Plastic-mechanic environment
The plastic-mechanical environment differs from the earlier film phenomena in that it has a physical film strip that can be held by hand, but which requires an intermittent decoder, for example a projector, to move. This intermittence decodes the film strip signal, e.g. when the projector switches between stop/start and open/close, creating a stream of images therewith. If the projector's "gate" is not set correctly, a "frameline" may appear on the canvas, where one sees the bottom of one image and the top of the next because the projector does not split the strip at the edge of the frame. This mistake has often been played in cartoons (e.g. Duck Amuck (1953)), but also used as a stylistic tool, e.g. in Pat O'Neill's experimental film Horizontal Boundaries (1997).
Likewise, the projector's invisible blink has also been subject to format reflection, e.g. in "flicker movies", where each frame consists of completely homogeneous fields without any image. In the earliest examples, such as Peter Kubelka's Arnulf Rainer (1960), the films (besides "titles") consist only of black and white frames that are grouped and spread across the film strip at varying intervals of time. The effect transforms the film projector into a kind of strobe light, bounding into the optomechanical environment.
A further radical interpretation can also be found in Robert Breer's anti-animations, e.g. Eye Wash (1959), a succession of radically unrelated frames. In these films, the viewer is offered no stable access to the film, which can create an illusion of movement - but conversely, the film also goes so fast that we cannot decode the contents of the individual frame. Instead the effect is that our eyes synthesize the separate images into an artificial whole, where we experience forms and movements that do not exist in a normal filmed reality of any of the frames.
Interestingly, the "flicker" films are also good examples of emulsion films that are difficult to convert to other film formats. First, the black frames that run through a film projector cause an actual darkness around the audience when the emulsion blocks the light - on the other hand, both TV, and video and digital projectors will use dimmed light to depict black, but this approach at the same time compromises the contrast of the images. Second, both the electronic and digital environment use other sampling principles, which means that the films are not loaded frame-by-frame, but scanline-by-scanline (video) or pixel-by-pixel (digital). Unlike a film projection, where each frame is projected "sharply" at dark intervals, the images merge in the electronic and digital environment because their displays do not blink, but gradually load the next frame, so to speak, on top of the previous one. These conditions can cause grayish shades and breaks in the image (where a line divides the image into black and white). Similar distortions can also occur if interlace and compression are used, which we will see in a little while.
Among others, these are some frequent issues when contemporary puritans of the plastic-mechnical environment discuss the format. Famous avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage has called video and digital renditions of "pudding" for the above reasons compared to the sharp projector's sharp projections.SOURCE! He also criticized the fact that the color rendition of these other two environments depend to a great extent on how each screen or projector is set with brightness, contrast, white balance, etc. On the other hand, the film projector guarantees that the colors are reproduced exactly as the artist has mixed them on the film strip.
The rendering of colors has been crucial to Brakhage because he often processes the film strip directly as a plastic material. He enrolls in a larger tradition of direct film works whose strategy is to examine the film strip as a physical object and perform plastic operations on it. This involves painting on the film strip (Brakhage's The Dante Quartet (1987)), scratching the emulsion (Len Lye's Free Radicals (1958)), sticking objects on the strip (Brakhage's Mothlight (1963)), cultivating bacteria on the film strip (Stephanie Maxwell), etc.
However, the plastic processing of the film strip does not have to be solely hands-on manipulation, and for a film strip to be reasonably durable as it passes through the projector, it may be advantageous to use an optical printer to combine images. An in-depth description of the optical printer's design and plastic mechanical operations is provided later.
REMEMBER:
- Zoetropen's drum showing small animation loops from paper, and the Mutoscope where the "film" is a kind of book that is flipped in for one .
- Philosophical toys = perception laws
Festival for "Small-Gauge Films"
Phyto
Recipes for gardening film emulsion stuff dark room fever: http://artsoftheworkingclass.org/text/bringing-the-garden-into-the-darkroom
Chemical film and photography
In 2019, Danish photographer Nicolai Howalt released the book Old Tjikko which contains 97 photos of the world's oldest tree developed on different photographic paper of a range of ages and qualities. The work's theme is the materiality of photography and development. Howalt was interviewed by Mette Sandbye in Deadline (DR2) on 3rd of the November 2019.
