Since the demise of Kodak's sumptuous Ektachrome 100D (7285) in 2012, I've been shooting quite a lot of their Vision-3 color negative stocks.* The transition from reversal to negative was neither easy, nor welcome, however. After 30-odd years of finessing my cinematographic abilities, I was feeling pretty confident as long as there was reversal in my camera. But life is like that I suppose. There is never a right time to lose a material that is so central to one's artistic vision.
My relationship with color reversal motion picture film began in 1982 with Kodachrome 40 Super 8 purchased at a local King Soopers store in Littleton, Colorado. At the time, a roll of K40 would set you back $3.99, and processing, an additional $1.59. I don't know what lab did the processing for King Soopers, but the quality was bottom-of-the-barrel. Rolls often came back dirty and scratched, with less-than-inspiring color. Every once in awhile a roll was lost or destroyed, but King Soopers always happily supplied a new roll and a little note of apology. I was too young then to understand how film labs worked, but no matter: if it weren't for King Soopers, film might not have been such a feasible hobby for a teenager with a weekly allowance of ten bucks.
At 18 I started film school at CU-Boulder and a year later purchased my first 16mm camera (a Bell & Howell 70DR) along with two rolls of Kodachrome 25. By then I had some ideas about film stocks, having been introduced to the stunning, beautiful, and challenging films of Stan Brakhage, Bruce Conner, and so many others. 16mm was a new and exciting animal and I couldn't wait to try to tame it.
Before I met Stan Brakhage face-to-face, I used to see him around "The Hill" (Boulder's retail district near campus.) My first encounter with Stan "in the wild" was while doing laundry at "Doozy Duds". Fearful of approaching him, I watched in awe/consternation as he solemnly sorted his underwear, socks, and shirts. My young mind had trouble reconciling the fact that one of the greatest artists of the 20th century did his own laundry. (Little did I know about the lives of experimental filmmakers.)
Other times I would see Stan dropping off or picking up his 16mm film from the developing counter at Jones Drug and Camera. (Jones was a Hill mainstay for so many years...and on a recent visit to Boulder I was grief-stricken to find it closed and converted to a Starbucks).
But back to 1989: I inquired at Jones about their processing...it was sent to Kodak and the cost was $36.99 per 100ft. (Ouch!) I wanted to be like Stan, but that price was out of my league. So I started researching alternative ways to get my Kodachrome developed. After some effort, I came across an ad in the back of Shutterbug for Dean's Grand Canyon Color in Arizona. I recall the lady who answered the phone seemed unfamiliar with 16mm (after all, this was well into the era of the camcorder). But after a little checking and a return phone call, she proudly informed me that yes, they could process it, and they would only charge twice the cost of Super 8...a very reasonable $12.50.
I suffered what seemed like an eternity of anticipation/ butterflies during the week it took for those first rolls to return from their chemical sojourn in Arizona. When the package finally arrived, I can only characterize the ritual of threading up and witnessing those images as something akin to a first kiss; or first love; or first intoxication. It was physical...like the sensation you get in your solar-plexus during a roller-coaster ride.
Being well accustomed to the soft indistinctness of Super 8, my first viewing of camera-original 16mm gave me an almost visceral sense of both expansion and concentration. Yes, I had seen some incredible (and rare) prints of classic avant-garde films at CU...but this! This was camera original! Like finding a direct route to nirvana...a veil had been lifted.
From 1972-2005, Kodak produced Kodachrome with virtually no change in formula. That might well be a record for any film stock and it is most definitely a record for a color stock. 16mm Kodachrome was available in two iterations: Daylight balanced 25 ISO and Type A (Tungsten balanced) 40 ISO.
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| My last roll of Kodachrome 16mm, exposed in June, 2009 (with Dwayne's twin-check number.) |
There were interesting differences in color palette between the two Kodachrome emulsions. Nathaniel Dorsky summed it up most eloquently when he likened it to the plumage of birds: K25 was 'male' (intensely saturated, demanding attention) and K40, 'female' (subdued, less conspicuous).
Yet the inherent characteristics of the two Kodachrome emulsions underwent further (albeit subtle) changes depending on the lab that processed it. From the mid-80s to the mid-2000s, there were a number of 16mm Kodachrome labs around the world. Of those I personally used, Kodak Switzerland and Kodak Palo Alto were the king and queen, respectively. Kodachrome from either of these labs was simply perfection, with fine, gentle grain, spectacular saturation, and the most subtle tonal gradations. Dean's Grand Canyon Color produced a grittier/grainier, less-refined look with colors that tended toward the primary (In the early 90s, Dean's was bought out by Fuji Trucolor and remained relatively unchanged until closing in the early 2000s). There was also Kodak in Dallas; a mostly capable lab with sometimes spotty quality control (particularly known for the infamous blue scratches on Super 8). For a brief time, A&I Color in Los Angeles were running Kodachrome and were excellent. After the year 2000, digital still photography was really taking over and the labs were starting to close/consolidate. Dwayne's Photo of Parsons, Kansas became the last K-14 processor, running continuously from about 1996 until the chemicals were no longer available in 2010. I believe their processing machine actually came from Kodak Dallas, but their look was fairly different. However it was consistent through those years--somewhere between the 'true-grit' of Fuji and the areté of Lausanne/Palo Alto.
Occasionally I'd spice up my Kodachrome diet with a little bit of Ektachrome VNF "Video News Film" (1977-2005). VNF came in four different (and faster) speeds. In general, VNF produced a softer image with a rather nostalgic feel. The colors were subdued and the blacks not quite as deep. Color would be de-emphasized in daylight and vivid at night. It wasn't a 'realistic' stock per-se, and it could turn ugly if you weren't careful. VNF was Kodak's first attempt to engineer a film designed for video transfer rather than projection. Fuji also made their version of VNF. I only got to try it once when it was already quite expired. By the 90s I believe Fuji had stopped making any color reversal in 16mm.
Filmmakers working in the 50s, 60s and 70s had the delight of many, many reversal stocks from Kodak as well as a panoply of material from Ansco/GAF, Agfa, Ferrania/3M, Fuji, Perutz, Orwo and probably several others I haven't heard of. Most of these companies were either out of the film business or concentrating on still photography by the early to mid-80s, thanks to the ubiquity of the camcorder. Perhaps I will go into greater detail on those historical stocks in a future post.
I believe the alchemic nature of film manufacturing and processing is a major element in the delightfully varied visual landscape of film-based cinema, but it is far from the only factor. There's also the camera and lenses with their respective quirks (especially evident in equipment that is more than half a century old)...But ultimately it comes down to the individual behind the camera and at the editing bench. Gesture and personal idiosyncrasy are the unifying touches in this witches brew of alchemy...an artist must become the gatekeeper of (and conduit for) this unpredictable zone between science and superstition (as Rod Serling might say). How else could one explain the near-infinite visual variations in the history of cinema?
At first glance, the recent generations of Kodak color negative (Vision-2 and Vision-3) seemed to represent the final nail-in-the-coffin for alchemy in cinema. It appeared Kodak had finally achieved cold uniformity and computer-like precision in a process that had been, until now, subject to so many uncontrolled variations. (In case I haven't been clear enough up to this point: the artist film--as opposed to the commercial film--do not reject, but rather embrace these variations, and utilize them for meaning.)
On the other hand, commercial producers see something like film grain (god forbid) as an obstacle to the effective portrayal of soap, or sex...or whatever it is they're trying to sell. Kodak appeared happy to oblige, boasting of the Vision series as 'optimized for digital scanning' (in layman's terms: having color that was neither here, nor there). Kodak also claimed improved intercutability; that is, the idea that there would be no difference in 'look' between the different film speeds in the Vision series (an almost outright lie, as I will explain in part 2.) These changes, when combined with Hollywood's all-consuming love affair with the 'digital intermediate', meant there weren't many enticing examples of the Vision series to go by. My own small trials Vision 2 were pretty halting as well.
Though I'd managed to stockpile about twenty rolls of Ektachrome before it was sold out, 2013-14 proved to be bittersweet years (with emphasis on the bitter). Kodak was in bankruptcy and I was even more worried there would be no film at all by next year. If they managed to survive, I wondered how I was going to be able to work with such (seemingly) soulless stuff as Vision 3.
Every time I loaded a roll from my dwindling supply of Ektachrome, it was a little death.
(To be continued).
*Kodak announced the re-birth of Ektachrome for the fourth quarter of 2017: read about it here
**And Film Ferrania is (re)building a film factory for the next 100 years of analog film...with color reversal promised as a first product
