Film fragments

Just about a year ago now I first laid my hands upon the 35mm elements known as "Knotte Grosse".

I don't know too much about the origins of this one, that's a question for Pamela (and really everything about Beckett that I'm writing is more based on rumors then actual fact - Pam is the real source for these things).  What I do know is that this film was a splinter off of his optical printing work that he perfected in "Heavy Light".  This was significantly more complex and hypnotic, but according to Beth Block this was the bane of his life while he was working on it.

He received a grant for it and therefore was obligated to finish it, but he also seemed to put it down and pick it up again at any moment.  He also often labeled rolls of film "Knotte Grosse" when they were in fact a gig he had for an advertisement or other project.

By the time I got to them, or really Mark Toscano at the Academy Film Archives since it's his jurisdiction, they were a few hundred rolls of film fragments that at first were unable to make too much sense out of.  Some sections were negative, some positive, but he specifically used a reversal stock while treating it as a negative (I think for economic reasons).  So, it was difficult for Mark to assess very quickly.  And, well, to say that Mark is a busy guy is an outright understatement.

During this entire process I found myself getting impatient with him because he would take weeks to respond to an email or phone call.  When in actuality he is constantly busy working on countless projects and he really has no exact obligation to the iotaCenter to help us work on anything.  So, I hope he forgives me for the times I may have been impatient with him during this process.

In any case, some how, some way, some where it came up that we should have a special process for working with "Knotte Grosse".  We knew we needed to include something of them in the DVD.  And some one, I think it was Mark, suggested that we should talk with Adam's old and close friend David Berry.  David had already been strongly involved in the process of the DVD with significant and generous donations to the iotaCenter specifically for the Adam Beckett project.  Not only did we want to make him feel like he was move involved in the process of the DVD, but we also wanted to get his opinion on these film fragments.  And it seemed only natural to have these fragments edited together in some sort of cohesive finalize piece.


As I've repeatedly stated these really are fragments and anyone who's seen the DVD can tell you that there are basically just sections of loops.  They start simple and get more complex and more complex.  Adam seemed to be working on getting a good library of loops that he would then jumble together in a final film.  He got up to the stage of making a library, but never made the film.  So, we asked David to make that film.


We didn't quite get directly to that a first.  I recall bringing this up with Larry and David, but later it turned out that David didn't have the time and Larry thought it would be manipulating the film too much.  However, initially we wanted to get David's opinion on what sections we should use.  We literally had 100's of rolls to choose from and I knew we'd have to cut it down if we wanted to make our deadline and get any help from Rhythm & Hues in scanning the film.

I figured we should just take an essential 1000' of film (about 10 minutes) of the best of the best that we could find.  Keeping in mind most of this was leader and long black sections between the loops this ended up only making it to about 3 minutes of footage and by no means could we cut any of that original material - it was archival film for god's sake.


So, we asked David to come down from the Bay Area and give us his assessment of what we should use.  I knew he would not have the time to spend all day at the archives looking at the film, but he would spend a good few hours doing so.  I also knew that Mark had not gone through all the film fragments and he would not have time to.  So, I decided to spend a day at the Academy looking through all the rolls of film and making note of reel numbers, estimated lengths, any notes or text like dates and whether or not a roll was interesting or possibly good for David to look at.

That way once David came down we were all set with just a few rolls and he wouldn't be slaving away at looking through bland or unnecessary rolls.

During that process I took some pictures and some video with my camera phone.  It's not great quality, but I hope you enjoy.  Next I'll tell you about David's visit and the following process.  On that day I brought my Digital SLR camera and took much better photographs.