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Thursday, April 19, 2007









My Lost Films


I made films from; most of them were carried by Canyon Cinema in
San Francisco. The films are all mast prints; I didn't copy them, but
showed the originals, since I wanted to use what little funds I had to
produce more. They were shown periodically at Millennium in New York, and
occasionally elsewhere, but they've never been part of the film community;
as a result, they've hardly been shown. Canyon Cinema returned them after
the board voted against handling masters, which could be damaged during a
screening of course. They were then placed at the Filmmakers Coop here in
NY, where they've remained on the shelf for fifteen years; I doubt anyone
has rented or seen them. I don't know their condition at this point; many
of the 16mm ones had mag stripe sound on them, which is susceptible to
print-through.

They were featured prominently in the 1992 Canyon Cinema catalog, just
before Canyon changed its mind about handling them. (I should add that my
videos have been available at times from places like Printed Matter or Art
Metropole, but these can be duplicated.) I'm saddened that they remain
unscreened - there are probably 15-24 hours worth. There are a large
number of them; for a while, when I was teaching at UCLA, I made a film
every week, mostly 16mm black and white sound, imitating the older silent
film production strategies and rates. For me the films broke a lot of new
ground - not least, in optical/magnetic soundtrack experimentation, but
they're quiet, moot on that point.

So I recently found a copy of the 1992 catalog and xeroxed the six pages
that describe my work. I am forced to think of the pages themselves as a
new film, made from the silence of the old; they read as a narrative of
concerns, experimentations, confusions, and theory-work changing over a
twenty-year period (although to be fair, most were made between 1980 and
1992). The image URLs are given below. Read the texts, imagine watching
the films, and maybe in some absurd future, they'll come to life again.

Sunday, April 15, 2007





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I've been remiss; if you go to http://www.asondheim.org/
just look at the most recent work; it's made with Second Life avatars still/yet - using techniques of behavior collision - when bvh files are piled on bvh files to the extent that there seems to be an almost darwinian competition among actions. i've also been doing performance in Second Life. if you look at http:// www.asondheim.org/pa.txt and http://www.asondheim.org/pb.txt you'll find the recent text files that accompanied the work. there have also been personal struggles, friends in troubles, our usual situation of desperate lack of finance (a faculty member at Brown where I'm teaching a beginning course in filmmaking asked if I liked living poor), bad leaks in the loft, cop shot in the neighborhood, building in flames three blocks away, riot in the subway station we use, friend in the hospital, another friend outrageously let go from a job, and so forth. not to mention health issues - that 'low temperature' thing that gives me flu-like symptoms about a third of the time (i have it now, accompanied by a headache of close to migraine proportions), a bad knee that's made walking difficult, eyes going bad and just no money for new glasses, our cat becoming wobbly, a real scare that my almost 93-year-old father was in serious poor health (not true), the usual series of nightmares giving me maybe a couple of hours sleep a night, fears of death and mass destruction, moving closer to the edge of deep depression (pulling back then but tottering), difficulty getting my main manuscript published, the usual job turn-downs, and the Sony shortwave stumbles a bit about the 15 megahertz position with a degree of static coming from god knows where... not to mention some bizarre uploads here that I have to go and correct, goodbye