japanese language and culture and he didn’t come up with anything, though he said “it definitely carries a very jp aesthetic”. so what is it?

(now, bear in mind the following is all dream logic. this is not a real thing.)

binbou-cam, or literally ‘poor/poverty camera’, is an artistic style of shooting film footage as cheaply as possible; which is to say, keeping your costs down, whether that means using practical effects or forgoing other expensive digital touchups. in the past decade, the government (or perhaps society as a whole, it’s not clear in context) cracked down on the proliferation of lavishly expensive post-processing and visual effects work, with the concern that with all the money being spent on films of all genres, people were losing touch with the nature of reality itself. their perceptions and expectations had been twisted, leaving them confused by and unsatisfied with the everyday physical world.

so the cost incurred by shooting a film was capped at a certain threshold, determined by the runtime and a few other factors. initially, some canny filmmakers gamed the system by bunching up their expensive cinematography at the beginning and end, and placing a section of cheaper film to separate the two parts, satisfying the requirement.

but as it turns out, this cheap film became an aesthetic all on its own, earning the appellation binbou-cam; and the more artistic films now have much more extensive cheap sections and much shorter expensive ones, and rather than how much a film takes to make, financially speaking, it is how little it takes that really impresses an audience, that serves as a mark of quality and skill on the filmmaker’s part.

i would have loved to dream long enough to see one of these films, but sadly, all i got was the concept. or if i did see one, it didn’t remain in memory, which is possible too.

i don’t know why my mind cooked up this particular term; or how, either, not being a neuroscientist of any caliber. there’s maybe some crossover with the concept of kintsugi, which unlike binbou-cam is a real thing, but i have no explanation as to why i’d subconsciously make that connection.

there is of course my exposure to things like code golf and similar challenges which bring to mind the concept of working within limitations. doing so successfully – in essence, ‘completing the task’ or in an artistic sense, communicating what you wanted to, without sacrificing substantially because of those limitations – is a mark of skill. it’s a self-imposed challenge, to be sure; unless you’re coding for very specific hardware or other edge cases, you don’t need to hyper-optimize your code to the point of individual character placement. but also, i haven’t touched actual code in a good minute, and it’s been years since i even thought about code golf. so that connection doesn’t make sense to me either.

that said: i do think about art a lot. especially in the present age, under current conditions, i think frequently about the incessant commercialization of art, the push to make money (and spend money), the tendrils of capitalism worming their way into everything and corrupting it, taking a thing of passion and creativity and choking it until it’s cold and lifeless, indistinguishable from some mass-produced corporate sludge. not a work of art; merely a product, a thing to be consumed and then cast aside to make room for an endless parade of things that stretches on into infinity.

it’s the world we live in, and barring some significant upheaval, the one we’re likely to live in for a while yet. but seeing – experiencing – a different world with a different take on cinema, however briefly, was a pleasant reprieve.

i wish you could’ve been there. i think you’d have enjoyed it.