3rd September 2011

Photo with 10 notes

Back from a well needed vacation in Los Angeles.  While I was there I was able to visit Mark Toscano at Academy Film Archives, who was generous enough to take the time to give me a tour of the archive and let me view some of his recently completed preservation work…  I was able to watch Will Hindle’s final, quasi-lost/quasi-unfinished, film Trekkerriff (which is now in distribution at Canyon), JJ Murphy’s Print Generation, and Elwood Decker’s Color Fragments…  During the tour, in one of the many rooms of storage, Mark opened a can which contained an original 35mm element of Stan Brakhage’s Garden of Earthly Delights… He gently unspooled a few feet of leader until he arrived at the organic matter…  To me, however silly it may be, this was terribly exciting…  There were several times in my art school experience where different teachers would take a print of Mothlight and unspool it across tables and show the class how the cameraless images were directly applied to film from moth wings, flowers, and earth between perforated tape… That was always wonderful, but this was beyond that… To be able to SEE the texture, the thickness, the frame to frame composition (with the marks on the side notating frames) in the 3 feet segment of unfurled images… To be able to experience even the SMELL of potpourri from the film…  It was awesome (in the truest sense of the word) There is an incredible joy that I have experiencing and making films which are not only moving pictures but also are a plastic art… Physical objects and images that can be viewed and understood on a very basic level without the need of any technology…  Art that shows the artists hand, that reference the act of making while completely obscuring the fact by presenting unbearably spectacular images…  The strand of Earthly Delights reminded me of all of this (and the fact that I should be making more films while I still can…) (I grabbed the photo from David Boardwell’s blog where he wrote about his visit to Academy… Mark also has a great blog that’s well worth a read…)

Back from a well needed vacation in Los Angeles.  While I was there I was able to visit Mark Toscano at Academy Film Archives, who was generous enough to take the time to give me a tour of the archive and let me view some of his recently completed preservation work… 

I was able to watch Will Hindle’s final, quasi-lost/quasi-unfinished, film Trekkerriff (which is now in distribution at Canyon), JJ Murphy’s Print Generation, and Elwood Decker’s Color Fragments… 

During the tour, in one of the many rooms of storage, Mark opened a can which contained an original 35mm element of Stan Brakhage’s Garden of Earthly Delights… He gently unspooled a few feet of leader until he arrived at the organic matter…  To me, however silly it may be, this was terribly exciting… 

There were several times in my art school experience where different teachers would take a print of Mothlight and unspool it across tables and show the class how the cameraless images were directly applied to film from moth wings, flowers, and earth between perforated tape… That was always wonderful, but this was beyond that… To be able to SEE the texture, the thickness, the frame to frame composition (with the marks on the side notating frames) in the 3 feet segment of unfurled images… To be able to experience even the SMELL of potpourri from the film…  It was awesome (in the truest sense of the word)

There is an incredible joy that I have experiencing and making films which are not only moving pictures but also are a plastic art… Physical objects and images that can be viewed and understood on a very basic level without the need of any technology…  Art that shows the artists hand, that reference the act of making while completely obscuring the fact by presenting unbearably spectacular images…  The strand of Earthly Delights reminded me of all of this (and the fact that I should be making more films while I still can…)

(I grabbed the photo from David Boardwell’s blog where he wrote about his visit to Academy… Mark also has a great blog that’s well worth a read…)

Tagged: Academy Film ArchiveGarden of Earthly DelightsMark ToscanoStan Brakhageexperimental film

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