The Film Prayer by A.P. Hollis was written in 1920. Hollis made the poem available to all non-theatrical film distributors to promote better handling of film. Hollis never copyrighted the poem.
"I am celluloid, not steel, Oh God of the machine, have mercy, I front dangers whenever I travel the whirling wheels of the mechanism. Over the sprocket wheels, held tight by the idlers, I am forced by the motor's might. If a careless hand misthreads me, I have no alternative but to go to my death. If the pull on the take-up reel is too violent, I am torn to shreds. If dirt collects in the aperture my film of beauty is streaked and marred, and I must face my beholders--a thing shamed and be spoiled. I travel many miles in tin cans, I am tossed on heavy trucks, sideways and upside down. See that I don't become bruised and wounded beyond the power to heal. I am a delicate ribbon of film - misuse me and I disappoint thousands; cherish me, and I delight and instruct the world." -- A.P. Hollis 1920
I found this quote on a film projector-related website today. Seems like a good place to start.
I use film. And so I collect films (mostly 16mm), not avidly or fervently, but I stumble across them and pick them up occasionally if I see a reel that looks interesting. I have found some wonderful films, perhaps most notably a 16mm educational film on the Amazon, called something like The Sleeping Giant. Incredible color and great lush scenic photography from the 50's I think. I have had to move numerous times over the past 10 years and this collection of films (and records and a good piece of my past, machines and cameras etc) has had to move with me, sometimes into not ideal storage situations. Leaky garages and storage spaces, poorly cooled closets. The last house had a garage which flooded the day after we moved in, soaking the bottom 6 inches of maybe 20 boxes containing books and films, original super8 reels and found 16mm reels. The Amazon reel was one of those, altered forever. Fortunately there are other prints of that film out in the world. I cannot promise to protect anything from the elements, as much as I'd like to say that I can.
I have 3,000 LP records which get decent treatment, but aren't always kept in optimally air-conditioned space. Many of them may be getting "lip warp", where the bottom edge of the disc, that sitting on the ground, begins to curl and makes the start of track 1 on either side sometimes untrackable. There are also several boxes of 78s that I take with me and the heat cannot be good to them; I hope to transfer them over to digital media but it's a cumbersome process.
Back to the films. I finally have a room that seems to be water-tight and I may be able to archive/organize all these little pieces, and find out what made it through the many moves and what didn't survive. There are prints of the films I myself made, the original super8 reels of the Filmers Almanac. There are several reels of found footage, educational films I gathered often with some re-use in mind. I also had a small collection of feature or featurettes on 16mm but I had to sell most of them because I lost faith in my archival abilities and didn't want to see films get ruined. 2 Japanese features with Takemitsu soundtracks. I still have a nice 16mm print of Peter Watkins The War Game that I'd like to show soon.
Wet Gate was a major instigating force for finding new reels of film and we cut out material for use in performance as loops, largely for the quality of sound on the strips. Film preservation often came up as a topic on Wet Gate performance tours; we encountered art world curator people for whom preservation is an important topic, and each of us has different takes on preserving film. My own attitude has remained largely that film, like other materials, has a finite lifetime, especially if played over and over as loop. So I lost my sense of need to preserve and maintain and pretty much came to see film material as something like paint or pencil that I could use and use up if needed. Of course the line was generally drawn to include old prints that were not rare or particularly special and to leave good, projectable reels of film alone, safe from the loop cutter.
Over the past year or so I have moved towards wanting to project No Film, simply using the projector as an interrupting light source to be manipulated, seeing the projection of light as a pure form of (futuristic) communication. This may have partly been a result of not being able to properly access film clips from a collection. But with the new (old) garage I have I am excited to think how I may rediscover footage. And also generate new footage. There is a Steenbeck in storage waiting for me to bring it into service once again. There are several unfinished films on hard drives awaiting final cutting also.
I use film as an artist uses paint and pencil, or magazine photos. It is material collected for use in the studio. It has perhaps lost its connection to film-time and history, being boxed and carried over distances. Standing on 2 feet perhaps I will see with both eyes and be able to recognize material appropriate for "appropriation", that overused term from 90's film art. Better said: material that may be ground down and partially destroyed, turned into something else, degraded, even de-based: emulsion taken off the film base. Is there no respect for history here? Have I lost hope, that the future may want to see exact replicas of what was? How much is worth preserving in a culture that seems bent on suicide (via the automobile and coal power plants)? Is the decadence of my film archive chaos a symptom of this disbelief?
The wonder of film is that it can be so many things, serve so many purposes. I always hoped to make influential films that might make the world a little better, to serve as an educational force. Great films do that. (Perhaps aspects of the Flamethrowers, the Almanac, Wet Gate have served...?) To be continued.
