| Animation seems to me to most clearly
articulate the particular properties of film: the 24 photographs per second; the
persistence of vision which allows us to suspend our disbelief and to accept that a series
of inanimate photographs is actually moving on the flat white screen before us. I
occasionally hand process a film. Other films I send to the lab for processing. The effect
of hand processing in some ways counteracts the illusion of the animated image, and in
other ways it emphasizes the mystery even more. Hand processing allows me to get down and
dirty with the celluloid, shoving ribbons of the stuff into a bucket of chemicals,
treating the film as what it is – a bunch of plastic. The miracle then comes when the
chemistry reveals what the light recorded on the film’s surface. At the same time, my
home laboratory adds a thick layer of nostalgia to the image. These films, developed as
negatives, appear as though unearthed from old basement boxes. They carry with them an air
of the past and of loss. Hand processing also adds scratches. These scratches jump around
on the surface of the filmed image, spontaneous animations in their own right. The final
result of the hand processing in Lost Treasures came from my own carelessness
– the beautiful colors that appeared because of my hasty processing – the
chemicals continued to do their work long after I called it a day. These are some of the reasons why I work with
animation. To have a closer rapport with the wonderful clumsiness of film, with the
imperfections of the homemade, and with the intimacy of capturing images in photographs,
frame after frame after frame. Lost Treasures is a memorial to three women, each of
whom taught me in different ways, and each of whom recently passed away. The film uses
hand-processed high-contrast film, whose surface has been damaged by stains of unwashed
chemistry, in an effort to express the disorientation of loss. The film’s title and
images come from the book Lost Treasures of Europe, a 1945 book of photographs of
cultural monuments, images taken before they were destroyed in the Second World War. |
