Errata is a web journal written by Robert Davis who has neither spent a night in a ghost town nor pulled a turnip from the earth. He doesn't even know if turnips grow in the ground. Perhaps on trees, like candy corn. Therefore, Errata is a non-commercial project.

Observation #1: It may be appropriate, when leaving a movie theater, to say "mysterious."

Observation #2: It may be appropriate, when leaving a movie theater, to say "mysterious" at the top of your lungs. Bring your eyebrows together before you say it. Effective!

Observation #3: Same for books. Even at libraries.

There is a prize for people who correctly guess the thing about Metropolis, Nevada.

Except where the text specifically states otherwise, Errata's vagaries are indicated vaguely and its authors are indistinct in the traditional way of the Internet, except where the authors lay claim to their work. In some cases Robert Davis lays claim to work that is not his own but has been abandoned like so many ghost towns. Except where held presently, fistfuls of dirt are suspended via dispersal, or dispersed via suspension (in the air), and thus their dissolution is their transcendence, or their transcendence is their dissolution. And yet our eyes tear, and our vision is impaired, demonstrating for the umpteenth time that one entity's gain is another's fit of sneezes. Except where indicated, storms shall outlive the clay upon which they rain, unless storms are improperly delimited by their clouds, which dissolve, rather than by their inevitable return. Thus the clay loses, unless the clay is said to own the storm, to use it to make itself heavy, to make itself cling to white garments, refuse dispersal, cake upon the facades of abandoned buildings, and sit like Man [sic] upon the earth where it is pelted by a storm that it owns. In which case the clay still loses, if you ask us.

Some of the above is legally binding and should be considered a mental contract between Errata and those upon whom it acts. The bit about the prize should be considered an overstatement insofar as prizes differ from dirt and prize dispersal differs from dirt dispersal. Please recall that ownership is a weight and, therefore, hope that you do not win the prize.

One day Errata or its representatives will call upon you for a favor. It is expected that you will hop-to without delay.

You may contact Robert Davis by email unless it's about the rock that was thrown in anger. The rock is more properly called a clod. Why do you continue to raise the topic?

20 March 2008

Jennifer Reeves in 16mm

Jennifer Reeves' Fear of Blushing

I've been enjoying a brief retrospective of the work of New York-based experimental filmmaker Jennifer Reeves here in San Francisco. She says she wants to be the last person to leave the sinking ship that is 16mm film, and I can see why. Like many avant-garde filmmakers, she wades deep into the material by hand painting frames, placing chemicals onto the film to create colors and shapes, and otherwise manipulating her pictures in ways that aren't possible with video. Film is on its way out, and I'm amazed and excited by what's possible on video these days. See the beautiful films of Pedro Costa or Jia Zhangke or Alexander Sokurov for a few examples. But taking 16mm film from the toolbox of an artist like Reeves — every day, less of the stock is being manufactured, fewer labs are processing it, and fewer venues have equipment for showing the final product — is a little bit like telling a painter that, sorry, we won't be manufacturing canvas and oil paint in the future. Try something else. Start from scratch. With a dramatically different medium.

Reeves has begun to work with video, too, and even if it's just a hedge she's achieving some pretty amazing results. She created Light Work I by shooting video footage of her laboratory as she worked on a 16mm film called Light Work Mood Disorder. So Light Work I is like an avant-garde behind-the-scenes documentary, and although it's a video, it captures macro views of defiantly analog processes: swirling paint, cockeyed wall projection, and sewn frames of celluloid. (Michael Sicinski is the guy to read on this sort of thing, although some of what he describes are actually elements of Light Work Mood Disorder, shown second-hand in Light Work I.)

What I liked most about the San Francisco retrospective were the two venues: the first night was at the Artists' Television Access in the Mission and the other two nights were at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts downtown. The Yerba Buena screening room is a fine place for a screening, but even with your eyes closed you can feel the difference between this hermetically humming museum space and ATA's lofty, wooden storefront, where the projections are visible from the Valencia Street sidewalk. When the film starts at Yerba Buena, you'll hear some pops from the speakers as the soundtrack kicks in; at ATA, you'll hear the galloping clatter of the projectors sitting on a table at the back of the room.

The shift in venues mirrored the shifts in both the media and the programming. The later screenings included a couple of experimental narratives, Chronic and The Time We Killed, alongside Reeves' more abstract works. The narratives don't herald a permanent shift in her work, though. She's working now on a feature-length, abstract, multi-projection project called When It Was Blue.

That's projectors, plural. Many of Reeves' abstract works require two projectors that play two reels at once, either superimposing one frame onto another or projecting two side-by-side frames, synced up manually by Reeves so that sometimes you're seeing two independent images and sometimes you're seeing one wide image, "Light" on the left, "Work" on the right. I'm not sure which is more tangible, the cones of light above our heads or the nearly graspable patter of two machines cranking through 24 frames per second, another feature lost in the switch to video, like the incidental noise of a vinyl turntable.

Reeves originally conceived Light Work Mood Disorder for four projectors, hence the four-word title. But even an avowed fan of 16mm film occasionally bows to practicality.

Posted by davis | Link

Reader Comments

March 20, 2008, 11:58 PM

Chris Rusak

It's nice to see another artist who wants to hold on to the traditional materials of the past and keep away from the digitization of everything. There is a great joy in the hands-on making of art.

Thanks for the info.

March 21, 2008, 12:46 AM

davis

Indeed. I appreciate what some filmmakers are doing with video, but the assumption that it's pretty much the same as film is silly when you're talking about such hands-on techniques.

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