Photochemistry, Love and Death.

Adam Tomas Burton BA Fine Art 2014 

Industry, technical, reflective report.

Abstract.

Photochemistry, Love and Death is a spiritual and psychological quest, lamenting the end of a creative era, written from a personal angle. I concentrate on the very material that is film, I treat it as a forgotten fruit. This is a love story and I make no apologies for this, I am a sentimental defender of my first love. I produce an extensive amount of primary research in the form of interviews and seek out practitioners who work with this wonderful material on a daily basis, to try and isolate photochemistry’s unique relationship with audience and practitioner. I approached this work with the intention of putting this love away and aside and moving on and in effect giving up the fight. It became clear to me that to defend something that we believe in to our core, we have to kick and scream and scratch and bite till our last breath...if that’s what it takes.

Introduction

Film as a medium is in crisis. Tacita Dean’s essay “Film” highlighted this in 2011 along with contributors as diverse as Neil Young and Lothar Baumgarten. We are nearing the end of 2013 and the projected world has changed – the digital replacement is without a doubt about to hammer the final nail in photochemistry’s coffin. I make little distinction between the still image and the motion picture; both are linked by photochemistry, their tangibility and their existence in the real world. Change is inevitable, the only thing that is certain along with death and taxes. This work is a lament to a lost love, a love walking out of the door with grace but unceremoniously. How will this impact on artists who wish to experiment in the future with photochemistry? Or should we just let it go and allow its rediscovery without intervention? “Se sono rose fioriranno.” (Translation: If they are roses they will bloom.) Italian proverb.

Chapter 1. My involvement with the medium

My own words and conversations in the interviews that I conducted in this report are driven by my 35 year relationship with photochemistry. This relationship took me from experiments with Super 8 to being director of photography on a winning entry at the Welsh International Film Festival, subsequently producing work for the BBC and Channel Four. This has led me to my current practice.

As a teenager my bedroom was almost permanently a darkroom, I became a cave dweller, the air thick with the humid smell of photographic chemicals I became seduced by the magic and alchemy of the process. Photography was quite literally my first love, I bonded with this material, with the process and its possibilities.

This thought while writing this led me to research love as a phenomenon, generating a piece of work called Oxytocin, a short 2-framed repeated animated sequence showing a flickering chemical molecular model. Oxytocin and serotonin are chemical drivers; it is the flooding of the brain with oxytocin that makes us fall in love, it is a bonding chemical. At the moment that the cervix opens during childbirth there is a massive production of oxytocin which helps the Mother to bond with the new-born. I believe that because we are driven by chemistry we recognise something in photochemistry that is like us, but can the same be said of digital?

I carry with me guilt that I have been partly responsible for photochemistry’s death. I was seduced once again, but this time by the immediacy and cheapness of using digital cameras. My research for this report indicates that film as a material has as a rough estimate, maybe ten years left. The manufacturers are dropping production at a frightening rate, for economic reasons.

“My greatest fear is that as a discarded medium and corporate outcast, analogue will no longer be essential to visual education...........they will not perceive the qualities of optical photography because their eyes will only know digital imagery”. (Mitch Epstein in Dean, 2011, pg. 67)

I spent the summer interviewing people who work with film on a daily basis – they too are a dying breed. None of this would be an issue but for the interest I have witnessed in the generation of 20-something’s that I have encountered since being at Art School. The COE of motion picture lab ‘i-dallies’ agrees:

“I had often wondered how much of it was being of a certain age, a certain generation....some of the most powerful things we have ever seen have been originated on this medium. I do think any audience, generally speaking feel more of a subliminal connection with work that has been originated on film”. (Horne, 2013)

This younger generations’ response to this medium is beyond nostalgia, they understand the first love I felt in that moist dark cave of my youth - and as a result my own love was rekindled.

The history of photography is by no means a linear development, there was an era of synchronicity driven by the 19th century, photography had arrived at the right time - and its uses were countless. The next imaging revolution would be digital, led by the developments by George E Smith and Willard Boyle with the charge-coupled device; this would evolve into the modern sensors in the digital cameras of today. By the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st the need for images interfacing with computer technology was a straight course set. The first consumer digital cameras were on the market by the mid-90’s, and within twenty years my velveteen rabbit (Margery Williams, 1922) would have its new sheen loved to death and be discarded and replaced by the new toy in the nursery. Ironically Kodak invested heavily in this digital development, and killed themselves in the process (Nikonrumors.com, 2013).

This got me thinking about where film is right now, so I started talking to people who work with it everyday. Clare Ellis, at the East Anglian Film Archive, showed me the facility when I explained my interest in film as material. We arranged a round table discussion with the senior archivist and other members of the team, and I was also given permission to do a performance piece in the vaults.

My anxieties about what was happening to my medium and my research for this report had a direct effect on my studio work. I felt that I needed to put myself into a position of self sufficiency. In order to do this I had to find the simplest of methods to create photochemical images, so I returned to the beginning.

I became influenced by my research into Henry Fox Talbot’s experiments with paper negatives. The actual images produced are not the focus of the work, but are beautiful nonetheless. My work becomes the piece “Dirty Filthy Paper, Dirty Filthy Film.” The remit for myself is a subtle performance, literally spreading the love to other artists, photographers and practitioners, this process gets under your skin and my collaborators all fall for its magic. It is quick and immediate: we shoot, we climb under my table (which is covered by a light tight bag) and we process and contact print – all within 8 minutes. These images are utterly unique, they are tangible real things, they engage with the world.

Fig. 2 Images from “Dirty Filthy Paper, Dirty Filthy Film.” (Adam T. Burton, 2013)

“Materiality translates the abstract and representational ‘photography’ into ‘photographs’ as objects that exist in time and space. The possibility of thinking about photographs in this way in part rests on the elemental fact that they are things”. (Edwards and Hart, 2004, pg. 2)

This Edwards and Hart quote is crucial. To exaggerate the point I sew the prints together, this is one piece of work, the images are both documentation and artefact. The process of sewing them together, the metal needle piercing the print and drawing thread through to hold them as one piece, echoes the tradition of the American quilt, an act of social engagement, all involved become conjoined, part of a new collective who have engaged in this experience.

The act of seclusion in the darkroom bag unifies, these people are trusting, this is a small tight space, there is physical engagement and I observe an interesting sense of ownership of the images we have made together. I offer a print to the participant. They will always keep this print and they will always remember the experience under my table.

In Greg Shapley’s After the artefact: Post-digital photography in our post-media era (Shapley 2011), he argues that not only has the introduction of digital made this absolute technical shift alter the means of production, but has also taken us into a world of post-photography where with the knowledge of the possibility of manipulation, we start to question the whole canon of photography’s history and this results in an “image apathy” (Wolf, p51 2010). This is reinforced by Frank Ritchin’s “In our own image” (Ritchin 1990), when he concludes on the use of image manipulation within the pages of Newsweek, “an ostensibly authoritative publication”, that “one cannot assume that the photograph is performing its traditional descriptive function”. Of course photography can tell truths and is also a master at telling lies. This to me validates even further the act of first hand experience in the kind of production of imagery that takes place within my own practice with my “performance photochemistry”, especially within the deliberate structure of “Dirty filthy Paper, Dirty Filthy Film.”

The post-digital, post-media world naturally creates a cynicism, this act of experience that I deliver maybe becomes a precursor to a more personal and localised understanding of believing our own eyes because we were there. By this I mean that we can only believe in our own photography which in turn becomes as valid as our own memory, at a much more personal level. In effect, returning photography to that shoebox under the bed rather than its internet publication for a mass audience.

There are numerous advantages to the use of digital imaging, but they are practical considerations, cost, speed, ease of use, the malleability of the images themselves, and because of these things digital becomes by its very nature more democratic, there is less need for expertise in a technical sense. I have searched high and low for serious academic research supporting a valid counter argument for the material connection of digital with the user or the viewer and it has eluded me. It is clear that with digital there is much more importance placed on the subject matter or the aesthetic nature of the content – there is something interesting in this, a uniformity and democracy driven by platform – but even this somehow reinforces my own belief in my argument at the importance of the physical artefact that is the photochemical print in that shoebox.

Fig 3 Darkroom Performance (Francesca Cant, 2013)

Chapter 2. My own pathetic attempt to save film

In the summer of 2012, I was staying with a member of staff at MIT in Boston, I expressed my concerns for the future of film. I had an idea which I thought could guarantee the future profitable production of acetate photochemical film. Storage of digital information is hugely unreliable, hard drives have an expected life of 6 years whereas photochemical film stored in the right way has an expected life of a thousand years. My idea was fairly simple: digital information could be stored visually at a microscopic level as a series of black and white dots, being read as binary code as instantaneously as the brief flash of a laser. No rotating disks, no moving parts, the film can be contact printed in order to make copies and if inscription was necessary prisms could be employed to affect the angle of the light with un-limitable variation. I put this idea to Jeff, he thought it possible and achievable but didn’t think that the consumer would be interested, and it would be domestic consumers that would make it profitable for manufacturers. The only organisations that would take up such an idea would be the military and banking.

At the onset of my research this summer I contacted David G. Foster, Ph.D. University of Rochester Department of Chemical Engineering

Hi Adam,
I'm actually still at Kodak in the R&D labs so I have contacts that I can send this to, however, you are perhaps 15 years late with this idea. I agree that film is an excellent medium for archival process, black and white film has been used like this for years, but certainly not in the way you propose.

The issue today is that film is no longer being produced at the level it once was, in fact, it is significantly reduced and both Kodak and Fuji have switched resources to other areas. The actual production of film is nearly non-existent compared to what it once was in the 80's, and is dropping quickly as digital options like cell phone cameras have become the normal method of image capture as you know.

The only way I can see this idea working is if you were able to calculate (i.e. guess) how much film you would want to use during the lifetime of the idea (very difficult) and then have that amount made in a one-time purchase that you would cold store and use accordingly.

Best Regards,
Dave

David G. Foster, Ph.D.
University of Rochester
Department of Chemical Engineering

The information obtained reinforced my concerns, I was well aware that film manufacture was in trouble and Kodak had gone into receivership but I hadn’t realised that the demise of film was so imminent. If we ever hear that a Dr David G. Foster makes his millions from his new digital storage system, you heard it here first, and it was my idea.

Chapter 3. Real people in the real world, who work with this real material

I want to find film locally, film, paper prints; it’s all photochemistry, all related. I call the Hollywood cinema in Anglia Square, Norwich, and talk to projectionist David Senior. He leads me to a large room at the back of the auditorium, where four projectors, two digital and two 35mm, feed two screens - one of each type for both screens. This smacks to me as a time of transition, and David is keen to show the contrast between digital and 35mm film playing in the same box. The room is noisy, the first projector is the digital one, running silent apart from cooling fans, it has a touch screen display, there is no mechanical movement, light spills out of vents in its side but it might as well be a domestic fridge. It’s the 35mm projector making all the noise, you can hear the film running through the gate of the projector; it is stuff, a long string of content. It has a physical relationship with its own production, a material the same as this, for this is a positive print, was run through a camera, it was witness to the location and the emotion of performance from an actor. The film makes a journey; each frame has its 24th of a second in the limelight before being packed away until the next showing.

Adam: “Do you feel that you have a more emotional connection with this process, with this machinery? Do you feel working with the 35mm projector that you have more of a historical connection with cinema?”

David: “Yes, I certainly feel like I am part of a sort of timeline of a spectrum of tangible cinema....putting this on, making the films up, getting your hands dirty as it were, splicing the films together”. (Senior, 2013)

In her essay “Film” (Dean, 2011,) Tacita Dean refers to her engagement with the medium, the very material and how this physical engagement becomes a crucial element to the process of making work. It is a reliable, uniform material:

“Film is time made manifest: time as physical length - 24 frames per second, 40 frames in a 16mm foot. It is still images beguiled into movement by movement and is eternally magic”. (Dean, 2011, Pg. 19)

David: “I still don’t understand how it becomes this” (he points at the screen through a small window). It’s a weird dichotomy of being aware of it on this side at one hand and just loving the content of films on the other...... It becomes an act of experience, going to the cinema, like no other”. (Senior, 2013)

The switch from 35mm film to digital is clearly a business decision.

“Digital cinema camera shooting has been gaining momentum.......Therefore, it has been decided to discontinue the sales of negative films, positive films, and some other products of motion picture in a prospect of March 2013”. (Fujifilm Global, 2013)

The distributors’ profit margins increase hugely by having only to deliver digital files as opposed to the billion dollars a year they currently spend on 35mm print. The British Film Institute is heading a campaign, “The Digital Screen Network”, to get all cinemas in the UK to go digital, but there is resistance in the industry, driven by the love of the film aesthetic. Interestingly, audiences’ desires don’t seem to be taken into consideration.

“The consumers are not out there clamouring for digital. There is not a large consumer benefit and so there’s no real consumer pull,” notes Peter Buckingham, head of distribution at the UK film council. “There is no real reason to do it other than some savings that might be made and possibly some extra income.” (Macnab, 2009 pg. 46)

Peter von Berg, director of the Midnight Sun festival in Finland expresses his resistance in more emotional terms.

“We respect the light of the film copies and annually prove that the electronic light of the digital world cannot reach the same mystical dimensions of traditional film.” (Macnab, 2009 pg. 47)

I believe strongly in this chemical, emotional, mystical connection that we have with the medium, the magic that Tacita Dean describes. Although there is an increasing use of digital technology in motion picture production these days, most major Hollywood productions are still shot on film – surely if this multi billion dollar industry relies on film, manufacture will continue and therefore make it still available for a micro domestic market?

There is a sublime illusionary nature that remains with film, going right back to the zoetrope. We know when we watch film that we are looking at an illusion, but in industry and audiences there is confusion as to what cinema has become since the introduction of digital. A good example is The Hobbit, which was shot and exhibited at 48 frames a second – the consensus of opinion is that it was just too real, the illusion lost. The HD digital nature at this fast frame rate made it become like looking at reality, it didn’t relate to film as an illusion that we have loved for a hundred years.

There is a difference between the real experience of cinema and a real experience. I recently went to see a show at the theatre at the end of Cromer pier, all singing all dancing, a packed house, extreme lighting, glitz, glamour – and it occurred to me that this was a true high definition experience, this reality was by its very nature highly focused, real and at the same time a staging. Film gives us a filtered experience, creates a separation, rendering reality to a changed form. So I see cinema as being a different act of experience to digital and HD and 3D and 48 frames a second, it becomes a theme park ride, a visual sensational thrill that is trying to fool its audience that they are witnessing a reality. This wasn’t the job of cinema. So the film industry is clearly throwing the baby out with the stop bath – this is down to economics.

The interesting thing is that the compromise on quality that is made for the sake of cost is beginning to bite back, digital post production, and its added man hours is beginning to make production costs rise beyond the level of film. 20 years ago I was director of photography of a film where I had dealings with Nigel Horne at Soho Images, a film lab in London. 18 months ago he had opened a new lab, ‘I- dallies’, and I managed to track him down and organised an interview to discuss what was happening to film.

“In the grand scheme of things it becomes no cheaper to shoot digitally than on film.....we've been hearing a lot this year that James Bond was shot on Alexa for the very first time, apparently the producers were so horrified by the costs....they are considering going back to film for the next one. But very soon the infrastructure for film will be non existent, production of film stock is already more limited than 5 years ago, and who will be around to process this stock? What it comes down to is....business. Technicolor closed, Deluxe will be closing in the next 12 months,....all the big studios in Hollywood want to come to the UK because of the tax breaks, studios and the expertise....potentially, all of a sudden there is no infrastructure to support them, no labs to process it. All of a sudden the whole industry suddenly realised next month film is dead. We can't shoot film in the UK”. (Horne, 2013)

One thing that interests me is that when we used film, we wanted to produce work with the cleanest of images, but now, for artists especially it's important that we see that grain, we don't get so upset by scratches, marks, uneven process. If we shoot on film, we want it to look like film, we want it identifiable as film.

This reminds me of the beginning of photography once more. Julia Margret Cameron, an early pioneer of photography allowed hair and fluff and marks to infiltrate her prints, as sensual elements. Because of the hands-on nature of film it is a rich medium for experimentation. Artists are increasingly interested in this medium, but they are trying to get on the train just as it’s leaving the station. Nigel’s lab processes much of their work.

“We do a lot of work for artists actually.... a well known artist taped a whole load of dead insects on to film. We had a very interesting guy a few years ago he had got hold of an old 1960s Russian sci-fi film, 35mm, and he just randomly cut this print....upside down, back to front and then painted on it....it was just an incredible project, it looked amazing. But when you saw it in this reconfigured state you kind of got it, it told you something”. (Horne, 2013)

What digital does well is create an accurate rendition of the world in the right conditions, it doesn’t have a 5 stop latitude, (allowing detail in shadow and highlight within the same frame) like film does, but if you get it right it will look great. This is where digital and film work well together, because you can make a digital rendition of a 35mm film and see every bit of grain, every nuance of film – the two can clearly live side by side. Nigel is more confident than I about the future of film, but then he has to be, he has a lot to lose.

And from the sublime to the ridiculous, I noticed that Poundland had 35mm neg film for sale...for a pound? I bought a lot of this stock and refrigerated it for later use, and contacted the company, securing an interview with their entertainment buyer John Fox. I have to admit I was being a little facetious, I didn’t think that I would get anything useful – I was wrong. John explained that their stock comes from the same distributors that supply other high street photography outlets including Boots, but because of Poundland’s buying power they can sell film at a pound and still profit. They sold three brands – Kodak, Agfa and Ferodo, but have recently stopped purchasing Kodak stock because the price increased. They sell 4,000 rolls a week across all their stores – what couldn’t be explained was that this 4,000 remains consistent and has done for many years despite the fact that new Poundland stores open every week. The same is the case for their VHS and audio cassettes – their sales have stuck at 2,000 units a week. Interestingly, they have completely stopped selling camera accessories – within the last two years the sales dropped off dramatically for compact camera cases. John put this down to increased popularity of the smartphone.

We come back to the question of who is manufacturing the material itself. Kodak ceased production of the acetate film base this year, but continue to apply the emulsion, and continue research and development. So Kodak and Nikon joined forces to push photography into the future with their combined efforts in research, leading to the demise of film (Nikonrumors.com, 2013). This action completely crippled Kodak, but Nikon will be the next to suffer, the camera is dead, as we knew it at least.

My prediction is that Nikon cannot sustain themselves with only high-end professional equipment, they are doomed, they like Kodak will fall on their own sword. Fuji is another story – they have completely stopped production of film, but, during their research into light-sensitive emulsions they have stumbled on something that has moved them in a completely different direction – the beauty industry. Fuji are putting vast resources into a new anti-wrinkle cream called Astalift (Fujifilm.com, 2013, fig.7).

Fig. 7 Astalift (Fujifilm.com, 2013)

Photography made waves in the 19th century because there was a buck to make, mobile communication hits its heights because the 21st century demands the instant. The trouble with the instant is that old adage, ‘easy come, easy go’. Gone will be that precious box of family history in print form. Instead these images that are taken on phones only exist on the drives of, at best, social network sites, and at worse on a phone that gets lost or stolen or just merely dies due to the planned obsolescence by the manufacturer.

And then when film reaches its end, the cherry-picked is taken to a mausoleum. There are archives all over the world. Archivists are an odd breed, they are (by my observations) collectors incarnate, they chase their tails, wrapping themselves up in authenticity and catalogue. I think they miss the point, maybe their importance is reinforced by the death of film, it makes their charge that more valuable. Whatever their motives they are driven by politics and funding, as I find out when trying to negotiate my performance piece in the East Anglian Film Archive.

In our discussion I explain that my main concern is that the use of this medium will diminish to such an extent that manufacture will cease, and even if it continues it will be too expensive for anyone to use. The archive will become a temple to this material, not just because of the imagery on it but as a physical thing.

Sean Kelly (educational archive technologist): “ In a way actually the development of digital might be a very good

thing for archives in the sense that we will start to be recognised as having these very valuable objects.... each one becomes an original. If you go back to films from the late 1800s or the early 1910s, few survive.......these original objects become more like paintings....I’m getting to the point now where I’m not worried about digital as a means of presentation in general.....as long as we talk about how things were originally shown and explain that. Applied colour was a very popular technique during the silent era and actually this is something that is very hard to replicate in duplication. The best way of presenting these elements is actually to digitize them and then you have much better control of the colour. I suppose the true authenticity would be that you show the original object and destroy it, and that’s an argument that Paulo Kirk Usa gets into, in the ‘Death of Cinema the Death of Film’, that actually maybe we should just put aside some film and just destroy it”. (Alvey, Kelly, 2013)

The thing about the exhibition of film is that it has uniqueness even at the level of exhibition; it is fundamentally a different experience to viewing a digital projection. My fear is that this experience will be marginalised, boiled down to this digital presentation both of work originated on film and originated digitally and become a lost experience in a generation or two until it is forgotten. And the same will be the case with photochemical prints. With prints the imagery is ingrained in the paper, the silver halides are part of the material, with the digital print it is a spray job, a sophisticated one, but it is an application.

Sean: “There is this kind of backwards idea that because it’s from the past it will be of low resolution....photochemical duplication is still the gold standard in the sense of simplicity, you can take a 35mm film from a hundred years ago and still project that film if you want to with little or no modification....it will stay there for thousands of years. But this ‘thousands of years’ requires expensive cold dry storage....why are we freezing our film or storing our film in cold storage, is it to preserve it for posterity or is it to slow down the process of decay, so that we can transfer it onto something else?” (Alvey, Kelly, 2013)

Conclusion

So this medium is dead, I feel I have to let it go. I had come to the decision that I had done my bit and it was not my responsibility anymore, this was no longer my fight. In an act of letting go I had planned to do a performance piece at the East Anglian Film Archive involving me pulling 700 feet of exposed but unprocessed film off the reel. The light of the archive vault, a place designed to protect and preserve film, would render the film useless and unusable. This was not to say anything negative about the archive, I just saw it as a poetic place to end the life of this particular film. The film that I was to destroy had its own history. I shot the film in 1991 over 3 days; halfway through post production the manager, who was financing the project, backed out and filed for bankruptcy. This very nearly sent me in the same direction, I learnt a big lesson. I was left with this 700 foot of 16mm stock and have been carrying it around with me all this time. It would cost over £700 to get processed, and this would never happen.

The performance was to take place on Monday the 11/11/13 at 10.30 am. Giulia Ranchetti was to document on video and I had invited two artists to be witnesses to this act, Lucia Thompson and Bing Ming Ng. Everything was in place, this was to be an emotional performance. On Friday 8/11/13 at 10pm I opened the following e-mail from the archive.

Dear Adam,

Since we spoke earlier this week I’ve given this a bit more thought – your email raises a couple of points I think.

I suppose one of the main things I’d say is that when you initially mentioned wanting to film yourself in the vaults, it was standing or sitting still – perhaps as a discussion about relationship between internal (thoughts etc.) and external physical space. It was on this basis that I OK’d the filming. Your intention is now to film yourself destroying film in a film archive, and whilst I appreciate that it is your film that will be destroyed, it’s to be expected that parallels could be drawn and connotations made. I do think it sounds like a potentially really interesting and provocative work; clearly you’re attributing significance to the location of the act of destruction though, and I just think we need to be really conscious of how this could potentially be perceived.

We’ve got various projects on the go with artists, and are genuinely always keen to explore new ideas. However, by way of example re: concerns about misconceptions etc., only last weekend I was involved in an event called ‘After the Archive’ (as in sharing and disseminating following research); a member of the public was distressed to hear that the East Anglian Film Archive were contributing to an event with such a title. They leapt to the conclusion that this meant that we’re no longer in existence.

Many apologies for not getting straight back to you, and I’d be more than happy to discuss this further with senior colleagues when they are next in the archive but for the moment at least I’m afraid this has got to be a no.

Best wishes, Clare

I didn’t panic; I just swallowed it and responded.

Adam Burton to Claire Ellis (EAFA)

That is no problem at all, I fully understand your position, I think the act would be valuable to highlight the value of the work that you do and the delicate nature of the material that you are protecting and hopefully bring about thought and discussion. I didn't see this as any kind of negative and violent act. More like a loving owner taking his old and ill cat to the vet to be put down. I thought it poetic that the light within the Vault, the Vault designed to protect the film, rather than destroying the film adds to the latent image, merely making the original marks, that are still there, just hidden behind and within the new exposure. Thank you for considering it in the first place. Adam

I tried not to think too much about what I would do, I contacted all involved and explained that the performance was off. I arranged a meeting at 10.30 on Monday morning with Giulia, Lucia and Bing Ming, to discuss where this could now go and what should be done with the film.

On Monday morning I woke up in an incredibly positive frame of mind and knew what I had to do, but I was open to the suggestions of my new collaborators. We met and discussed what had happened, we talked of perhaps recreating the archive somehow, digitally, or using video footage that I had shot of the vaults to expose the film. And then I made my suggestion. That we process the film ourselves, we set up a production line with the various stages of the process each of us being responsible for our own stage and document. Giulia and I had processed in the past in buckets but only 50 foot lengths of super 8, this would be 700 feet of 16mm. It would have to be done in a 5 litre kit because of the sheer amount of film. The kit would cost £77 and there would be no guarantee that there would still be images there after 22 years or that our processing skills are up to dealing with this amount of film.

The film was set for execution and the judge gave a reprieve at the 11th hour to create a very different performance, the opening of a time capsule, and a complete change of mind – I am not prepared to give up on my gal, I love her. (Orson Wells talking about his medium)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUKQ5Twhg0&t=314s

“700 Feet Down" ache shot 1990, 16mm hand processed in a bucket 2013.

Interview With Nigel Horne. CEO of I-dallies motion picture processing lab.

Adam/ So you have set up this company fairly recently. Nigel/ Yes a little over 18 months ago. Adam/ You must have some faith in the future of film.

Nigel / Well its blind faith. Initially is the truth and then, and naive optimism is the truth. I think all for us in the industry, particularly us on the film side of the fence kind of thought , 3 or 4 years ago that there was an inevitable decline and death of film as a medium. Uuummm I set this up for a very particular reason, we were promised to do a huge feature film, because we had done this production companies feature film and it was very successful, it had all gone very well, they were happy. This company was born out of a company called I lab which reliance media lab owned who were an Indian company. They closed it down had a complete disinterest in film so Christ knows why they bought it..

Assistant/ The DOP is here Adam / do you want to deal with him. Nigel/ is that ok, are you alright for time. Adam / I’m fine I am flexible I have loads of time. Nigel/ sorry when I say we are snowed under, we really are. Nigel goes off with the assistant to give a tour of the lab to the dop. I sit and wait. 30 mins later he returns.

Adam / so you are someone who has worked with film for a long time. Have you got any thoughts what it is about this medium that allows us to feel so connected to the material itself as opposed to digital.

Nigel/ It s a very pertinent point I had often wondered how much of it was being of a certain age a certain generation , that it was linked to an expected response, an expected image to which we respond to. Which one has seen all ones life, and some of the most powerful things we have ever seen have been originated on this medium. And they in turn have a deep impact on you. And affected you for the rest of your life. And then quite interestingly my son who is 25 and all his friends are complete film nuts and love film and funnily enough and would given the opportunity and all things being equal would shoot things on film and want to work with film. Which reassured me that it is not an age generational thing. And I do think subliminally, any audience generally speaking, feel more of a subliminal connection with work that has been originated on film. Obviously there are projects that suit a digital origination but....its to do with texture it’s to do with the subliminal flicker. Random grain, it’s just the way it records things it is completely chalk and cheese compared to digital.

Adam / there is a sublime illusionary nature that remains with film, and it goes right back to the zoetrope. We know when we watch film that we are looking at an illusion, there is no doubt about that.. I interviewed a projectionist who went to see the hobbit shown at 48 frames a second and he said it was just too real, the illusion was lost. He said that because of its HD digital nature shot at this fast frame rate it became like looking at reality, it didn’t relate to film as this illusion that we have loved for a hundred years. There is a difference between the real experience of cinema and a real experience. I recently went to see a show at the theatre at the end of Cromer pier, all singing all dancing a packed house, extreme lighting, glitz glamour, dancers and it occurred to me that this was a true high definition experience, this reality was by its very nature highly focused, real and at the same time a staging. Film gives us a filtered experience, creates a separation, rendering reality to a changed form. But now obviously familiar. So I see cinema as being a different act of experience with digital and HD and 3d and 48 frames a second it becomes a theme park ride, a visual sensational thrill that is trying to fool it audience that they are witnessing a reality. This wasn’t the job of cinema.

Nigel / That’s very interesting. No response.

I then bring out the current work that I have been making, I understand that in order to be able to continue with any kind of future use of photochemical image making we as artist have to become self sufficient, using the most basic of methods, I return to Fox Talbot’s paper negative process, its simple and cheep and as far removed format digital imaging I can get.

I put my paper neg contact prints out on the floor.

Adam / I make these paper negatives, 5x4, they are tangible real things, objects (I flick them like a pack of cards) they make a noise, they crease, you can drop them, they are here in the real world, and they are beautiful. It doesn’t really matter what is on them, that is of no consequence, these are interesting images driven by an interesting process they are rendered with chemical marks from the process, they are not a facsimile of the world, they don’t represent the world with anything that approaches accuracy. You could probably emulate these digitally, but why?

Nigel/ You could emulate them but I don’t think that you would really get it. And you would spend a lot of money trying to do that as well. (laughs)

Adam / Digital hasn’t got there yet but there will probably be some amazing software that manages to create a single frame grain. That will give the illusion of film but it will create an illusion, a facsimile, a synthetic film.

Nigel / But that still isn’t the thing, that isn’t it. What has become blindingly apparent , even in the last 9 months or so to the big producers, is that unless you are shooting at a very high shooting ratio, I don’t know like 50 to 1, in the grand scheme of things it becomes no cheaper to shoot digitally than on film. And we are beginning to get feedback on this from producers. The pennies kind of dropped, everybody has had a chance to shoot on Harry's using raw files gone through the whole production, postproduction process and we've been hearing a lot this year the James Bond was shot Alexa the very 1st time, apparently the producers were so horrified by the costs. Apparently and I only had this second- hand but there are considering going back to film the next one. The DOP is a hard digital man, is nailed his colours to the mast.

Adam/ And what sort of ages the DOP as a matter of interest.

Nigel/ I'd say he's middle-aged, but that is a bit of a standard-bearer for, he did the Cohen brothers where art thou.

Adam/ About shot on film?

Nigel/ That was shot on film but it was the 1st 2k di in the states but it looked shocking, I saw as it Cannes, it was appalling. But ironically in Europe, Europe had the best di, digital film lab in Copenhagen, years ahead of Hollywood. But he's been a digital man since then and he is nailed his colours so firmly to the mast that they may have to pursue it. All the stories around pine wood in the last 6 months that the costs were, that the producers were, horrified at the costs not just a little bit is staggeringly so the postproduction. This only productions now have had a chance to equate the 2 financially logistically creatively and nothing on the screen at the end that the audience see. There is more film being shot this year than last year, I can say within the UK, we do know the latter still closing in Europe, and I think one closed in France only a few weeks ago.

Adam/ So who is it that is producing the base now?

Nigel/ Well it's interesting, Kodak has now subbed that out, the acetate base of the film. I'm not sure of the company that they specialised in it the decades for all sorts of other markets. The emulsion, the coating, that's what Kodak do that is their specialty. The base is made for all sorts of industries, are thousands of applications so was much more cost-effective the Kodak this year to farm that out. What Kodak are investing in and are committed to the foreseeable future, but that might be another question is in the development of the emulsion technology and the coating.

Adam/ But they are limiting stock. What's left the 500. Nigel/ The 500 is by far the most popular stock they use.

Adam/ It's a great stock though isn't it. Nigel/ It is a great stock.

Adam/ One thing that interests me is there when we shoot on film, we wanted to look like film we still fight for the cleanest of images, now it's important that we see that grain in the 500 we don't get so upset by scratches on the film or marks or even maybe uneven process. If we shoot on film, we wanted to look like film.

Nigel/ Of course the big studios that seem more willing to use film then you might believe, Warner Brothers, Disney, all these guys, the major studios, 99% of the productions pencilled in the next year look like they're going to be shot on film which is surprising. And even projects like Star Wars for instance.

Adam/ Really, but George Lucas is so anti-film.

Nigel/ aaarr but he's not the one calling the shots. David Abrahams is the director. So they're shooting 3 back-to-back in the UK next year.

Adam/ Is that at Shepperton?

Nigel/ I'm....... Not really sure, I don't think I can go into that. There are many major productions being shot next year certainly on 35. Have you spoken to Kodak.

Adam/ They are a nightmare to get hold of.

Nigel/ Yes, they are very guarded, understandably so. In fact the guys in the UK won't have all the information. Our discussions with Kodak broadly speaking seem to be the next few years its okay, but after that is the sort of suck it and see situation. It has to be a business.

Adam/ Yes but we kind of have a responsibility, we had 100 years of filmmaking, and at least 200 years of photochemical photography. The only reliable way to store any of this work is being produced today is on film, the people of the film archive tell me that there is an estimated life of 1000 years for acetate-based film as opposed to 3 years of a hard drive.

Nigel/ Yes and anything that is produced today is backed up on 35mm film and it is a major production is saved as 3 strip black-and-white.

Adam/ So the production of this material has to continue.

Nigel/ When it comes down to, is all of this is a business. None of this can be done unless there is a profit to be made. Tech is close down this year, deluxe will be closing in the next 12 months say, we opened this 18 months ago and we had no idea that we would be in this situation 18 months later, look film nearly fell off the edge here when Technicolor announced their closure, all the big studios in Hollywood were like shock horror, they want to come to the UK because of the tax breaks, and the studios and the expertise and whatever, they Wanna shoot lots of film it appeared, but of course potentially, all of a sudden there is no infrastructure to support, no labs to process it, what the hell we can do. So potentially all of a sudden the whole industry came to a cliff edge, and suddenly realised with facing next month film is dead. We can't shoot film in the UK. Where we're here we're geared up, but it's uncertain future. The tragedy of the situation with Technicolor was that it was a lab built on phenomenally amounts of bulk print and they couldn't scale it down.

Nigel / Well were here, we are geared up it’s an uncertain future, but I suppose ant future is uncertain. Making it cost effective is difficult, obviously the tragedy of the situation with Technicolor is that they were a lab built on processing a phenomenal amount of bulk print and they couldn’t scale it down, because that’s the size of the building, that’s the size of the infrastructure, all the engineering infrastructure, the chemical infrastructure, this vast trillions of feet going through, and huge amounts of neg and of course, I mean we are massively busy, but neg had declined dramatically.

Adam / so are you making prints here as well?

Nigel / No, but we have brought some printing machines, and we are going to be putting a printing processor in here, and we are going to be putting a mezzanine floor in so we will be able to support print. Not high speed bulk print.

Adam / for daily use?

Nigel / Yeah for Daily use, selected rush printing, obviously some big projects need to see, that’s what the DOP’s like, they also want printer light, so we have an analyser coming in, do rush prints and also print deliverables for the deliverable schedules, for interposs internegs which is also required as part of delivery schedules, and check prints off DI negs, so that will be it. So within the next few months that will be up and running. Our priority is on the neg side, and making sure that’s as good as that can be. Because that’s our reputation. We will be dealing with major clients and big studios.

Adam/ is anything at all being shot for TV?

Nigel/ Very few commercials, the commercial market was one market that went wholesale into digital, in fact that was the market that decline more rapidly than any other. Then the BBC as you know came up with their 2006, the legendary Andy Quested, they in effect banned 16mm, basically what they were saying was that its not good enough for HD transmission, well having worked in this industry for..... we all know that 16mm is a perfect 2K medium, and phenomenal amounts of features have been shot on 16mm and gone through 2k DI and looks fantastic on a big screen, even going back to. The Draftsman’s Contract which was the first 16mm blow up (to 35mm) I ever saw. And I remember when I saw that, I didn’t even know how it had been shot, I saw it on the big screen somewhere, and I thought fucking hell that is a fantastic, even for 35mm, I was thinking could that have been shot 70mm, cause it looked so stunning. When I later discovered that it was super 16 optically blown up to 35mm I was blown away. So this whole thing with the BBC is interesting because the industry slightly lamely, we all tried to fight the BBC at the time, but they were completely closed. A number of tests were done at pinewood, the evaluation tests that they did. Sue Gibson was president of the BSC and they did a lot of tests, Joe Dunstan built a rig to house, God, virtually every camera known to man at the time, 16, 35 and then every digital camera apart from the Red, because the Red declined the invitation to get involved.

Adam / What year was this? Nigel / Ooh, Christ...2000 and 8ish something like that. Adam / So it would have been an early Red

Nigel / Yeah an early Red but there where a ton of digital cameras around, you know Vipers and god knows what, that were being used for TV work and stuff. They built this big rig they put all these cameras on it, they designed sets particularly to show weaknesses, inherent weaknesses in any originate format.

Adam / So Latitude?

Nigel / Latitude, absolutely latitude, movement within frame, camera movement, interiors, exteriors. Absolutely. So everything was shot at the same time, under the same conditions and that was the idea so that nobody could say...and all the manufactures of the digital cameras were involved, invited to come along and set their cameras up to there optimum, so it was no stone left unturned to make this a fair and equitable objective test. There were a number of screenings around the country, and if you look at the image forum website there is lots of information. And basically what it showed was what we all kind of expected. They all had strengths and weaknesses in certain conditions as we know. There was one 16mm test that was pretty badly under exposed on a high speed Fuji stock that was a grainy as hell, which everybody slightly gasped about, but all the other film stuff looked fantastic. And what it showed of course, and particularly with 35mm was it was in a league of its own. It was streets ahead but most specifically in its wonderful kind of grasp of flesh tones and the incredible subtleties, it was just like in another league. Some of the digital stuff you fell of your chair it was that horrible. Untrue...and just not right.

Adam / Digital tends to plasticize skin tone. Nigel / Totally plasticizes it. Yeah.

Adam / The trouble is, is that we have got used to that look, with everything shot digitally, we will forget how flesh looks on film. And then they see a 35mm film...and.

Nigel / And then they see a 35mm film......I know, I know, I know. Its interesting that you brought those stills out. It’s just that magic of the photochemical process. I don’t mean for us to sound like luddites, I’m aware that digital origination has a huge part to play, you know, there not gonna shoot Eastenders on film.

Adam / What digital does really well is create a really good rendition of the world in the right conditions, it doesn’t have a 5 stop latitude, but if you get it right it will look great. This is where digital and film work well together, because you can make a digital rendition of a 35mm film and see every bit of grain, every nuance of film, the two can clearly live side by side.

Nigel/ Absolutely. Did you see the David lynch film inland empire, which was his first digital film. I have to say I think it is a masterpiece. One thing that did strike me particularly was that there was a sequence in it which was particularly horrifically underexposed digitally, there sitting in a hotel room, there is an intimidating guy talking, its at night, it looks technically shocking, and looks like nothing else in the film and its kind of a mistake, you know it’s a mistake, you know its just not right and the shots within it vary dramatically as well for know artistic reasons as far as one can make out. Any way in the interview afterwards with David Lynch, he’s saying it’s great, you know its digital we can shoot as much as we want...blahdy blahdy blah. And it was quite interesting cause I thought it was an absolute work of genius the whole thing and funnily enough even the mistake I thought worked fantastically, and thought he probably just did that because he is David Lynch. Where as if that had been on film and had been a shocking bit of cinematography maybe he wouldn’t have got away with it quite o much.

Adam / David Lynch has said he will never work on film again.

Nigel / Yeah he’s a big champion for digital. And good, look I think the guy is great. And I love that about him.

Adam/ Yeah and that is Lynch being the trailblazer, when it becomes the norm he will go elsewhere technically. He’ll probably start making flick books.

Nigel / Yeah, there is this mentality in the industry that something new has to completely supersede what came before. Where as I sort of think that painting and photography co-exist, radio and books and newspapers co-exist.

Adam / I think that the greatest threat to practitioners that use film, whether that be stills or motion picture is that, without the manufacture for the motion picture industry it will just stop being produced.

Nigel / Yeah, I heard just last week that there is a new motion picture stock being manufactured by an Italian company. But the Kodak thing, they are bringing it out of chapter 11 now, there is an announcement literally, coming very soon, they have spent apparently, I don’t know the exact figure, someone told me that it was billions of dollars to bring two strands of there business out of chapter 11 insolvency in the states, of which one of these is motion picture. And what Kodak say of course, we wouldn’t be doing that because we think there is life in the old dog yet. They see some kind of future. But it has to be a business, and of course to some degree it’s going to be effected by volumes of print film, because at some degree that makes it a viable business for them. And that seems to be falling off dramatically, Neg seems to be holding up fairly reasonably. I dunno the heartening things that we seem to be told by productions that are coming through, is that directors, big name directors and big name DOP’s it seems on these big projects, want to shoot on film, 35 and 70.

Adam/ So that will be the saviour, that and the underground.

Nigel / Yeah, yeah, and we do lots of work for artists, we do a lot of work for artist actually and we did a very interesting promo a few months ago, and we did a whole load of tests and they were shooting on a pin hole camera, and I processed it, I only saw the neg on the bench but it looked absolutely fantastic. And also there was a well known artist came in with some tests a couple of weeks ago but he had taped a whole load of dead insects on to film.

Adam / MMm Mothlight.

Nigel / yeah not an original idea but interesting that he was experimenting with the material. So now they have gone off to do a major project, I think no insects were harmed in the making of this motion picture. I love all that, painting, scratching we had a very interesting guy a few years ago when I was working at i-lab and he had got hold of an old 1960s Russian sci fi film 35mm, and what he did he just randomly cut this print up and then randomly in all sorts of lengths stuck it together, upside down, back to front and then painted on it and then painted on it again, it was just an incredible project, it looked amazing. But when you saw it in this reconfigured state you kind of got it, it told you something.

Adam/ That is very much about the material of film and what you can do with it as a physical thing.

Nigel / Yes, yes.

Adam / you can cut it up with a razor blade, you don’t need a huge amount of software, you can hold it up to the light.

Nigel / Yeah it is the physicality of it, exactly. It is such a wonderfully manipulative medium. And I used to get kind of frustrated, I used to do a lot of experimental work and if you did anything other than it said on the box Kodak wouldn’t touch you with a barge pole, they wouldn’t show any interest they wouldn’t give you any advice, and I was thinking I know that 99.9 per cent of the projects need to be done properly but it is such a wonderfully manipulative medium why not encourage that. I did a couple of films with Mike Figgie where he shot, one film in particular, he wasn’t sure what he wanted so he did a whole load of tests and he ended up shooting it on predominantly 16mm reversal which we cross processed and it was beautiful, and there were two different speeds of that at that time, it looked absolutely stunning and he also did some in camera tricks as well, so lots of in camera fade to blacks and inverted camera tonnes of slo mo and lots of those things combined and then it was reversal which we cross processed and then we blew it up to 35 as interposs interneg and did a reverse grade. On the interposes. There was no way of grading the reversal so we graded the interposes. And he was completely open to any suggestions about anything. And then he went on to shoot most things digitally subsequently. We hired the Odeon leister sq to look at all the prints we were doing to check the prints and when you saw this stuff on the screen I can’t tell you. One the most phenomenal things I had seen on the big screen in terms of motion picture, your jaw hit the floor, about 2 thirds of the film were like this and it just put something over to you, psychologically whatever, that no ordinary narrative could have done, it’s a film called the loss of sexual innocence. I saw Tarkovsky's film nostalgia at Cannes when it came out and that killed me and the loss of sexual innocence on the big screen just killed you. You could virtually not talk for days, just incredible. And that is what you know film can do. I’ve seen tons of clever digital stuff, like we all have, but it just doesn’t do it.

Interview with David Senior. Projectionist at Hollywood cinema, Anglia sq. Norwich. July 2013

David Senior has been a projectionist for 5 years, he is 30ish, a large pair of headphones are worn around his neck like jewellery. He did his degree at UEA in film theory.

He leads me to a large room at the back of the auditorium, there are four projectors feeding two screens, two digital and two 35mm. One of each type for both screens. This smacks to me as a time of transition.

David/ This is the projection booth for screens two and three and we just so happen to have a digital film playing alongside a 35mm film playing in the same box. It will show you the contrast between the two.

The room is noisy, the first projector is the digital one, it is running silent apart from cooling fans that are exhausted up through the ceiling with a chimney, it has a touch screen display, there is no mechanical movement, light spills out of vents in its side but it might as well be a domestic fridge.

David/ This is the digital projector, touch screen controls, the controls are even the same as on your domestic DVD or VHS machine at home. It’s frightening just how simple this is. Feature films tend to come on small external hard drives and the trailers we often get on memory sticks.

It’s the 35mm projector that is making all the noise, you can hear the film running through the gate of the projector, it run off large horizontal platters, three one above the other, the film is fed though a series of rollers to the projector and back to the bottom platter, it is stuff, a long string of content. It has a physical relationship with its own production, a material the same as this, for this is a positive print, was run through a camera, it was witness to the location and the emotion of performance from an actor. The film makes a journey, each frame has its 25th of a second in the limelight before being packed away until the next showing.

David/ The 35 mm film comes on reels and we splice them together on these platters. So once its going we don’t have to stand there changing reels every 20 minutes.

Adam/ Oh this is just beautiful isn’t it.

David/ Isn’t it, isn’t it. Because I’m a sort of a wishy washy hippy type, yes. The clattering of that, being able to, I’ll show you, if you stand looking at it and you relax your eye enough you can see that it is just 24 frames going through, it’s a flip book, it’s a giant flip book. And then you look through to the screen, my brain can’t make that leap. When you see the frames and you can differentiate, and you look through there and you have a seamless image. If you stand there zoning out you do begin to, if you pick it up and follow it, do you see what I mean. Digital is a lot easier, simply in a person going to work sense. Because you press a button and simply forget about it, you, don’t have to do scope changes, this lens is the widescreen lens, and this is the cinemascope lens.

Adam/ do you feel you have a more emotional connection with this process, with this machinery. Do you feel working with the 35mm projector that you have more of a historical connection with cinema.

David/ Yes I certainly feel like I am part of a sort of timeline of a spectrum of tangible cinema. In my own small way. Putting this on, making the films up, getting your hands dirty as it were, splicing the films together, its great, its fun. I still don’t understand how it becomes this ( he points at the screen through a small window). And if I watch a film here, if I sneak into a screen while I’m at work, even now I think I’m going to sit there and not see the film. Because I’m too aware of what’s happening out back, but I’m not, I sit down, and I switch off and I’m lost in the film again. It’s a weird dichotomy of being aware of it on this side at one hand and just loving the content of films on the other.

Adam: You say in your own small way but without you at the end of the chain, delivering this product to a paying audience, there would be no production.

When I was say at the age of eight at the ABC flee-pit cinema and you would look at the projection window at the back and you see the guy in the projection booth, and it was always kids that did it, they will look at you and wave. And if they have seen the projectionist they will almost always turn to the person next to them and they will wave as well.

It becomes an act of experience going to the cinema like no other.

Interview with Jane Alvey and Sean Kelly of The East Anglian Film Archive. July 2013.

Adam / Can you just introduce yourselves please and tell me what your job title is.

Jane / Jane Alvey, senior archivist at the East Anglian film archive.

Sean / And I’m Sean Kelly and my current job title is educational archive technologist.

Adam / I’ll try and explain what I’m doing. So my approach to this research report is quite literally as an investigation and I’m writing the report as a Raymond Chandleresqe meets William Burroughs novel with a dash of David Lynch for good measure (Jane laughs) And I’m looking into the emotional connection that we have with the very material of film and photochemical paper, and photochemical processes. I believe, and I must add there is no hard and fast evidence for this, so it becomes a philosophical debate really, there is no right or wrong answers with any of this. But I believe that we have a subliminal chemical connection with the nature of this material that we don’t with the digital version.

Jane / (laughs) Right.

Adam / Both as practitioners and as audience, we ask constant questions about why we like film so much. Audiences seem to know that there is a difference between film and digital even if they haven’t given it a huge amount of thought, they seem to know. What is it that tells us that what we are seeing is one or the other is it the randomness of grain or the subtle flicker or is it a deeper connection to the material as a physical thing that creates an illusion, or am I just talking nonsense? Film is at crisis point now and all of my research corroborates this. May main concern is that the use of this medium will diminish to such an extent that manufacture will cease and even if it continues it will be too expensive for anyone to use. This place will become a temple to this material, not just because of the imagery on it but as a physical thing.

Sean / It’s a debate that’s been going on for a long time in archives and I think you are right in what you say. In a way actually the development of digital might be a very good thing for archives in the sense that they will start to be recognised as having these very valuable objects, you know, film as an original object becomes more and more true because you have the Walter Benjamin argument about duplication and plastic arts and actually that’s not true because at some point they will become originals because no matter how many times they’ve been duplicated, each one has its own life in an archive, and each one becomes an original. The argument was, well you can’t say what’s the original because you have thousands of prints, but actually that’s just not true because each of those prints has had a completely different life. If you go back to films from the late 1800s or the early 1910s, few survive , when they do survive you gather together so many different prints to try and make whatever this original would be. So in a way we will start to recognise film, particularly in feature films. These original objects become more like paintings almost , you know. Especially with applied colour they become very important objects. But at the same time I think it’s a different argument about digital in terms of archives and duplication, I’m getting to the point now where I'm not worried about digital as a means of presentation in general. I don’t see why there has to be a shift between the two...this was originally on film and now its digital and therefore its not authentic, it goes back to the idea about documentation, as long as we talk about how things were original shown and explain that. When we talk about restoration, which is beyond what we do here really, but there are already so many technologies that have been used and lost with film, we talk about film as this thing film, but there are so many different formats and so many different stocks and techniques that were used and the transition from silent to sound and to television. Film has been used in so many different places that already if we had film digital can represent a better cinematic representation of the originals. As an example applied colour was a very popular technique during the silent era and actually this is something that is very hard to replicate in duplication. The authentic object is all about duplication of photochemical film but that is just not true for these original elements. The best way of presenting these elements is actually to digitize them and then you have much better control of the colour and in a way the gold standard is to actually to present it digitally because that’s how you can actually get the accuracy of the original colours when you duplicate a film, you can do it but its very, very hard and very expensive, you have to spend a lot of time re-grading and going back and re-grading and that’s not how they were originally worked with anyway. The whole idea was that the original object, I suppose the true authenticity would be that you show the original object and to destroy them and that’s an argument that Paulo Kirk Usa gets into in “The death of cinema, the death of film”, that actually maybe we should just put aside some film and just destroy it.

Adam/ So it then becomes a privileged experience then.

Sean / Exactly, as in a museum, like, you would have a museum in London or somewhere that you go to and they show original film and run it, and we do that now, we could put aside a number of prints of films and say these are projectable prints we will show them in a museum, we will show them with trained staff with knowledge about how to look after this object.

Adam / The thing about the exhibition of film is that it has a uniqueness even at the level of exhibition, it is fundamentally a different experience too viewing a digital projection. My fear is that this experience will be marginalised, boiled down to this digital presentation both of work originated on film and originated digitally and it becomes a lost experience in a generation or two until it is forgotten and no longer matters.

One of my main concerns is that with the lack of production of photochemical film for the motion picture industry will lead to all photochemical film ceasing to be produced and this will mean that as practitioners we will be forced to being much more self sufficient and will inevitably lead us back to the beginning of photography as we find a simple way to work with photochemistry. And this thought led me to go right back to fox Talbot and his paper negatives at the very beginning of photography. In Tacita Deans essay film she concludes by saying when her medium is gone she will move mediums, her hand will be forced. Maybe I’m more stubborn. So I get together artists and photographers and collaborate on the experience of using this paper negative process, its simple and quick, we shoot and process the negs immediately. And in the process these artists and photographers interest in photography is rekindled, they fall for the process all over again. There is something about this work that is beyond digital emulation. I am allowing the chemistry to start playing with the image.

12.33 Jane / They are lovely aren’t they so varied in tone. And the textures.

Sean / Yeah beautiful

Adam / during this process I became dissatisfied with their contrast, with the bright harsh whites of the paper so I started experimenting with tinting the images, not any reasons of nostalgia, just to drop that white off so I ended up staining them with tea. Which must have been the reason that, that tinting originated, so interestingly by experiencing this form of photography from its beginnings you sort of set off on this evolutionary journey within photography itself.

Sean / Yeah it was one of the reasons, too reduce contrast. Yeah I get where your coming from, there is a difference between the industry and kind of smaller groupings, I think they might survive, obviously its very scary, because you cant say that it will survive, but.

Adam / But without the manufacturing of film.....

Sean / Absolutely, and you need the industry to support it. You might have less choice, I think it might survive as a thing.

Adam / It is such a massive process to manufacture this material, the base, the acetate itself isn’t a problem because it is produced for loads of different applications but the expertise is in the emulsion coating, my fear is that without demand, without it making business sense these skills will just get lost, and with it the choice as a medium.

Sean / Maybe it’s different, but vinyl records for example, there is a resurgence for vinyl records and maybe it’s because as a product it’s not as difficult to manufacture. But I think it might survive maybe you have two choices of stock and like one or two cameras being produced....maybe. But there is the whole....maybe it’s not big enough, but there is lomo and lomography.

Adam / Yeah but that doesn’t really show in its entirety what film can do.

Sean / Yeah it’s more about mistakes. Yeah I guess we have that problem in archive, they may ring up and say we want this or that, but it doesn’t really matter what because it’s just archive film, it doesn’t matter about it being in HD because its only film. There is this kind of backwards idea that because it’s from the past it will be of low resolution, but that’s more of a problem of documentation and exhibition...I don’t know. I’m coming from it as an archivist so......I love film, I adore film, but I do come to it from a perspective of preserving what has happened almost. For many years there has been an argument about are we here to preserve film because it’s the gold standard for preservation, photochemical duplication is still the gold standard in the sense of simplicity, I mean you can take a 35mm film from a hundred years ago and you can still project that film if you want to with little or no modification. It hasn’t changed, and you can leave it cold and dry and it will stay there for thousands of years. We don’t photo chemically duplicate anymore. But this thousands of years requires expensive cold dry storage, you can freeze it. We have cold storage here, it’s not as cold as we would like it, but it is very, very expensive. The current argument in archives at the moment is, why are we freezing our film or storing our film in cold storage, is it to preserve it for posterity or is it to slow down the process of decay, which is still happening. So that we can transfer it onto something else.

Adam /But there is no method of storage with the longevity of the original. Jane / It will be transferring it again and again. So it’s a continual act.

Sean / One of the natures of film is that we duplicate it, that’s part of the process, you don’t watch the negative you watch the print. Cold dry storage came about because we realised....we had nitrate film, we started duplicating it to acetate because nitrate was dangerous and unstable so it was duplicated to tri acetate and then disposing of the nitrate and then finding that in fact triacetate is much less stable, with such things as vinegar syndrome. When Triacetate was invented SMPT did tests and published papers, but they only did tests on temperature not on humidity. So they sold it to the community and the industry as being a stable alternative, and then ten or fifteen years later archivists had been using it and there were reports in the field, especially in the tropics that the film was starting to essentially smell of vinegar. And it wasn’t kind of listened to until it happened in the western world. So ten years later it started happening in the states and in Europe, people were starting to say our film is beginning to smell a bit funny and it was late 70s early 80s that scientists started getting evolved and looking at what was happening. Vinegar syndrome is essentially a by product of the decay process in triacetate film, so the film base starts to break down and one of the by products is acetic acid which is a catalyst for the reaction itself, so it is self catalysing, it gets faster and faster. If you go into our B Vault you will smell vinegar.

Adam / Everything really is chemistry, isn’t it.

Jane / We have a film about film manufacture, shot at Eastman house and it is cellulous and the emulsion is gelatine and it’s all hydroscopic, there is this response to water, there is a physical familiarity in film.

Adam / And we love that physical familiarity.

Jane / I think so, just as we love (photographic) paper, how much is that about our upbringing.

Adam / At first I thought that may have had something to do with it, an element of nostalgia but my first hand experience of working alongside a different generation indicates otherwise.

Jane / They get it?

Adam / They get it. And I can say in all honesty I was completely seduced by the ease, immediacy and cheapness of digital, both moving and still. And I feel I lost my way a bit, but it was this generation that brought me back to look at film as they see it, they look at it from a different angle and got me back on track. And I fear for that box of photographs under the bed, that family heirloom, people always say if they have a house fire they get there family out first followed by their pets and then that box of photographs. Will people do the same with their hard drives? I don’t know. Friends of mine who have new babies take countless photographs on their phones, they never print to photochemistry, they may upload to a server in a mountainside in Minnesota, but there is little physical ownership of these artefacts as we once had. Our family histories become virtual. There is missing that physical handing over, It is likely the photographs of my Great Grandfather at one time were in the hands of my Great Grandfather, they are not just images.

Jane / Its about that experience of looking at them together, there are a whole generation now, aunts and grandparents who don’t see the photographs because they don’t have a computer, so they are just sort of shut out, 20 years ago they would have seen the prints, do people really put up their images on the television screen , I don’t really know. I don’t know how sad to feel about it, because we have been through waves of loss of ancient technology and quality and experience that we know nothing of now because its moved on, and I personally feel saddened by this because I feel that we cant do film justice in the archive. I don’t think we can capture sufficiently what is special about film to get

people to recognise what they have lost. Even in a gallery if were to run film through a projector its still an artificial experience. It’s not how people were, but you can’t keep alive something that was of its time, there is a quality there that people will not get that sense of if they were never to experience film projected. In good surroundings.

Adam / Even in bad surroundings, the experience of the fleapit cinema. It is still about experience of this flickering illusion, which with digital is lost and tidied up by the technology. When we watch the 35mm illusion it’s our brains that tidies up the flaws in the motion, we collaborate as spectators.

Sean / I absolutely agree with what you are saying, but um, I also remember I have been to so many bad film screenings, where the film is scratched or has faded colour or there is cuts in the film and there are jumps, or the sound, or the racking goes out, I'm not saying that digital is the answer but when I go to see.....2k isn’t good enough 4k is kind of amazing and SMPT has shown that if you have 20/20 vision 6.5 k is kind of like the sweet spot where you can’t actually perceive the pixels.

Adam / But we are missing something in the experience, its like the difference of going on a modern diesel train to a destination as an act of experience compared to going on a steam where the racking’s out and there are scratches and we smell the oil and feel the inertia.

Sean / I’m almost saying that it shouldn’t have been there. Film wasn’t meant to be seen with scratches on it.

Jane / Yeah it shouldn’t have been there in the first place. It was meant to look good.

Adam / But again another interesting point about those photographers that are using film today is that they are unconcerned with cleaning out negative marks

and dust and hairs, its part of the way that this physical material interacts with the world that it inhabits. It shouts this is film.

Sean / Oh yeah absolutely. But there are two kinds of areas though, because there is this idea of authenticity of what the person intended and the expectations of the audience. There is a good example of this in Germany. The foreign films are shown dubbed and there is an outcry if films are shown with the original voices. People in Germany like certain voices, the voice actors, that is their authentic experience of that film even though that is not the intention of the artist. So there is definitely authenticity in the experience, and different kinds of experience.

Adam / And I have to return to that moment when we fall for this medium, from our experience, we all remember that first experience of seeing a film at the cinema. Will the modern experience affect us in the same way. Remove the illusion and we remove the magic. There was a lot of debate about the hobbit, audiences and critics saying that it was too much of a real experience.

Sean / Yeah 48 frames a second.

Adam / Does it become much more a theme park experience than a cinema experience?

Jane / Just what is the best film experience.

Sean / I just don’t think that you can define it, film as thing is just a transitory thing in the long scale of things, film has transformed so much in terms of frame rates and colour and sound and formats. The different ways we watch in terms of widescreen or the use of colour in film, there are so many different film formats. But I don’t necessarily feel......film will survive into digital especially with 6k.

Adam / Well the combination of the two, film and digital...but we have to have the stock available.

Sean / I do think that film will survive in some form, but I do think as an archive we do have to get our act together in terms of digital and preserving it. We were talking about this nostalgia for film and we are now beginning to see that for video, there is a fashion for VHS, which is a completely different kind of quality and there is a nostalgia for retro computers or things that have moved on.

Adam / Nostalgia makes me feel really uncomfortable, this idea that things were better way back when, its so Daily Mail, and I think with regard to film and my investigation it is a bit of a red herring. It’s just not democratic. My interest in the most basic of photochemical image making is that it is hugely democratic, and simple. It wasn’t that expensive to make images in this way, but it will. The process that I am playing with at the moment is cheap, each picture costs 8p to make and this leaves room for mistakes and experimentation. My research became a bit of a quest to find film, where in the market is it beyond the obvious and I was really interested in the fact that Poundland sell it, 35mm stock in date, it seemed bizarre to me that a roll of film that you buy from boots for £4 you can get from Poundland for a pound. So I spoke to John Fox the head buyer for entertainment products and he explained that this stock is bought from the same distributors that supply the specialist photography shops, but it is there buying power that enables them firstly to buy at the right price which in turn allows them to sell for a pound. So at the moment at one level this product is deemed expensive and specialist and at another is treated as a cheap commodity, make of that what you will. What happens about your old equipment where is the expertise to service this stuff.

Sean / We have a technician at the moment, but this is another thing, I mean we...you still can go out there and buy new scanning equipment, but there is an argument , what is going to happen when the big companies have finished scanning what they need to scan, is that also going to die, we’ve had ours custom made with a very knowledgeable technician, it was cheaper than buying a new machine.

Adam / All the people that are here are of an age that they do have that interest in film, what’s going to happen in a hundred years time when that interest is more limited. Can you trust that your work will be carried on. It’s a bit like Walt Disney’s head being cryogenically frozen and the money running out.

Sean / The discussion in the field at the moment is , why are we preserving the film the way we do. There are two different schools of thought, the BFI have just built their vaults where there freezing it at -16 and the pioneers of that were in Copenhagen where essentially they have frozen there stuff but the idea is that they have frozen it not for posterity but to actually begin to scan it, to duplicate it, its frozen but its not necessarily frozen for ever, it gives you time. To think about what you are going to do next. And I do believe that we are going to have to go digital. And we are at that point now where we can preserve video digitally and I think we are getting to that point where we can preserve film digitally. It’s a whole new field, it almost becomes documentation as core, so you have to document so much and knowledge transfer so much.

Adam / So what are you talking about preserving onto, what format?

Sean / Well this is the interesting thing, you were talking about preserving on to film. Currently the standard would be preserving on to LTO.

Adam / That’s magnetic tape?

Sean / Yeah LTO is tape , so we are still going back to plastic, but even if we store on hard drive the argument is, its still a physical thing there are still mechanics, bits there and atoms and electrons , whatever. There are people talking about how we can preserve with DNA or holograms, its just part of the process almost 49.04

Jane / Its all rather theoretical though because it has to do with archives having the funding to do transfers, I was just talking this morning about the audio visual

service collection, tens of thousands of video tapes, and he said I’m surprised you haven’t digitized them. Well how long have we been digitizing this archive, five or six years and with the video tapes, you don’t have to stand over it the way you do with film, but we have 600, 700 hours of film digitized it’s a fraction of the collection here.

Sean / It’s a very small percentage. Jane / Tiny. Adam / How do you make a decision as to what you are digitizing?

Sean / We are not digitizing for preservation at the moment, at the moment we are digitizing for access primarily, but we have the master digital that we preserve on LTO, with the idea that we don’t have to go back to the original at the moment.

Adam / But the LTO only lasts for, how long?

Sean / Well, so the LTO is kind of like an active system so as a standard the people who produce LTO have agreed that they always support two generations, so we are currently using LTO 4, LTO 5 is now out, when LTO 6 comes out that is your last chance to basically migrate your LTO 4 tapes to the new system.

Adam / That’s because the format is changing?

Sean / Every format, every generation, um essentially guarantees backward compatibility.

Adam / And what are we talking about in terms of a timeframe here.

Sean / Well that’s almost a mute point because you have to have the machines to read the tapes, you know this is the thing, this is the thing about video tape as well because....in a way video tape is the elephant in the room because with video tape we have the problem right now, because you need the machines to read the signal, and then digitize it.

Adam / Well it’s a problem right now and it highlights and magnifies the film problem, it’s an accelerated version of the future for film.

Sean / With film there is a slight difference, with film its kinda an agnostic thing where anyone with enough money can make the machines to transfer film, whereas with video tape its all proprietary, you need to know how that signal is formed, so you need to have the special Sony heads in the machine to be able to read the signal where as with film, light shines through it and you see it.

Adam / Yeah, the only hardware and software you need for film is your eyes and a bit of light...beautiful.

Sean / And that brings us right back to that idea, is it an object or is it a performance because if you’ve got the original film object, and you can see those images, you don’t see the film, you don’t see it in motion.

Adam / But you know its there! You know it’s safe.

Sean / You know its there, but you can’t experience it. You still need a means to re-present it. Preserving the object is only one part of it. And transferring the object is only one part of it. You still need knowledge of how it was shown, or the ways too show it, that doesn’t mean that you can’t experiment with ways of showing it. If you’ve got a strip of film with images on, yes its there, but you still need to talk about how to present that.

Adam / Yeah, you got me thinking about frame rates, when we were kids watching those Chaplin silents speeded up, that was never the intention of the film maker, they were shot at 16 or 18 fps and of course we saw them on TV, they were transferred at 25 fps, and now this has become our perception almost as substandard, it works ok for comedy but they did the same with D W Griffiths and Abel Gance. This is how audiences see this stuff and we believe that is how it was shot.

Jane / We don’t. Sean / No. Adam / No. Jane/ Its frustrating.

Sean / But um, there are so many arguments in the silent film community about frame rates, I went to Portanelli last year and there was a very heated discussion about whether it should be 18 or 21 frames per second.

Adam / I love that it’s about people caring.

Sean / Its great. But it just shows you as well the idea of variables in terms of the experience of film, because there are so many variables.

Adam / So many variables and within that so many different experiences. We are coming from this from quite different angles me as an artist and you as an archivist, part of me likes the idea that we are seeing this stuff a little off kilter and part of me wants to defend the artist’s intension , but I guess at least it is creating experience.

Jane / I becomes a genuine experience.

Sean / I agree that it’s an authentic experience, but it’s almost like, I don’t believe that there is always one original, there are multiple originals and I work in a framework of multiplicity of originals. But it goes back again to documentation, if you are presenting a film, I like the idea, that there are many ways of doing it.... of presenting to the public, what it is you are actually watching, where it came from, what it was, how it might have been seen, the ways it works, and again that’s only one way of doing it, I mean there are always ways of working with artists and re- presenting material. There are so many ways of doing it, but there can be almost a core philosophy, and there are different philosophies for different archives.

55.32 Jane / I have always thought that with Edwardian film and we have a number of places that are quite unrecognisable, that we are archivists, why would we tell lies, why would we want to mislead people. I could show a film and say this is Colchester in 1909 and everybody would believe me and its not and how could anyone tell it wasn’t but it would drive people to analyze the film more closely and get more out of it if they suddenly decided that they couldn’t trust me. This is one of the other worries about archiving really your putting things away labelled, but how reliable are the labels. You know how you used to reuse video tapes at home and at some point you stop writing on it what it is. And it’s that one that says match of the day, and you know it’s got the family party on it. And how films come to an archive, its not usually a neat process of ,”I’m going to archive all my work and give it”, its usually from house clearance, and someone has died and it hasn’t been prepared, or an organisation has gone bankrupt and so you receive it just as it is in all its rawness and quite often without any identification at all.

Adam / So here’s a question, do you dispose of anything?

Sean / Laughs....umm err we don’t at the moment but in any future collections policy, I would definitely like to address the question of disposal.

Jane / If you look at our acquisition policy it’s got a whole section marked disposal. It’s a good question, is it worth keeping, is it not worth keeping, is it worth finding a home for it somewhere else, is there somewhere better, its going to mean something to somebody, is it in the best place. So you’ve got a collecting policy, and this archive is about a region, it’s about the regions film makers. So we’ve got a definition about what we have historically been bringing in.

Adam / So what do you do with that rare piece of film of Marylyn Monroe, I don’t know tripping up a kerb....its unrelated to the region?

Jane / Now why would we give it to someone else?

Adam / You would be fighting to find some connection to Norfolk....oohh her shoes were made in Norwich.

Jane / It was (the acquisition policy ) anything exciting, when we discussed our acquisition policy with our last director but one, I flippantly came up with anything exciting, and he went with that. But no seriously, we do work collaboratively with other archives and there has been a sense of what we each collect and what we would pass on to another organisation, if it was more appropriate for them, id say its all up in the air now, because we are storing digital files and I don’t know what sort of active dialogue there is about acquisition in this country right now. But, what to keep, what to keep.

Adam / Ok, I think we are done....but you love film, you are in love with film?

Sean / yeah...absolutely, I still shoot film, I still shoot film at home, but for me it’s....look if you’ve only got 36 exposures, you kind of think about them and also I know by their very nature they will preserve themselves almost, I stick them in a box, yes and in a hundred years time they may start dissolving but I can in some respects. I shoot digitally, I use my iphone all the time but if it’s a wedding or something or something special or now and again ill go out at the weekend and shoot film.

Jane / That may be one of the appeals with the young people you are working with the cameras are pretty self explanatory you can see how everything works, you feel like you could almost repair it yourself.

Adam / They just don’t break like digital cameras do. They were so well made.

References Books and Journals

Bassler, B. (2010) Cell to Cell Communication. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society.

Bahr. E. (2009) Uncapping the Lens: The History of Early Photography, Col Res Libr News, No. 70. Crofts. C. (2008) Digital Decay, Moving Image, No. 2. Dean, T. (2011) Film. London: Tate. Durant. M. (2010) Photography and Performance, Aperture, No. 199.

Goldberg, R. (2004) Performance. London: Thames & Hudson. Jones, A. (1988) Body Art Performing the Subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Johnson. K. Kase. JC (2005) Cinema as Artifact and Event, Moving Image: University of Minnesota Press

Klyen. R. (2013) Kiss Me Deadly, The Journal of Cinema & Media, Framework 54, No. 1, Spring 2013, pp. 114–119.

Lipkin, J. (2005) Photography reborn. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Macnab. G. (2009) The Big Switch, Sight and Sound, No. 9.

Massey. I. (2009) The Neural Imagination: Aesthetic and Neuroscientific Approaches to the Arts, Cognitive Approaches to Literature and Culture Series: Austin: University of Texas Press.

Norbrega. C. (2006) Biophoton – the Language of Cells: What can living systems tell us about interaction, Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research Volume 4 Number 3.

Prosser, J. (2005) Light in the dark room. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ritchin, F. (2010) In our own image. New York, N.Y.: Aperture.

Rojek, C. and Turner, B. S. (1993) Forget Baudrillard?. London: Routledge.

Shapley, G. (2011) ‘After the artefact: Post-digital photography in our post-media era’, Journal of Visual Art Practice 10: 1, pp. 5–20, doi: 10.1386/ jvap.10.1.5_1

Williams, M. (1995) The Velveteen Rabbit. London. Puffin. Wolf, S. (2010) The digital eye. Munich, Germany: Prestel.

Online sources

En.wikipedia.org (1963) Oxytocin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. [online] Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxytocin [Accessed: 20 Sept 2013].

Fujifilm.com (2013) Fujifilm introduces Astalift skincare products to the European market — To be launched in France in February 2012. [online] Available at: http://www.fujifilm.com/news/n111205.html [Accessed: 20 Oct 2013].

Fujifilm Global (2013) Discontinuation of Motion Picture Film production. [online] Available at: http://www.fujifilm.com/news/n130402.html [Accessed: 20 June 2013].

Nikonrumors.com. (2013) Interview with Kodak's lead engineer on the early Nikon-based Kodak DCS cameras | Nikon Rumors. [online] Available at: http://nikonrumors.com/2013/04/09/interview-with-kodaks-lead-engineer-on-the-early- nikon-based-kodak-dcs-cameras.aspx/ [Accessed: 20 Sept 2013].

Primary Research interviews by the author

Horne, N. (2013) Interview with CEO of I-dallies. Interviewed by Adam Tomas Burton [in person] I-dallies, Unit 10/Kendal Court/Kendal Av, London W3 0RU, 14/ 7/2013.

Senior, D. (2013) Interview with cinema projectionist. Interviewed by Adam Tomas Burton [in person] Hollywood Cinema, Anglia Square, Norwich, Norfolk.

Alvey, J. Kelly. S (2013) Interview with the East Anglian Film Archive. Interviewed by Adam Tomas Burton [in person] East Anglian Film Archive, The Archive Centre County Hall Martineau Lane Norwich NR1 2DQ, 18/09/2013.

Foxx, J. (2013) Interview with head buyer for Poundland. Interviewed by Adam Tomas Burton

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