What got me looking in my 35mm negative archives were what I call film strips. In the late 70’s-early 80’s I when I was exposing a lot of 35mm film, I’d bulk load my own cassettes from 100 foot long rolls of 35 mm film. Often, after re-using cassettes over and over, they’d tend to leak light at the beginning and the end of the 36 exposure length of film in the cassettes, typically when I opened the camera to load or unload the film cassettes. Sometimes, interesting things happened with the film from the light leaks. Back then, I printed some of the film strip sequences on 20″x 24″ paper, and I liked them a lot. Recently, I scanned a couple of them, and printed them 17″x54″. And, I got excited about the film strips again.
Besides their visual quality and uniqueness, I started thinking about the film strips as little movie clips, and I started to let my imagination fill in the space between the moments of each frame. I put a couple of them into Final Cut, and put them on a time line to see what they actually looked like as movie clips. And that game has led to some interesting reading, namely Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, and some Immanuel Kant. It’s also brought me back to some David Lynch, Orson Welles, and Akira Kurosawa movies (I can’t emphasis how great Welles’s Franz Kafka’s The Trial is.) Even more recently, I’ve started to put some non-linear narrative with my film strips. I’m not sure where all this is going at the moment, but I sure like the process, and what I’m thinking about. And I like the film strips as little pieces of my history.
