Antique Film Project

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.

Found and Lost Footage Etc.

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.

Lessons of The Videomaster by Skip Blumberg

Just watched Skip Blumberg's Hommage to Nam June Paik, a nice document focusing on the wake. Nam June's Wake... run riverun. Uptown to where the black clad artists comb their hair before paying respects to such a man, open casket, who single-handedly wielded the porta-pak that invented video art. Wielding his own modern-day porta-pak on the streets of NYC, Blumberg asks the people he meets at Paik's wake what they learned from Nam June, inserting little graphics and inset frames of clips from historical Paik video like "Global Groove" or 1984's international satellite telecast "Good Morning, Mr. Orwell". In the gallery-like setting of the wake, students rub shoulders with dignified art stars and come away equals in Paik's democratic kingdom of video. The disc includes documentation of the event held at the Guggenheim Museum to honor Paik, a beautiful performance by Yoko Ono that is the crown jewel of this dvd.

A blow-by-blow description of the Paik wake and Guggenheim event can be found at Yoko's website:
http://www.a-i-u.net/paik_rev.html

Miranda July 1: Me and You and Everyone We Know; Learning To Love You More

I was on a Film Arts Foundation panel with Miranda July about 7 years ago in San Francisco. I don't recall exactly the subject, perhaps distribution of film in the future or alternate forms of film presentation, but we 3 Wet Gate members were there along with Miranda and several other artistes. I do recall that Ms. July directly contradicted something I said and I felt that the way she did it was authoritarian, it pissed me off and I lost some respect for her then. I'd heard of her work distributing women's film and video on VHS tape collections and bought 1 years ago at Amoeba records for its inclusion of Naomi Uman's "Removed", an old porn film reworked with nail-polish remover to erase the female image. She has since directed a major independent feature (Me and You and Everyone We Know) which won a number of major awards and now has a group of printed page publications coming out, including the "arts education" book Learning To Love You More. Clearly, July is an energetic and innovative person, and she is moving fluidly from the margins of the art world into a vocal role in the culture at large. I respect her for it and wish her the best.

I liked Me and You and Everyone a lot and recommended it to everyone I know, but was disappointed that July made some story decisions that made the film unviewable for older and perhaps slightly more socially conservative persons. There is sexual language in the film that is simply too crude for most older audiences and I'm sure there were lots of walk-outs at the theater. At the same time I realize the film is largely/partly about children having sexual lives or that there is no definite time at which children should or shouldn't be exposed to the truth of the sexual world. There is a current of film using extreme sexual situations I think for gratuitous effect or in a kind of cold cool that demands that the viewer push themselves through new ways of thinking about sexuality, or be offended and leave the room. While I'm not too easily offended by frank sexual material I am turned off by smug tough guy use of it, and I felt that from this film, some of the same things I feel from Todd Solondz films and other current young directors. I simply believe there are ways of saying things that don't alienate a whole portion of the viewing public. There are so many good sequences in July's film that I felt it was a failure to have to make a small section of it lurid in a Pink Flamingos kind of way. I wonder if July's decision to co-write the film with visitors to her website, collecting comments written there and shaping them into a script, allowed her subjects to get out of hand. The idea of co-writing a script with many semi-anonymous others is certainly innovative and pushes the usually auteurial film-making towards the more collectively creative. But something in the way of soul, or accountability perhaps, can be lost.

Miranda does translate previous video art pieces of her own very nicely in Me And You, showcasing her personal vignette style of video-making as a recurring motif in the film and depicting her character as one trying to connect to a museum or gallery curator with varied success. It's a nice autobiographical storyline and perhaps the best depiction of "what is a performance artist" in recent film.

I saw 2 new books by July at Vroman's Books in Pasadena recently, a book of short stories and this art book, "Learning To Love You More". It looks like an intriguing collection of assignments for art school students and the products of such assignments and I think this could be very useful for teachers and students of creative process. Again, July has opened her authorial access into a show of works and ideas by a lot of the young and unknown people and students she interacts with. She has taken some ideas basic to Fluxus, particularly the idea that a work of "art" can be a score or instructions open to interpretation by a multitude of other people. The creative act is not so much a lonely studio creation, but is the social nexus or network created through ideas and communication itself. Like a new telephone. Could be good, could cause unwanted long distance charges. Could ask us to review the work of Yoko Ono, Joseph Beuys or Linda Montano. I also can't get my head around the Learning To Love You title. Smarmy. I like the proposition that art can be psychologically healing, but July comes across a bit like an inflatable doll with such a title, willing to be bent into any position to please. Or appear that way, Bambi-eyed, only to slam you down later in a dark alley. The provocation is good PR but presses the Oh No button. What, you? Love me? You didn't at the Film Arts round table. I guess my reaction is par for the course, to barter in cliches.

The world has become a big magazine rack and everything on it is instantaneous and disposable. Ironic? Well, nice in a mean kind of way.

Amazing Documentaries: The Take

We crossed paths with Avi Lewis in Perth, Australia when Wet Gate was there for some concerts as part of the Revelations Film Festival, July of '05. Lewis was showing his recently completed The Take, a documentary of worker takeovers of factories abandoned by bankrupt owners in Argentina. I didn't have a chance to see The Take back then nor speak much with Lewis, but finally saw this impressive piece of independent documentary work and must recommend it to anyone interested in social change and true progress. Indymedia activists Lewis and Naomi Klein went to Buenos Aires during the chaotic period after 2001, when the country saw 5 different presidents fail to right a series of financial collapses in the country. Carlos Menem was the last and worst of these, actively selling out the country's resources to foreign interests and allowing a huge flight of existing capital from the country. This is summarized in The Take as background to a series of worker take-overs of factories in the country, whereby working people sought to take control of their labor. A great team of activist filmmakers worked under exceedingly difficult conditions in a country under financial seige by its moneyed class and haunted by living specters of dictatorship when activists were disappeared. A tremendous testament to the seemingly endless abuse of power in another country forced to its knees by the "loans" of the International Monetary Fund. Required viewing.

Amazing Documentaries: Henri Langlois, Phantom of The Cinematheque

Another wonderful history lesson in a can: this portrait of the life of Henri Langlois, founder of the Cinematheque Francais in Paris. Contains wonderful historic footage of Langlois through periods of his life: during the German Occupation, how films were acquired, stored and preserved(?), building a huge national treasure of a film library and providing screenings of essential cinema which taught generations of young filmmakers where to start. Great footage of turbulent 1968 Paris, when Langlois was under seige by more conservative social forces and demonstrations mounted in support of him featuring Godard, Truffaut and academic-revolutionary Daniel Cohn-Bendit. A great slice of French cultural history and necessary viewing for film collectors and preservationists.

Amazing Documentaries: The Agronomist

Finally had the chance to view this tremendous piece of history by Jonathan Demme, who I don't tend to think of as a political filmmaker, but this is great work. The heart breaking life story of radio activist Jean Dominique, who played a large role in the democratic uprising in Haiti through his radio commentaries at Radio Haiti, the station he founded and which acted as a voice for the people. The film serves as a succinct history of Haiti in the 20th century, with summaries of the years under dictators Papa Doc Duvalier and son, Baby Doc, and how the US has meddled in the affairs of this poor country for so long. Also chronicles the rise and fall of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the country priest who became Haiti's first democratically elected president. But the center of the film remains Dominique, a uniquely firey personality who you'd expect might be an actor or theate director, just so much life in his eyes and his speech. A beautiful portrait of a life stopped short by the thuggish repression that has paralyzed Haitian society for too long.