The Flamethrowers began in 1988 when I found a damaged print of Satyajit Ray's "Pather Panchali" in a Boston film collection. I'd actually seen the same damage done to a small segment of "The Seven Samurai" in a screening at Harvard's Film Archive and, after looking into the issue, was offered a loan of an almost entirely ruined reel of the Ray film to study. I refilmed sections of the damage onto super8 in close up. I had been reading Roberto Arlt's classic Argentinian novel "The Seven Madman" and its story of a secret plot to destroy society with poison gas mixed with what I was viewing in this film footage. The second volume of the novel is titled "The Flamethrowers", and I called this footage "The Flamethrowers" also, since the damage had come about by a projector throwing too much heat on the film, destroying it--or altering it radically--as it was being projected. I sent the 3 reels of b+w super8, along with 3 unexposed rolls, to Matthias Mueller of Alte Kinder, who I met at a Montreal Film Fest in early 1988, asking his group to make a second part to "The Flamethrowers", that this might become a serial film project. I arrived in Bielefeld for the Intercom Festival in late 1988 to find the Alte Kinders finishing the edit of their 3 reel segment. We screened the 6 roll piece at Intercom a few days later on 3 projectors, the old film triptych. Matthias and i agreed that the film was looking like an homage to another group of filmmakers, Schmelzdahin, the Bonn trio who mixed their own film chemistry and inspired a generation. We sent the film materials on to Schmelzdahin (Jurgen Reble, Jochen Lempert, and Jochen Mueller) who did contribute a third sequence to The Flamethrowers. The films came back to Matthias and he put together a single strip super8 version of all of the material, re-filming sections projected on 3 projectors and inter-cutting that with full-frame shots; he built a very beautiful version of the piece (I asked him to do this, wanting to see the same form he had developed in his film "Epilog" applied to this material). This "original" super8 version of The Flamethrowers also has wonderful audio that Matthias threw together on his Bauer sound-on-sound s8 projector, mixing tapes of sliding volcanic glass, Indian music, us running in the Bielefeld subway stations and water in his bathtub. Matthias is great with birdsounds, which appear throughout his films. Schmelzdahin took the materials again and tried to make a 35mm version of the project, but I never saw the results. Matthias later had a s8>16mm blow-up made and hired some soundtrack composers, but I think the audio on that version failed; that film copy toured in a Goethe Institute exhibition. I have just recently transfered a 16mm print to dv and begun restoring the original audio, which I have on an old videotape transfer of the original super8.
The Flamethrowers was essentially the crowning collaboration of the Film Almanac project and remains a significant collaboration of my life. I hope to return to this way of working. (Some additional words and film at www.filmersalmanac.net)
