Stills from THE CROSSING (2007)

A Trip Down Memory Lane

San Francisco in the 1990s was a youth-heady time where personal cinema oozed juicy and ripe with potential.

No where more so than at Total Mobile Home microCINEMA...and each lovingly hand-made calendar will remain forever burned into my visual memory. 

This reminiscence by Christine Metropoulos sums up the atmosphere of the times quite beautifully: A CINEMATIC REVERIE IN FIVE PARTS: VISIONS OF VENUES IN THE 1990s (excerpt).

Thanks for the memories, David Sherman and Rebecca Barten!

Reprint of AMIA piece

This article was first published in The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists, Spring 2012 issue. Though I am currently shooting color negative (due to the demise of Ektachrome in 2013) Film Ferrania is on track to manufacture a new color reversal film stock within the next year.

AT THIS MOMENT

I’m a committed color reversal filmmaker. I started shooting Super 8mm when I was twelve. At twenty, I discovered 16mm Kodachrome. Sometime later, I made a private commitment to explore the film medium until the end of my time here on earth.

Owning the simple, quality tools of amateur moviemaking (wind‐up camera, non-scratching projector, hot splicer, etc.) is easier today than when I started. They’re unobtrusive fixtures in my life and were built to last. Their effect on the psyche is far-reaching, however. The need to make films frequently springs to life in a reverie of hedonism, so much that even food or sex can’t compete. Projecting a color reversal original induces a superb high or, if you’re lucky, hallucinations.

I relish the anxiety of waiting for the film to come back from the lab and still get butterflies when I thread up a new roll. I can’t explain what kind of films I make. I’m an amateur with a day job. My films are public displays of affection.

Nearly ninety years after the advent of 16mm, I am aware how strange this lifestyle may seem. There are other mediums better suited to graphic imagery, but the sensual qualities of color reversal are what free my imagination. The definition of boring is trying to capture how the world really looks; capturing how it feels from an ecstatic state is profoundly interesting.

The ability to shoot, project, and edit from the same roll is a marvel of portability and economy. To work with color reversal is to sculpt elements forged in the explosions of distant stars at bargain‐basement prices. In skilled hands, color reversal film doesn’t have to resort to trickery. One of its gifts is a gritty, but otherworldly, perspective.

Yet I have doubts about cinema and myself. Is it wrong to dedicate oneself to the pursuit of beauty while there is so much ugliness and injustice in the world? Using film today is a willful partnership with uncertainty. It’s a corporeal dance with death but without the glamour. And I do understand the appeal of digital technology. Being a simulation of the corporeal, it affords some protection from doubt and a hint of immortality.

Making a print is the beginning of a more grown‐up effort, as my role shifts from pleasure seeker to preservationist. I do it because I’d like to share my work with a wider public. Someday I may project only my originals, accepting that they may be quickly destroyed. For now I accept the less‐than‐perfect materials we’ve been given.

Kodak’s Color Internegative II film (32/7272) is a high‐resolution print stock designed for low‐contrast color reversal originals. Yet a large majority of 16mm films have been made on projection contrast original, particularly those of interest to archives. In my work, every shot should be timed for maintenance—no change in color balance, no density correction, no scene matching. For this reason, I have learned to time my originals by eye, at least as a way of communicating my desires to the lab’s timer.

My sainted lab graciously humors me with a special internegative treatment: the lightest post-flashing combined with a 1.5 stop pull process. This is one bit of trickery that works and will greatly expand the limits of shadow detail, without compromising density. Shadows are the hinterlands where a large part of the magic of reversal occurs. Nathaniel Dorsky takes it even further. For him, a print can never be more than a facsimile. His reversal‐based films are edited to the qualities of the facsimile, not the original. He makes an internegative of many times more footage than the finished film and chooses only those shots that “translate” for the final cut.

A movie camera and body working in tandem can channel the subconscious. One could not set out to invent this rarified system on purpose. Its very lack of sophistication demands that you mean what you shoot and shoot what you mean. This is a form that exists at this particular moment, on this particular planet, due to an impossible confluence of factors.

Like many, I mourned the death of Kodachrome. My Bolex and I became one with it over the years. I almost never used my light meter with it. Kodachrome was the standard by which other films were judged. Its colors were forged in molten steel, and its blacks were more alive with shape and dimension than any 3‐D production.

Kodak then gave us Ektachrome 100D (7285)—a modern, “T‐Grain” emulsion. It is a happy film stock at first, and I’ve had to struggle to pull up the stakes of Kodachrome’s moodiness. But the initial amusement‐park rendition is not superficial; there’s a youthful wisdom there, in contrast to the stoicism of Kodachrome. I’ve learned to coax 7285’s subtleties to the fore. And I believe, as Stan Brakhage once told me, they are my subtleties—particularities of color that belong to no one else. This is one of them most profound mysteries of film, and it cuts across all genres: how so many people can use similar materials yet come up with such an infinitely shifting palate of possibilities. I guess that would be the definition of art.

I believe that as filmmakers, audiences, and preservationists, it is always in our interest to vocalize those ideas that might get us branded as “artsy,” “impractical,” and “crazy.” In years to come, these ideas will be more important. I hope it won’t be too late. I’m heartened to see a few younger people discovering the sensual delights of vinyl records, black‐and‐white photography, and filmmaking after having known only a simulated reality. After all, a life without a little hedonism is hardly worth living.

Article by Carson Lund

A sincere thanks to Carson Lund for his very generous writing on my films.

Direct link to Carson Lund's Blog: 

"Are the Hills Going to March Off"--A First Exposure to the Films of Timoleon Wilkins... February, 2014

Friday, February 21, 2014

A First Exposure to the Films of Timoleon Wilkins...

As subjects, roiling water surfaces and bokeh are fairly played out in lyrical/personal/diaristic 16mm Bolex filmmaking. That Timoleon Wilkins manages something like a fresh take on them says a great deal about the level of his sensitivity. Among other things, Los Caudales (2005) features dozens of seagull’s-eye view close-ups of lapping water on high-contrast black-and-white reversal stock, the resultant image a defamiliarizing dance of bright white dots and squiggles on a jet-black surface. Parts of Quartet (In Camera) (2009) study permutations of light photographed through telephoto lenses, and instead of an anarchic sprawl of light blobs, Wilkins achieves something closer to the balletic choreography of Len Lye’s films, albeit in a far more muted and unpredictable register. It bears mentioning that this is only a fragment of the material Wilkins finds fit to turn his camera toward.

Educated under the tutelage of Stan Brakhage at the University of Colorado and far from quiet about his admiration for and familiarity with filmmakers like Nathaniel Dorsky, Bruce Baillie, and Bruce Conner, Wilkins sits pretty squarely in the romantic tradition of avant-garde cinema, the strand of underground filmmaking that valorizes the cameraman as a soloist with a unique ability to imprint his or her own subjectivity on the camera eye. Up to a point, Wilkins benefits from the acknowledgment of such ancestry. For one, it’s part of what brought him to Boston in the first place, Dorsky being the relatively fashionable commodity that he is, at least in the bone-dry marketplace of contemporary experimental cinema. (Rob Todd’s continuing obscurity, on the other hand, needs to be corrected.)



Still, Wilkins’ work creates distinct impressions. The most conspicuous of these is tied to his status as a lifelong citizen of the West (Colorado, Mexico, and Los Angeles are the touch points I’m aware of), the landscapes of which inflect his films to a significant degree. If Peter Hutton’s New York Portraits, sublime as they can be, are quintessential expressions of the cramped geography of the East Coast, Wilkins’ films achieve something similarly archetypal with regards to the openness of the West. Big skies, sacred-seeming cloud formations, vast plains, elongated highways, wandering cattle, and vast beaches are all subject to scrutiny. Land merges into sky, thunderstorms erupt (or are merely implied to erupt through inspired aperture futzing), and Wilkins’ camera follows telephone lines along the highway as if to celebrate the freedom of movement afforded by the landscape. In my own experiences out West, such ample space means feeling liberated from staying too long in one place; movement becomes a texture of life.

Made between 1998 and 2010, Lake of the Spirits, Los Caudales, The Crossing, Quarter, and, especially, Drifter—all of which were shown at the Harvard Film Archive’s recent tribute to Wilkins—evoke this restlessness. Four of them are silent, yet the dynamism of their montage and the diversity of their images generates a tone more exploratory than contemplative. Intermittent flashes of bright light (or perhaps merely blank leader, it’s hard to tell) act as optical refreshment as well as ways to transition between rushes of abstraction (bokeh, light leaks, water surfaces, objects photographed and/or processed in such a way that they become unidentifiable) and sections of documentary-like observation (flowers, landscapes, sparingly used human faces). In posing these two representational extremes side by side, Wilkins is constantly seeking their points of intersection, the moments where the banal turns into something magical. Edited largely in-camera—that is, conceived as a linear flow of images in conjunction with the filming stage—these films are therefore documents of Wilkins’ thought processes while shooting them—the flickering of his consciousness, if you will. And they are unbelievably beautiful.  -Carson Lund

Frame enlargements from DRIFTER