I’m very grateful to the organizers of ATypI 2017 for the opportunity to talk about my work on film leaders. They also did a bang-up job of recording the talks.

This direct animation, a major outcome of my Lost Leaders project, foregrounds the most ephemeral handwritten traces of film developers, printers, distributors, projectionists, and archivists, such as film titles and reel/print numbers. It is based on historical research into the first three film leader standards in the US (Academy (1930/1947); Society (1951); Universal (1965/1966)), together with discoveries in two major film archives: the nitrate film collection at the Packard campus of the Library of Congress in Culpeper, Virginia; and, Library and Archives Canada in Gatineau, Quebec.

Each section begins and ends with all the distinctive graphical elements of the identification and synchronization sections specified in each successive leader standard (Academy, Society, Universal). These have been drawn by hand, frame by frame, while the ‘actual content’ of each section is the text for that standard, handwritten, word-for-word. Put another way, the ‘paratextual’ metadata of film, ie the parts the audience rarely sees, has been turned into the visible content.

Inevitably, then, each of the three sections is longer than the last, as the particulars of each successive standard become more and more verbose. As might be expected, the handwriting is barely legible when projected, but no less evocative, as this cameraless animation celebrates each standard by foregrounding the hidden labour of film developing, printing, distributing, projecting, and archiving.

Since leaders are of course mostly silent, the work is augmented with specially commissioned audio, composed and performed by Montreal-based sound artist Jackie Gallant.

Academy / Society / Universal: 3 Handwritten Leader Standards (2016) premiered at the Orphan Film Symposium, Culpeper VA, April 2016. 

The 10th Orphan Film Symposium was held at the Packard campus of the Library of Congress, April 6-9, 2016. Organized by Dan Streible (NYU) and Mike Mashon (LOC), it offered another ‘packard’ program of screenings and presentations. The highlights were many, including a live choral accompaniment to Flotte Bursche (1908). As with the last gathering (Amsterdam, 2014), I was struck by the genial atmosphere, the astonishing array of archival and experimental material and insights, the shared thrill of discovery.

My own presentation was a brief update on my leader research, followed by the premiere of Academy/Society/Universal: 3 Handwritten Leader Standards (2016), a direct animation I’ve been working on for two years. I previously reported on the completion and screening of the first section here. The entire film, in three parts, was handwritten in pen and ink on clear 35mm leader and then digitally transferred by Frame Discreet in Toronto. For each section I traced the official head and tail of the standardized leader (Academy, then Society, then Universal); the ‘content’ of each section is the text of the standard itself, written out in full. My collaborator, Jackie Gallant, composed three wonderful pieces of experimental sound to accompany the film.

I recently had the very great pleasure of speaking at the 9th Orphan Film Symposium, held at the marvelous EYE Film Institute in Amsterdam, and organized by the estimable Dan Streible (NYU). I can’t recommend Orphans highly enough: the ‘Orphanistas’ are a lively, friendly, and very dedicated bunch of film preservationists, restorers, archivists, scholars and artists. I spent so much time watching stunning old films (many with live musical accompaniment) in the lush, darkened confines of EYE’s Cinema #1 that I had grave difficulty dealing with my jetlag. (Tellingly, when I returned home to Montreal, I just snapped back into local time – as if I’d never left Canada.)

Two of the many highlights: First, the presentation by Elżbieta Wysocka (Filmoteka Narodowa) on the extraordinary direct animation work of Polish artist Julian Antonisz (1941-1987). Most startling of all was his collection of self-invented, homemade animation machines, especially the ’24-frame chamfering pantograph animograph’. The user draws two frames using the two (attached) drawing devices, and the machine magically creates the intervening 22 frames, so the animation ‘morphs’ smoothly from one to the other. Watching his films, you can often see how the action pulsates and loops, second by second, which I take to be an effect of his ‘pantograph animograph’. A stark reminder that automated ‘tweening’ has been around a lot longer than, say, Adobe’s Flash software.

The second highlight was watching Gustave Giró’s Perros en Paracaidas [Dogs Parachute in Antarctica], a silent 16mm film from 1963. Presented by Andrés Levinson (Museo del Cine, Buenos Aires), I would describe this as a design film: a limited, high-contrast palette of white, blue (sky), and red (plane); bold, stark lettering on the plane’s fuselage, and a repeated motif of sled-dogs and men with white semicircular parachutes, falling silently against a deep blue sky. In one brief moment of jaw-dropping serendipity, the fleeting white dots marking the stock number of one of the film’s reels coincide with the ‘white dots’ of the parachutes in flight. It might well be the most beautiful few frames of film I’ve ever seen (says the graphic designer).

My own talk was well received, and I made some fantastic contacts in my quest to find more examples of film leaders that I can document, scan, and then use as ‘digital found footage’ for my art practice. A sidenote: my work falls under the rubric of what we call in Canada ‘research-creation‘, a form of critical inquiry that combines ‘traditional’ research with creative mediamaking. The Lost Leaders project is perhaps the first instance of R-C in my brief career that has unfolded in a resolutely ‘backwards’ manner: I began with the very conscious goal of making work in an open-ended fashion and, only now, three years down the line, am I applying myself to a semi-systematic process of library and archival research. Interesting, then, that although I wanted to provide the Orphans audience with a loosely chronological accounting of the project to date, my talk (and associated slides) kept wanting to rewrite themselves as research followed by creation. Hmm. Anyway, everything worked out just fine, and I’m now very excited to throw myself into a sustained period of research and (more) creation, while avoiding the reductive impulse to insist on one narrowly ‘informing’ the other.

Next up will be an entry on this site dedicated to reporting on my recent experiments with stained glass.

Finally, here’s a link to the Korsakow ‘sketch film’ I played during the break immediately before my talk, and a snapshot of my slides from the talk itself:

Photo credits: The featured image is one of my Lost Leaders photomontages, using layered 35mm film leader. It’s a riff on the name of the symposium, ie Orphans 9 (or O9). The photo of my talk is by Dan Streible (CC licence).

Above is a snapshot of a Korsakow sketch film I prepared specifically for the Orphan Film Symposium in Amsterdam in April 2014. Dan Streible, its founder and chief organizer, kindly offered to project some of my work during a twenty-minute break immediately before my short talk, so I put this film together and set it up to autoplay.

This sketch film features the wonderful sound design of my collaborator Jackie Gallant, with video editing by Dayna McLeod. Click here to run the sketch film. Turn up your sound! (NB There’s a hidden fullscreen toggle just above the ‘552’ on the bottom left side. You can also use the fullscreen option in your browser.)

On March 1, 2014, I gave my first ever public talk about Lost Leaders to a small but engaged audience at Counterpath, a press + bookstore + gallery + performance space in Denver. After three years of ‘back-burner’ activity on the project, it was great to have an excuse to bring it front-and-center: to use the opportunity to formalize my initial thoughts about the project, and to share the creative work I’ve done to date. (Given the fact that I was also booked to do a much shorter presentation at the Orphan Film Symposium in Amsterdam in April, I would also be better able to figure out how to compress the material into the format required for Amsterdam.)

An extended interview with Renée Farrar about Lost Leaders, Korsakow, and my brief residency at Professor Lori Emerson’s Media Archaeology Lab at the University of Colorado.

Brief blog post about the color studies I made during my residency at the MAL.

There’s a very low-quality reference video of my Counterpath talk, here, and a similar video of my Korsakow workshop at CU here (in four parts).

Photo credit: Mél Hogan