Alan Sondheim on Sat, 21 Apr 2007 06:20:56 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> My Lost Films |
My Lost Films I made films from 1969-1993; most of them were carried by Canyon Cinema in San Francisco. The films are all mast prints; I didn't copy them, but showed the originals, since I wanted to use what little funds I had to produce more. They were shown periodically at Millennium in New York, and occasionally elsewhere, but they've never been part of the film community; as a result, they've hardly been shown. Canyon Cinema returned them after the board voted against handling masters, which could be damaged during a screening of course. They were then placed at the Filmmakers Coop here in NY, where they've remained on the shelf for fifteen years; I doubt anyone has rented or seen them. I don't know their condition at this point; many of the 16mm ones had mag stripe sound on them, which is susceptible to print-through. They were featured prominently in the 1992 Canyon Cinema catalog, just before Canyon changed its mind about handling them. (I should add that my videos have been available at times from places like Printed Matter or Art Metropole, but these can be duplicated.) I'm saddened that they remain unscreened - there are probably 15-24 hours worth. There are a large number of them; for a while, when I was teaching at UCLA, I made a film every week, mostly 16mm black and white sound, imitating the older silent film production strategies and rates. For me the films broke a lot of new ground - not least, in optical/magnetic soundtrack experimentation, but they're quiet, moot on that point. So I recently found a copy of the 1992 catalog and xeroxed the six pages that describe my work. I am forced to think of the pages themselves as a new film, made from the silence of the old; they read as a narrative of concerns, experimentations, confusions, and theory-work changing over a twenty-year period (although to be fair, most were made between 1980 and 1992). The image URLs are given below. Read the texts, imagine watching the films, and maybe in some absurd future, they'll come to life again. http://www.asondheim.org/canyonfilm1.jpg http://www.asondheim.org/canyonfilm2.jpg http://www.asondheim.org/canyonfilm3.jpg http://www.asondheim.org/canyonfilm4.jpg http://www.asondheim.org/canyonfilm5.jpg http://www.asondheim.org/canyonfilm6.jpg http://www.asondheim.org/canyonfilm7.jpg # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net