About 15 years ago I became aware of antique recordings, 78s and Edison diamond discs. I heard a radio show on my old station WMFO while driving up to Maine where the DJ played sides by The Happiness Boys, Ernest Hare and Billy Jones, from the 20's and 30's. I was hooked and slowly began researching the topic. I now have a very good collection of antique music on LP, CD and in 78 form, and also have 2 Edison players, a cylinder and a disc player. After studying avant-garde music for 25 years I came to see antique music as avant-garde simply because the so-called new music was losing its newness to me, so little is really ground breaking. Looking back to the beginnings of recorded sound became equally if not more exciting. Old music was new to me. I began a radio show at KZYX (Dark Matter) which presented both antique and avant-garde music in a freeform manner, as I pleased to present it, sometimes with wonderful results. The abutting of antique recordings up against truly new experimental work could be glorious in the frission generated, or could fall flat. A weekly radio show can't always sound inspired, especially if you work a day job at the same station, which I did for 3 years.
The interest in antique music could not help but spill over into my interest in film, and they both being roughly contiguous: the history of recorded sound roughly coinciding with the history of filmmaking; there are many connections. Antique music is naturally the soundtrack material for old films, or could be. I made many notes towards making a film about antique music, focusing first on the Happiness Boys, then conceiving of a section called Chinese Radio, and then I imagined a final section on current HiFi equipment and the people who follow it, perhaps to include selections of very modern music also. These ideas have not been realized. But they have metamorposed, just like the found footage in my collection, which has aged and some has been destroyed. There is still life stirring in those ideas or the ghosts of those ideas.
Reading recently about my friend Alex MacKenzie's use of a hand crank projector in performance, mimicking the earliest of film show techniques, has me re-excited about the possibilities. Alex and I have agreed so many times on our belief that film performance can be a more vital approach to film; that finished film reels represent the mechanized methods of distribution and repitition that have strangled our culture under consumerism. Have we just failed to successfully manufacture film products? Yes and no. The inability to make product may be just as much a refusal to allow film to become product or the struggle to keep it from being only that.
Dealing with elements of antique film seems like another way to turn against the grain of standardized film culture, although there has certainly been a trand also in this direction, especially with all the "100 Years of Cinema" hoopla. It is wonderful to see filmmakers like Guy Maddin successfully bridge the antique film image via hand held super8 cameras with electric computer editing (I find his editing a bit antagonistic actually, the Darren Ornofsky effect...). Shooting new film using stylistic elements found in antique film, while not always innovative, can certainly be a source of renovation in film language and use.
An Antique Film Project would attempt to collect and preserve reels of film footage shot before the sound era or through and including the 30's. (At this point almost any 16mm found footage teeters on the edge of "antiqueness", so maybe dates are pointless. I have a few reels of Spanish Civil War material that was to married to some travelog super8 of mine from Spain and called A Climate For Rebellion. Unfinished at this date.
