After Frames for Frampton, I made a few other experimental diary films, including 2 called Ways To Midas, referring to my path home passing the Midas muffler sign and photography's "silver touch", and The Siberian Tigers, a fantasy baseball team and long sound piece of strange radio noise. The Siberian Tigers was awarded a fellowship from the Boston Film/Video Foundation and was presented there as a 2-monitor experimental video feature. My interest in Hollis Frampton's work made me decide to try to remake his grand work Magellan, consisting of a film for every day of the calendar year, by inviting super8 filmmakers the world over to shoot one day each for the project. Magellan inside out or not singularly concentric around one author-creator. This was a period in which mail artists were trading cassettes like mad, and great fun ideas with fluxus twists were being exchanged as "mail art". I was actively engaged and it was much more interesting than pursuing painting or other staid gallery arts. I traded freely with artists around the world. A crazy Canadian named David Zack started inviting people to share one name ("Monty Cantsin", or was it "Karen Elliot"? I think Karen Elliot was an alternate...) and show works as such collectively created. (I stupidly once sent him a letter my father had written to our family from his 1970's visit to Russia as a Washington Post reporter, describing seeing Lenin's waxy body in the mausoleum... Zack was in a Mexican prison at the time and died shortly after.) Anyhow, there were great collective projects going on perhaps as a response to the heightened pitch of reagan's Cold War posturing and world privatisation plans. There were Festivals of Plagiarism going on as art events internationally and even an Art Strike mobilized from within the mail artist community. It was heady fun.
The Filmers Almanac came out of that period, and from my interest in seeing super8 film become an exchange media akin to the audio cassette. If we did radio shows where we played cassettes from artists all over the world, couldn't we also present film shows of super8 rolls from afar as well? Starting in 1985 I sent out 3600 invitations to participate in the Almanac making, 100 each month for 3 years. (That was after Jeff Plansker helped me with the title over breakfast in Harvard Square, blurting out "Farmers Almanac" which became Filmers Almanac, and then tENTATIVELY a. cONVENIENCE chose the first day as I was mentioning the idea to him.) The target year 1988 came and 250 filmers had chosen film dates. I wound up receiving about 125 of those rolls, which was over 7 hours of film if projected traditionally. After some initial screenings, I turned to a 2-projector system, putting one on a lazy susan to allow for panning overlap. Matthias Mueller invited me to Germany and set up several screenings. He made an exquisite film for the Almanac which became the seed for his film The Memo Book. The production level on the films from Germany were amazingly high; there was an active sub-professional filmmaking scene there like no other. The Almanac showed in Helsinki, Detmold, Bielefeld, Hamburg, Osnabruck, Braunschweig, Bonn and Paris. At the Helsinki 8mm Festival at the start of the tour, filmmaker Vivienne Dick arrived from London and told us that the Berlin Wall had opened.
The other most memorable Filmers Almanac event was a screening in Toronto, under the umbrella of Pleasure Dome at the Purple Institution, a collective art loft. The screening there was so well received that people stayed on partying until almost dawn. A filmmaker raced home and got his 2-projector film to show at the end. A film crew caterer brought us all a late-night meal, and Atom Egoyan said hello, I think the Almanac giving some inspiration to his later "Calendar". I took a bus at dawn back to my hosts' apartment, a large box of films in one arm and super8 projector in the other.
see also: www.filmersalmanac.net/
