  coworker leah came over tonight to look at the roll of super 8mm film she had test-shot for a found camera. i ended up showing her my film equipment, how to edit, and how i once edited, and screening not just her three-minute strip of film but my own hour-long super 8mm film about times square y2k, trompe l'oeil , as well. i'm still really surprised she loved it so much because, technically speaking, it's kind of crappy. the film is full of scratches and needs to be cleaned of specks of emulsion and dust. the soundtrack is distorted and badly in need of re-recording. in short, it needs major restoration and one day i'll devote myself to rebuilding it. she liked the rawness of it though, and i guess she's right. super 8mm is a crude medium for which you forfeit a lot of control. she said i should screen it for the fundraiser for the film she's about to shoot in new york - she liked the irony of that - and i said if i did, it'd have to be without the sound.
she disagreed, and i can tell i've been warped into aural hyperconsciousness by making music films. i cleaned trompe just now for the first time in a long time because the cleaner tends to wear away the magnetic sound striping that lines either side of the film, one along the sprocket holes, the other directly opposite. it felt a lot like sitting at a potter's wheel and there i realized most of the scratches are on the base of the celluloid, not the emulsion.
i learned the difference way back when i used to project and assistant manage a theatre. black for base, and that means green is for the scratches on emulsion. green because the scratch is the unexposed color latent in the emulsion now revealed. now you know, next time you're in a movie theatre. after the films and artwork of my studio, leah made me feel really accomplished, historically, tonight, and i think i've forgotten how much i've been working since i was 17 and things turned over.
she says i'll be one of those people they'll write about one day and my current films will end up popular in the underground. that i'll be a todd haynes yet, karen carpenter superstar and all. so aim low, in my case. i think i'm going to restore it really soon. reinstate the soundtrack, all digitally. i need more film cleaning fabric and research, though.
film is kind of buddha. it's forever decaying from the moment it's produced, well beyond exposure and development, if first you can beat the expiration date. but i really bought the trompe l'oeil film for australia and new zealand and it got exposed months after its intended use and it's still fairly well, even tonight. but it's biodegradable and eventually gets eaten away - so 80% of silent cinema is believed to be lost. i have a memory of a moving image of an archivist uncovering the lid of a can to show us beneath it where crumbled celluloid got a glimpse of air and light again for the first time in decades, but never again for the front of the brighter projector bulb. leah marvelled at my small collection of buster keaton super 8mm films stacked on a shelf. they sit the wrong way, though. they should be vertical in their reels, not horizontal, because gravity will eventually buckle the strips of film.
i fixed that, by the way, using reels of leader and of odds and ends as bookends. i have a friend whose parents still talk about the night i came over with my 35-pound projector and screened sherlock, jr on a white sheet stretched across the living room doorway. the film came with a failing piece of paper that reads: Excellent print of a rare 1924 Buster Keaton comedy classic. Buster plays a projectionist in a cinema who lets his imagination run away with him right into the film he is showing!
Once there he dizzily dances to the editor's change of scene in one of the funniest and most imaginative sequences ever filmed - - i made a film from that sequence. malec in durée , walkmen music - - From then on it's just one long laugh as he tries to solve a crime, prove his own innocence and win the girl of his dreams! All without any hint of a smile on his own face! Sherlock Jr. has a big plus for classic movie buffs - it shows you just what an old time movie theatre was really like with scenes of the auditorium, foyer and of course, the projection box itself!
that's the saddest thing i've ever heard, to quote marty, who tends to help start my mornings these days. i used to be a staunch radical for only film. but i can't stand how precious it is anymore. everytime there's a scratch, or the colors seem to fade, it breaks me down with the film a little more. the allure of the immaterial image that i railed against so long has won me over. i couldn't take the frailness anymore.
this feels like writing about someone i used to be close to whom i haven't spoken of in a long time. we once spent a spring break together and twice that week i stayed awake for two days, subsisting on tea and unable to eat, drink, or sleep for want of splicing. tonight i wasn't hungry when i should have been, and i feel badly it's turned out this way. 
