Stan Brakhage's Two Negatives.

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Here's a picture of the can that contained the original negative for Stan Brakhage's late film Max (2002), a loving portrait of the family cat. It's a lovely film, but it's fair to say that it's not necessarily a particularly well-known or widely acclaimed work from Stan. But what does make it particularly significant is that it is one of only two films that Stan ever shot and finished on negative, and the ONLY film he ever shot and finished on color negative.

For anyone reading who may not be familiar with film stocks and their history, it was far more common for 16mm independent/experimental filmmakers to shoot and finish in reversal film than in negative film until about the 1980s. Reversal film essentially refers to film that, when shot and processed, yields a positive (rather than negative) image. The earliest 16mm film stocks (beginning in 1923) were reversal, as they were primarily designed for amateur use - the filmmaker would shoot a movie, process the film, and then be able to project the original directly.

Kodak's first widely marketed color film, Kodachrome, was also reversal, as was its later counterpart, Ektachrome. In fact, if my research serves me right, Kodak didn't even offer a color negative camera stock for general sale in 16mm until 1963-64 (though 16mm black and white negative existed for quite some time before this). Even after this, so-called experimental filmmakers didn't very commonly use 16mm color negative, likely for a few reasons.

It was, at the time, more expensive. There were also, at the time, many more film stock options in reversal than in negative. There were even three different reversal print stocks co-existing throughout the 1970s. It was also harder to edit for filmmakers who did their own cutting - one would likely have to edit a workprint and then match the negative to the workprint, and for some, I imagine the abstraction of the negative image was not as intuitive to work with. Finally, it could also be that negative stocks' tendencies to be more easily scratched and dirtied, and the increased and potentially distracting visibility of negative dirt and damage (appearing as white rather than black in a projection print) may have dissuaded some from working with it.

Two of the very few experimental filmmakers I can think of that shot color negative as early as the late 1960s/early 1970s are Morgan Fisher (Documentary Footage, 1968), Chris Langdon (Bondage Girl, 1973; Love Hospital Trailer, 1975).

From my work on Stan Brakhage's films, it's quite clear that Stan seemed to strive for prints that mirrored his cut original. In other words, he wanted the projection prints to look as closely like his originals as possible - what he saw in editing was what he wanted to get on screen. Stan also famously eschewed workprints in any form, preferring to directly cut his originals, considering the idea of cutting a workprint and then slavishly matching the original to it to be more or less impossible for him - "...my nature is such that when I got to the original I would not be able to just match edge numbers, I would make another whole film." (Q&A at Millennium, 2/19/1972)

Working in negative was counterintuitive to this editing approach. However, he did shoot and cut one early film on black and white negative: Day Break and White Eye, from 1957, a transitional sound film that, though very interesting, doesn't screen very much. (Commonly listed in print as "Daybreak and Whiteye", the title as I've written it initially here is how it actually appears on screen.)

Day Break and White Eye actually has quite a bit of cutting in it, all done to the original b/w negative, from which prints were then made. By contrast, Max consists of a single, uncut, 7279 500T camera negative roll, with b/w titles spliced to the beginning and end.

(I should mention here that although Stan only shot and finished two of his films on negative, a lot of the originals for his optically printed painted films are color negatives, such as Chartres Series (1994), Stellar (1993), or Black Ice (1994), among dozens of others. However, these optically conformed negatives were entirely the result of optical printing work from original painted film, undertaken by Sam Bush at Western Cinema Lab according to Stan's instructions. Later painted films made following Sam's departure from the lab were printed to Kodachrome by Mary Beth Reed, Phil Solomon, or Stan himself, as with Preludes 1-6 (1996), Micro-Garden (2001), or Lovesong 5 & Lovesong 6 (2001).)

None of this is to say that Stan only shot 16mm negative on these two occasions. As far back as the 1960s, he began to periodically shoot or print onto color negative, to be used in either of two different ways. In some cases, the negative would be incorporated into a positive original as-is, i.e. as an orange-masked, color negative image treated as positive, as with films like Scenes From Under Childhood (1967) and the Sincerity films (1973-80). Sometimes the negative would be printed, and the resulting print would be cut into the originals, sometimes alongside its negative counterpart (as in The Process (1972), Tortured Dust (1984), and Agnus Dei Kinder Synapse (1991)).

In the late 1980s, as the range of reversal stocks diminished and fewer labs could process and print them, Stan began to shoot quite a bit of color negative. However, rather than shoot negative and cut and finish on negative, he would instead shoot negative, print it, and then use this print as his original. The color print would be treated in the same way as reversal, as a positive original which Stan would edit and complete in positive. The lab would then make an internegative from this cut original so that prints could be struck.

The originals for quite a few films from this period incorporate color print this way (usually 7384 and 7386 print stocks). Some films are entirely or nearly entirely color print originals, such as The Thatch of Night (1990), Visions in Meditation #1 (1989), Boulder Blues and Pearls And... (1993), and Delicacies of Molten Horror Synapse (1991). Other films incorporate a diverse mix of color print, Kodachrome, Ektachrome, and other stocks, such as Visions in Meditation #2 (1989), The Mammals of Victoria (1994), and The Cat of the Worm's Green Realm (1997).

One interesting by-product of this filmmaking approach is the increased presence of both positive and negative dirt/damage in the films that incorporate color print stock. As Stan used what was most likely just dry-gate dailies in his editing of color print, there is usually some noticeable negative dirt printed into the color positive stock. Additionally, while Ektachrome and especially Kodachrome were fairly resilient to scratching during his editing process, the color print stock was softer and more susceptible to damage, so (usually) green and yellow emulsion marks and scratches are often visible in these films. If you have volume 2 of Criterion's 'by Brakhage' DVD series, you can spot these qualities in some of the aforementioned films.

Original picture roll for Tortured Dust (part 2) (1984), showing (L-to-R) one frame of Kodachrome, two frames of faded color print, three frames of color negative. Also on display here is Stan's signature technique of splicing in 2 frames of black leader at every single cut of a film.

Goodbye, Bob.

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Robert Nelson (1930-2012)

Can't really express at all how very sad I am to report that Robert Nelson has died. He was 81. He had been diagnosed with terminal cancer about a year ago, and had decided to not receive treatment, to go out in his own way, as he could only do, as Chick Strand had decided to do before him.

All things considered, Bob was doing pretty well all year, actually. He had moments, sometimes days, of fatigue and feeling kind of lousy, but had plenty of good days too. I last spoke to him about a week ago and we talked about meeting up soon. He sounded great, and was as sharp as ever. So when I got the call from Wiley today, the news was a bit of a shock to me, as Bob had still seemed so vital and alive a week before.

He hadn’t been taking any medication or treatment beyond the herbal kind, and had continued to live on his own in the mountains in the small house he built in gorgeous Mendocino County. An inimitably homespun and offhand philosopher, he would say things to me like, “what the hell, I’ve had a good run.” I made him some CDs to check out a few months ago, and after he’d listened to and enjoyed them a few times he unexpectedly sent them back, saying “they were really good, I just don’t want to accumulate any more shit.”

Bob has easily been one of the most important people in my life, a massive source of influence, inspiration, support, friendship, and good company for the past ten years. His films are still huge for me. and will be til I die.

I sought him out in 2001 when I worked at Canyon Cinema. I had seen Bleu Shut and Hot Leatherette, and they had both knocked me out, especially Bleu Shut. At the time, my friend Martha was a preservationist at the Academy Film Archive in L.A., and she and I concocted a proposal for Bob and the Academy to start getting his filmography preserved, film by film. After he answered my initial letter, Bob and I had exchanged a few more letters (he was a great letter-writer) without yet meeting. One day without warning, he just strolled into the Canyon office on Third. Dominic hadn’t seen him in a few years at least, and said, almost in shock, “…Well hi, Bob!” Bob and I met, had lunch and talked about the archiving thing, and a deal was hatched. He was still very skeptical about the value of his work and his own desire for people to even see the films, but a project at the Academy was worked out, and Martha preserved The Off-Handed Jape and Deep Westurn right away, with Bob still not really wanting the films to see the light of day. I took over when I was hired to replace her in ’03, when she left to work in Tanzania, and have worked on a bunch of ‘em since then.

Over the years, a certain visceral block about his films, a desire to destroy many of them or at least keep them withdrawn from view, loosened and relented, in some cases title by title. I worked on him to do screenings, and though he wouldn’t initially appear in person, he approved the occasional showing of individual films starting in late 2003. In 2004, with Craig Baldwin’s help, we were able to do a 3-day retrospective at Other Cinema, with Bob in person, which marked a big change in his attitude about the work. The voluminous positive feedback from audiences I was able to pass on encouraged him more and more to lighten up about it all. He started making appearances, including some brilliant ones at Oberhausen, Vienna, and elsewhere. He even started working on several new films (left uncompleted) in 2007 or so, one of which was a collaboration we discussed at length, and which I hope I can actually complete now.

I was always thrilled to pass word along to him about how much one or more of his films had influenced someone I’d met, because by the 1990s, he had gotten really apathetic about a lot of them. But the interest in his films over the past ten years was something he really enjoyed, and he came around to re-embracing many of his own films. (Some of them remained to him nausea-inducing failures, though. Mention What Do You Talk About? or The Beard, and he would groan.) He was thrilled his work still resonated with people, or just made them laugh. Sometimes younger filmmakers would track him down and send him their work, and he always looked at it with a fresh, critical gaze, responding with his genuine and thoughtful reactions, which sometimes led to extended correspondences.

I always found him incredibly open, curious, wise, attentive, interested. He was just so fucking great to hang out with. How many people over 30 (let alone 80) still approach life, conversation, questions, EVERYTHING, with a completely open, curious mind, capable of considering and reconsidering, changing, reorienting…? Even in screening Q&As, when asked a question about Bleu Shut or Blondino that he’d probably been asked dozens of times before, he would seriously consider the question and try to give a unique, thoughtful answer. He was so full of consideration and wisdom, always gave me (and others) great advice.

So many filmmakers are filmmakers in some way or other because of Bob (among them Peter Hutton, Fred Worden, Chris Langdon, Curt McDowell, Mike Henderson, numerous others). Peter once told me that when he saw Bob’s films for the first time, his reaction was “wait, you can make movies like that?”, and started making films himself. David Wilson (of Museum of Jurassic Technology fame) was deeply inspired by The Awful Backlash, and wasn’t the only one to have that reaction. Bob named the classic film Near the Big Chakra, with his gift for evocative titles. Bob could also be burtally honest about someone’s work, because he felt a friend was due that honesty and respect, even if it cost him a few friendships. Bob was the person I was most nervous and yet most eager to show my own films, and his positive, thoughtful reactions meant something immeasurable to me, as did the criticism of one film of mine he thought was a stinker.

When an artist dies, the inevitable retrospectives follow. But that’s OK. Bob was happy to have his work rediscovered, and thrilled that anybody still found it entertaining, funny, enlightening, whatever. I already miss him deeply, but am excited that his films (and his spirit, a very palpable, inextricable part of them) are, and will continue to be, very much with us.

If anyone would like to send any thoughts, reminiscences, testimonials, etc. about Bob or his work to me, I’d be happy to share them with his family and friends.

Bob Nelson, ca. mid-1960s

Bob Nelson in Oberhausen, 2006 (photo by Mark Toscano)

Original poster for the premiere of The Great Blondino (1967)

Bob in The Off-Handed Jape (1967)

Shooting The Great Blondino (1967) in San Francisco. (Bob is on the left, Wiley on the right.)

Production still from Oh Dem Watermelons (1965)

Bob in Bleu Shut (1970)

Still from Hauling Toto Big (1997)

Bob in Blondino costume in The Great Blondino Preview (1967)

Will Hindle's Visual Cue Rolls

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Happy Thanksgiving! Decided to write a quick(?) post before starting to peel potatoes.

When I started working at the film archive in 2003, one of the first filmmakers whose work I wanted to do something to preserve/restore was Will Hindle. Will died in 1987. In the 1960s and 1970s, he was easily one of the more influential and acclaimed experimental filmmakers working. Even his earliest films, like Pastorale d'ete (1958) and Non Catholicam (1957-63/64) had a huge influence on people like Bruce Baillie (who helped Will shoot Non Catholicam). Stan Brakhage was a great friend and admirer. By all accounts, Will was a deeply intelligent, sensitive, and intense person and artist, who affected many he encountered over a few decades of existence on the independent film scene. Several of his 1970s/80s students I've spoken to have a profound connection to him, and count him as a chief influence in their lives. A much more extensive post should be written on Will, but I'll try to address that in the future.

One important thing to mention is that Will's films wouldn't have survived if it weren't for the incredible Shellie Fleming, who has not only been an exceptionally influential professor for many SAIC students over the years, but was also the person who really single-handedly saved and cared for what survived of Will's films for many years until she and I got in touch in 2003 to talk about preserving them. She has been an important inspiration to me as well.

A lot of pictures for today's post, all of a single object. One of Will's most complex films in terms of its visual choreography and editing, is Watersmith (1969). Will clearly had an incredibly deep and perhaps even innate understanding of the possibilities of film printing. His editing and composition reflects this, and his most accomplished films, like Billabong (1968), Chinese Firedrill (1968), and Watersmith reflect a truly uncanny understanding of the remote capabilities of a film printer and the seemingly inconceivably rich ways in which that process could be manipulated and exploited.

In working with Will's surviving film materials, one method I've realized that he employed to visualize this process is that of the visual cue roll. Although I can imagine that other filmmakers must have used similar methods (perhaps Scott Bartlett or Tom DeWitt?), Will's visual cue rolls are the only ones I've personally encountered. At the archive, visual cue rolls for Billabong, Chinese Firedrill, and Watersmith have all survived, and they're fascinating to wind through. Essentially, they function as a map to the printing of the film.

Watersmith was constructed in 16mm reversal A/B/C rolls, meaning there were three full-length printing rolls which, when printed in succession onto the same receiving print stock, employing all the various effects/dissolves/etc Will charted, would create a complete print with all its desired effects, color timing, and so forth. Accompanying these actual printing rolls would be the visual cue roll. See the pictures below to get an idea of what I'm talking about. The visual cue roll is a roll of lightstruck leader, the kind of stuff you'd normally splice onto the head or tail of a film, for example. Will created a roll of leader that matched the printing rolls in length, with matching head and tail cue marks as well. Then, throughout the visual cue roll, he would make notations and labels in magic marker indicating the various effects, color timing requests, and other descriptions of how the A/B/C rolls should be printed by the lab (in this case, Deluxe Hollywood).

To me, this is a remarkable primary document, which not only illuminates Will's process itself, but expresses some of the complexity of his conception for his films as (if I could borrow the expression) sculptures in time. The interaction of layers, the procession of sequences in tandem and succession, are incredibly rich, often moving, highly intuitive yet inexplicable - in other words, Will's films often have the effect of hitting the viewer on both a gut and intellectual level without you knowing precisely why. I think his control of visual language, in both pure image/sound relationships and in the use of powerful narrative fragments and suggestions, is incredibly unique, and hopefully his work will experience some kind of rediscovery in the near future. I'm currently working on preserving a few of his films, and a few more are short on the heels of these. Unfortunately, the one film that perhaps suffers the most, archivally speaking, is Watersmith itself. For while the visual cue roll survives in all of its suggestiveness, the original A/B/C rolls are lost.

I'm a bad blogger, but I'll try to be better.

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Sometimes I update with reasonable regularity, then I'll go months with no sign of life. Sorry about that.

There has been so much going on for the past year in my film world/life that it's often hard to keep up. Between the ever-increasing volume of preservation and restoration work (not to mention all the filmmaker and lab interactions, inspections, inventory, and collection management that goes with it, and even further not to mention the horrendous amount of email I feel like I'm always drowning in), plus the huge amount of stuff I have going on with Los Angeles Filmforum's very exciting Alternative Projections project, it's been hard for me to make time to post thing here.

But I do definitely want to continue to be able to share the bizarre or interesting projects, findings, discoveries, etc. that I feel are a big part of my work, so I'll try update things a bit more regularly here. I just have to cultivate it as a habitual activity.

Above is a still from the incredible The Death of the Gorilla (1966), by the inimitable Peter Mays. This is what you might call a local classic, in that it's known to the L.A. avant-garde community, and is a crucial part of L.A. avant-garde history, but it's been shamefully left out of a lot of larger histories of experimental film. This film is a masterwork and should be a classic, (whatever that means). It's also now newly restored, and is showing in the 2011 edition of Views From the Avant-Garde at New York Film Festival, as well as other locales, and I hope you get a chance to check it out.

Peter made this film by shooting 100ft. camera rolls of 16mm 7255 Ektachrome Commercial off of his television. He would run the film entirely through the camera with a certain color gel in front of the lens, and shoot fragmented bursts of primarily low-budget horror, sci-fi, and exotica stuff, with some King Kong and other recognizable features thrown into the mix. Upon reaching the end of the roll, he would rewind the entire roll, then do another full pass in-camera, shooting again off the television, this time with a different color gel. He sometimes did 6-8 full passes with 6-8 different colors in this manner. He got roll after roll of amazing, kaleidoscopic material this way. Immediately after getting his very best roll yet, he produced a total dud, which is how he knew the shooting was done. He then VERY extensively edited the material into a rough psychedelic narrative, and also created a similarly kaleidoscopic collage soundtrack to go with the image. The end result is 16 minutes of mind-blowing psychedelic genius, with all superimpositions produced in-camera, no exception.

Actually, you may have already seen some images from this film without realizing it. Strips from the film make up the entire cover of Taschen's Art Cinema coffee table book.

The preservation didn't actually take a ton of time. But it was an interesting experience, and unique in a couple of ways.

Peter had actually undertaken his own project to preserve and make available his work a few years prior, culminating in an incredibly elaborate and resourcefully executed DVD set of his work, from his earliest shorts to his most recent Flash animations. With a lot of films in his filmography, and some of them confusing due to variant versions, incompleteness, and other issues, he and I agreed that the best way to start working on anything of his was to go title-by-title, with The Death of the Gorilla seeming an obvious place to start, it being his most well-known film.

Peter had attempted to get the original 16mm mag track for the film transferred a few years back, to no success. The audio house had told him it couldn't be done effectively, and instead he made a new optical track positive from his track negative, and used that as the audio source for his digital transfer and DVD.

Acetate mag stock does have a tendency to deteriorate more readily and alarmingly than picture, something to do with the metal oxide "aggravating" the acetate base it's on. Most mag stocks switched to much more stable polyester in the 1970s/'80s.

When I got the mag track from Peter, it was pretty stinky with vinegar syndrome, and fairly warped and starting to curl. But it wasn't as bad as some really nasty mags I'd encountered, and I was pretty confident it could be transferred. Nick Bergh at Endpoint Audio really knows how to handle deteriorating mag well, and I gave it to him, which eventually yielded a very nice transfer. At Audio Mechanics, we checked the mag against an existing transfer of the optical track, and it was superior, though not by a huge margin, as the source for the track's audio was recorded ambiently off of television with a mic, and was pretty lo-fi to begin with. But the mag still sounded a bit better.

In the meantime, the original picture had its own issues. 7255 Ektachrome Commercial stock doesn't have nearly the color stability problems of its successor, the dreaded 7252 ECO (covered elsewhere in this blog), and Peter's original still has great looking color and contrast. It was also undamaged - no tears, perf damage, anything like that.

Normally, an element like this would be printed on a wetgate printer, the liquid in the gate helping to fill in scratches and blemishes on the source element, so the newly made element is as scratch-free and clean as possible. But we couldn't print Peter's original this way for two reasons. First, the head and tail titles were hand-painted (and beautifully, I might add - see end of this post). More problematic were the splices - Peter had originally edited the film with tape splices, which have held firm, but separated slightly over time, leaving a sliver of a gap in between pretty much all of them (and there are many many hundreds of splices in the original). If printed as-is, these slivers of splice gaps would be visible throughout the movie as punctuating white horizontal bars, occurring annoyingly and constantly throughout the film, especially since the framelines shift a bit over the course of the movie. To compensate for this, Peter, in his incredible focus and diligence, actually blackened out the splice gaps with a black marker, OVER the tape splices. So any attempt to clean or wet-print this original would wash away not only the hand-painted titles, but ALL of the "corrections" to the splice gaps. Yikes.

Also, because the adhesive from the tape splices had oozed somewhat over the years, every opposite lap of film from any given tape splice had dirt and adhesive residue stuck to it, on both sides of the film, constantly, throughout its entire length. Yikes again.

What to do? Well, the solution was painfully clear. I had to hand clean the entire thing, a foot at a time, all the way through, on both base and emulsion sides of the roll. Which I did. I hand-cleaned every single instance of that adhesive gunk and the dirt sticking to the adhesive gunk, through 600+ feet of the original for this film, on both sides. It took a while, but not as long as I thought it would.

In the meantime, another unique aspect of the project presented itself, which was very helpful. Extremely presciently, Peter had cut together a short, 50ft. roll of original outtakes from the film which represented a lot of the film's various looks. He did this specifically to be used as a test roll, so the lab could print the short test roll and experiment with exposures and timing, rather than print the full original a bunch of times. VERY helpful.

So while cleaning the original, I sent this test roll to the lab - Colorlab in this case. The wonderful and brilliant timer there, Chris Hughes, and the great Julia Nicoll got the test roll printed to internegative, then timed to print. Peter and I had decided pretty early on that the film should absolutely be printed as a "one light". In other words, there would be no timing light changes for the entirety of the film - one "best" light setting would be used for the whole thing. The reasoning for this was twofold - Peter had originally printed it this way in the 1960s, and the nature of the film's concept and making suggested this approach made the most sense. In other words, all of the superimpositions and color effects should be treated equally on a neutral grounding, not diversely modified from sequence to sequence or anything like that.

Additionally, Peter and I agreed the lab should try to make the new print look as much like the original as possible. Normally one might be matching a screening print of a film rather than the original, because perhaps there's a certain amount of color correction or other exposure modification that would have taken place in the film's printing. But in this case, we agreed that matching the original again fit the film's concept and execution, and also allowed for a very fine, subtle, high quality mirroring of the original as an object, rather than trying to artificially match a Kodachrome print, which would be a lot less subtle, a lot more contrasty, and miss the film's fine detail somewhat.

The test came back from Colorlab looking great, and needed only a tiny correction (1 point lighter, 1 point less blue). It looked beautiful. In the meantime, I had finished hand-cleaning the original, and shipped it to Colorlab for them to do another dry cleaning pass and then print it according to the results gotten from the test. Also in the meantime, the sound work had been finished and a new digital sound master, new mag track, and new optical track negative were created. Colorlab produced a new internegative and a first answer print with sound that hit the film exactly on the money. It looked fantastic. Peter saw it and was absolutely thrilled. I compared it to the 1960s Kodachrome print, which, though also beautiful, was not as good as the new one, which had a lot more range of color and subtlety of detail, closer to the original.

The new print premiered at Rotterdam 2011 in a pair of restored L.A. experimental film programs I put together, and I hope Rob Todd doesn't mind me quoting him as calling the film "a maximalist monsterpiece".

To conclude this really long post, I thought I'd share a few more stills from the film:

Adding three images to this post that show the hand-painted titles in the film's original. I had originally planned to put these images in from the beginning, but my laptop (on which they were held hostage) crapped out, and I only got it fixed in late December 2011... Enjoy!

RIP

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What is there to be said? News articles abound, generally containing accurate info about this very, very special film stock. Kodak announced its discontinuation on June 22, 2009, and the last day you can get your Kodachrome processed (by the indefatigable Dwayne's Photo) is today, Thursday, December 30, 2010.

The photo above shows the one and only roll of 16mm Kodachrome I ever managed to shoot in my life. I bought it a few years ago before I even owned a 16mm camera, and shot it only a month ago or so, and just sent it to Dwayne's two days ago. Very curious about how it'll come out. I also sent six super 8 rolls, from which I expect varying levels of successful/unsuccessful processing - one of them was shot in 1986 by me as a kid, one was shot in 2007 on stock from 1984, and the rest are of more recent vintage, but stored inconsistently over the last couple of years. Hopefully there will be some positive surprises.

In my restoration work, Kodachrome can present some unique issues in duplication via internegative, particularly because it's a direct projection stock, i.e. meant to be viewed/projected as an original. Its higher contrast and unique image qualities mean special steps have to be taken for its successful duplication. Some labs flash the internegative slightly and then pull two stops, to lower contrast. Or one stop. Or 1.5 stops. Or ...? I'm sure there are other tricks of the trade employed at various facilities sensitive to the special needs of Kodachrome, some of them perhaps proprietary secrets, who knows?

I've had the pleasure of working on preserving/restoring various films shot on Kodachrome over the past seven years, and here's a list of some of them off the top of my head (alphabetical by filmmaker name):

Mirror (Gary Beydler, 1974)
Hand Held Day (Gary Beydler, 1975)
The Wonder Ring (Stan Brakhage, 1955)
Gnir Rednow (Stan Brakhage & Joseph Cornell, 1955/late '60s)
The Act of Seeing with one's own eyes (Stan Brakhage, 1971) (some sequences)
Odds & Ends (Jane Conger Belson Shimane, 1958)
Sam Fuller's WWII home movies (Samuel Fuller, 1945) (some rolls)
The Assignation (Curtis Harrington, 1953)
Mother Goose Stories & Fairy Tales (Ray Harryhausen, 1946-1953)
Angel Blue Sweet Wings (Chick Strand, 1966)
Five Film Exercises (John and James Whitney, ca.1944-1946)
Yantra (James Whitney, 1957)
Lapis (James Whitney, 1966) (both Yantra and Lapis projects involved a test approach to digital restoration of the films, which yielded very intriguing results) (collaboration w/ John Whitney Jr.)
Mozart Rondo (John Whitney, 1952)

...not to mention the various avant-garde films that were saved and ONLY preservable/restorable thanks to the existence of a Kodachrome (7387) print. Common through the early '70s, Kodachrome prints were color reversal prints on a variation (?) of Kodachrome, usually meant for printing from lower contrast originals, like ECO (Ektachrome Commercial). Like the camera stock, these prints are gorgeous, and have incredible color stability.

With the introduction of a higher contrast Ektachrome print stock in the early '70s, use of the Kodachrome print stock diminished until it was discontinued altogether in August 1981. But because these 1970s ECO originals are often faded, or originals may be lost, it's the ultra-fine, ultra-stable Kodachrome prints that can alternatively provide the basis for a restoration, to impressively high quality results.

Some films I've worked on that were preserved from (or with the help of) a surviving Kodachrome print include:

Dear Janice (Adam Beckett, 1972) (originals lost) (collaboration w/ iotaCenter)
Evolution of the Red Star (Adam Beckett, 1973) (originals lost) (collaboration w/ iotaCenter)
Heavy-Light (Adam Beckett, 1973) (originals faded) (collaboration w/ iotaCenter)
Los Ojos (Gary Beydler, 1975) (originals lost)
Nothing Happened This Morning (David Bienstock, 1965) (color section only) (originals lost) (still in progress)
Brummer's (David Bienstock, 1967) (originals lost)
The Riddle of Lumen (Stan Brakhage, 1972) (some faded shots in the original)
The Room (Carmen D'Avino, 1958) (originals lost)
A Trip (Carmen D'Avino, 1960) (originals lost)
The Maltese Cross Movement (A.K. Dewdney, 1967) (originals lost)
Bertha's Children (Roberta Friedman & Grahame Weinbren, 1976) (originals faded)
Murray and Max Talk About Money (Roberta Friedman & Grahame Weinbren, 1979) (originals lost)
Now That the Buffalo's Gone (Burton C. Gershfield, 1967) (originals lost) (still in progress)
The Wormwood Star (Curtis Harrington, 1956) (originals lost)
unc. (Bruce Lane, 1966) (originals lost)
Go Oh Wow (Chris Langdon, 1972) (originals lost)
various color trailers (Chris Langdon, ca.1973-74) (originals lost)
The Alphabet (David Lynch, 1967) (originals partially damaged) (still in progress)
Sears Sox (Pat O'Neill, Chick Strand, and Martin Muller, ca.1968) (originals lost)
Mirror People (Kathy Rose, 1974) (originals lost)
Throbs (Fred Worden, 1972) (originals lost)

*

And for those of you who have found yourselves with some Kodachrome you didn't get around to shooting in time for the processing deadline: Remember that Kodachrome can be processed as black and white, so it's not entirely useless now, and I've heard you can get interestingly high contrast results. (In fact, Kodachrome is technically a black and white stock, with the color dye only being created in the processing - this is a large part of why it's so complicated to process.) Or, consider donating an unused box to a local film archive or film museum to be saved as an artifact.

Hope everybody who had wanted to shoot it got to shoot it. Crazy to think of an analog in other arts/media - is there one? I suppose one could lament never having had the chance to shoot on 1/2-inch open reel video, but the decks and cameras still exist and you could always use old stock, which is plentiful, though it might involve taping over something. Obscure forms of printmaking are still doable, as are numerous uncommon photographic processes. You can still paint with centuries-old oil paint recipes if you really want to and people are making absinthe traditionally again. What other art form besides photographic film (and definitely video too) is so technologically dependent as to render entire avenues of creative and/or technological exploration utterly obsolete, unattainable, killed? Then again, Polaroid was saved from this fate by passionate supporters, so maybe there are possibilities for Kodachrome, though I'm very doubtful.

In the meantime, I'm glad I like the 7285 Ektachrome so much (available in 16mm and super 8). It's really quite beautiful, give it a shot if you haven't tried it yet.

Deteriorated 28mm diacetate.

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Not much to say here, other than that these are some particularly nice photos I managed of a badly deteriorated 28mm diacetate print of Les Misérables (maybe the 1917 version?). Broadly speaking, as a format 28mm was more or less killed by the introduction of 16mm in 1923. Enjoy! (?)

This one frame...

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...is the reason why we had to print Ben VanMeter's S.F. Trips Festival - An Opening (1967) without cleaning it, or via a liquid gate printer. But that's OK! Ben is a filmmaker who was particularly attuned to the physical qualities of cinema, and I don't mean just its usual textures and surfaces.

This film was shot on January 21-23, 1966, at the massively significant Trips Festival, which occurred at Longshoreman's Hall in San Francisco. I can't imagine what it must have actually been like to attend, but from all accounts, the Trips Festival was a pretty startlingly rapturous event. All the arts were on display, often intermixed, whether it be light show performance, electronic and tape music, film projections, performances, the Grateful Dead, interactive displays, any number of other possibilities. It was an incredibly extensive interactive multimedia event that allowed attendees and participants to utterly free associate their way through the nearly limitless artistic and aesthetic endeavors then brewing and boiling over from the Bay Area underground.

Ben VanMeter, who had arrived in the Bay Area from Oklahoma in the very early '60s, was already a known filmmaker, having made several significant 16mm shorts that were playing regularly around town and elsewhere on the underground cinema circuit. Ben's approach was in many ways marked by a deep and intuitive lyricism, letting internal and external energies often direct his improvisatory responsive, but disciplined camera, resulting in a free-flowing "river of images" (to quote Robert Nelson) that is beautifully free-associative and ephemeral.

Ben seems to have first (successfully) tried this approach with the remarkable Olds-Mo-Bile (1964) (recently renamed Bolex Peyote Bardo by Ben), a 12-minute b/w film for which Ben intuitively filmed a full roll, rewound it, then filmed over it again, then again, to create unexpected in-camera superimpositions. But it's not a film of total chance - it's a quite successful combination of certain preplanned layer interactions and a basic trust of his own muse, a highly integrated mix of the intentional and the fortuitous.

Although this approach in some ways reached its zenith in Ben's feature Acid Mantra (1968), perhaps the most striking and near-perfect articulation of the technique is to be found in S.F. Trips Festival.

Ben had three camera rolls of 7255 Ektachrome Commercial, which he fully ran through his camera each day of the 3-day Trips Festival. The end result was three 100ft. rolls of film that each had been triple exposed in-camera, each layer of exposure representing a day of the festival. Aside from just two or three necessary structural edits, Ben just spliced the three rolls together essentially unedited. This was then set to a soundtrack that was achieved in roughly the same manner, via triple layering of sound he recorded throughout the festival.

Ben calls the film "a documentary of the Trips Festival from the point of view of a goldfish in the punch bowl." Indeed, it seems that a participatory, impressionistic, kaleidoscopic piece such as this would be the only way to document such an event, in which simultaneity and multimedia (both intentional and accidental) ruled. Ben's dual approach of open and considered pre-structuring, plus an intuitive embrace of the happenstance and unexpected, results in a hypnotic audiovisual cornucopia which nevertheless also does well to document the event in a strange sort of impressionistic semi-clarity. The whole film hovers between kinetic psychedelic light show and home movie informality.

As for preservation of the film (since this blog is about Preservation Insanity)....

Well, the preservation wasn't that insane. Having viewed a 1967 Kodachrome print a number of times, I was surprised to discover the single hand-painted frame shown above once inspecting the film's camera original - I had never noticed it during my viewings of the film. Winding to the same spot on the Kodachrome print, there it was, but really washed out and not very visible. In fact, overall, the Kodachrome print was missing a lot of the original's subtle shadow and highlight detail, which is not surprising, given that the Kodachrome print stock (7387) was gorgeous, but would inevitably gain contrast and lose shadow and highlight detail particularly in a dark, richly colorful film like S.F. Trips Festival.

Color-wise, the Kodachrome print basically looked identical to the original. After talking to Ben, it became clear that we could match the original in terms of exposure, and since his intention in printing the film was essentially to duplicate the original as-is, we didn't seek to color-correct or boost contrast or any other particular thing. Since the one frame of hand-painting meant the original couldn't be cleaned conventionally, I basically just wound through it a few times with a dry velvet, and also checked it carefully throughout for any schmutz or gunk, of which I found none - the original was thankfully quite clean.

FotoKem Labs carefully printed a new polyester internegative, dry gate, without further cleaning, and timed the new print to match the original as closely as possible. We were, in a sense, treating the original as a sort of neutral canvas on which all the recorded events happened in the colors and light/dark relationships as they did. Similar to Gary Beydler's Venice Pier (1976), the original was treated as much as a one-light as possible - the film stock being sort of a scientific control, upon which all the individual events recorded could express themselves as they did, with no additional photochemical or artistic intervention.

Does that make sense? J.J. Murphy's Print Generation (1974), about which I've been promising an entry here for a year or two, is similar - the filmic space is on its essential level a neutral one in which the activity/process unfolds, unblemished and unmodified by additional tinkering. The process by which the film is made is tied to the material in a way that would make any extra superficial changes dishonest and destructive. As freeform as it plays, Ben's film is precisely this as well, so we basically timed the restoration to match the look of the original, hand-painted frame and all.

Incidentally, the hand-painted frame is over what would otherwise be a flash frame. Though there are other flash frames here and there throughout the film, I guess Ben took a liking to this one and decided to decorate it!

Thanks for reading. I'll try to post a bit more regularly than I have been... Let me know if you enjoy this sort of thing! I should do an entry on Ben's Acid Mantra, come to think of it... maybe that'll be up next...

One other note - if you attended the opening night of PFA's Radical Light series on 10/15/2010, you may have seen S.F. Trips Festival, which quietly premiered there in its restored version. But I'll be doing my best to get it around so folks can see it, it's a film I like very much and think many others will too.