Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.11.1501101526360.808@panix2.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: The Canyon Film Catalog / missing history (fwd)
Date: Sat, 10 Jan 2015 15:29:24 -0500 (EST)
The Canyon Film Catalog / missing history http://www.alansondheim.org/canyonfilm7.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/canyonfilm1.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/canyonfilm2.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/canyonfilm3.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/canyonfilm4.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/canyonfilm5.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/canyonfilm6.jpg These films are probably still in the Filmmakers Coop; I haven't heard from them, so I have no idea if they've been shown. I think not, but at least one was shown (I received a catalog from another organization), and I wasn't informed. For those who might be interested, these are master prints - I showed masters only, I didn't have money for duplication - which Canyon in S.F. took on. They then changed their policy (for legal reasons I gathered) and the films were returned. Now they decay at the Coop, nothing is done with them - but if you want an idea of their contents, read away on the seven sad jpgs. Most of these are 16mm sound films, but there are 8mm and super8mm as well. Why put these jpgs up? So that this minor history isn't totally lost, so that someone might find value in the films, so that they might even be restored or archived (hopefully they're still there) - and because I just found the catalog shots, going through other archives of my own. Years ago, Kathy Acker and I made the Blue Tape and a parody of the Blue Tape. The parody has disappeared; I imagine it's somewhere in my archives at NYU Fales, or University of Ohio in Columbus. It sits and decays. The current Acker revival places the Blue Tape at a center; it's been the subject of PhD theses and random shows. No one wants to see my other video or film from that period; I exist as her appendage, as a diacritical mark of no consequence. The last show of the Blue Tape was in Brooklyn; I asked the curator if he would be interested in seeing my other work, and there was no reply. Among the other pieces, a 2000 mph. super8mm film made while driving alone and non-stop from Dallas to Los Angeles, the camera aimed out the windshield, film and batteries changed on the fly. A 16mm hour-long sound film called Hollywood, about just that; I flew in Jocelyn Doray from Montreal to star in it. A 16mm 11 minute silent film shooting down the Sunset Strip, waiting for something to happen, and something did. Film shot at murder scenes and in burning buildings. Hour-long films such as Sleazy and the Year 3000, shorter films such as Nuclear Winter, sexualized films, narrative films like God, films made with slit-scan techniques picked up from 2001: A Space Odyssey, films dealing with male and female nudity, early conceptual 8mm films, anti-Vietnam War films based on found North Vietnamese found footage of napalm bombing, films made in New York, Rhode Island, Montreal, Los Angeles, where I made a 16mm film a week for a year, all of them numbered, most sound and edited in-camera, in length from three minutes to an hour. So many sound-tracks were magnetic-striped, probably all lost due to print-through and flaking, so many splices were taped, probably yellow and brittled, and the sprocket holes themselves probably chatter uncontrollably in the projector. I haven't seen the films in years myself, perhaps they're discarded, or overheated, curled, perhaps the cans are rusted. For a long time they were shown at Millennium in New York, thanks to Howard Guttenplan, but the film community never came, there was no buildup of interest, I wrote a few articles on them that were published, but I wasn't part of the movement, I went to their films, I knew them, there was talk of a twenty-four hour showing of my work, of a curated night or nights, nothing came of anything. I imagine the color stock slowly reddening, imagine fingerprints burned in, maybe they've been stolen, what remains are these pages, I think maybe a few video conversions, I'm not sure, just as the EIAJ videos I made, including the Acker ones but so many more, are hopelessly chemically decaying, sticking together, they can only play once, NYU Fales hasn't been interested in reviving them, it costs too much, maybe another twenty hours there, I'm not sure. Now I make my little videos and put them up, YouTube has banned me without recourse or due process thanks to Google, perhaps four or five people watch them, they show at various places, but there's still no community. The earlier films go back as far as 1977 at least, and up through the early 1990s, and they're different from my current work, they were also different from other work back then, all that in-camera editing, fast processing, master- showing, broken narratives, sound-sync and pseudo sound-sync, wild theory, and no homage to or lineage from the male heroes of avant-garde cinema at the time, I don't think I ever showed at Anthology for example and couldn't understand Brakhage's appeal and structural cinema bored me. Tony Conrad brought me out to Hallwalls and mocked my work, there was no audience. I showed at MOMA and in two Whitney Biennials and thought I was getting somewhere. It just stopped. At different times I showed all over the country. I never got a film grant and couldn't continue. I improvised all sorts of optical arrays for production. Later I did the same with 3/4" tape and went back and used Beta as well and all that stuff's disappeared. I think the originals are at NYU Fales but there are a lot also in Ohio. Tim Murray at Cornell has about two terabytes of my video archives, but I've written him several times about updating them (at least another terabyte at this point), and he's never written back. I'm afraid all my work, digital, analog, and physical, will eventually be discarded, I'm not that important, at NYU and Ohio, there are boxes and boxes, what's online like this text will disappear after I die, obviously, I keep taking things down on the alansondheim site because there's limited space, it's a site I have to pay for, it's difficult to do, so those files will be gone. What's left will be the Acker tape somewhere and maybe those anthologies I made years ago because really important people are in them, I have a good eye. But as for the videos and music and films, and the films listed in the jpgs above, I don't know, realistically they're probably still at the Coop, corroded and split, sooner or later they'll be discarded as well. At least I had a chance to make them, and wonder at their beauty and intensity, and that's most likely the end of them, of it all, of my work. If you're not canonic, if your genre slips, your work is stillborn, here's the catalog, or at least its imaginary, I dream the presence of these films, I dream your presence, I dream the screen illuminated, I dream the screen itself, your presence, the image, the sound.