Analog (Tactile) Remix

Reusing Film in a Digital World.

A few days ago I posted my “first film ever”, Stealing Away While I was looking through old drives to find this film, I also found some alternate uses of the footage that I shot. With the exception of a few rare filmmakers out there who insist on showing their film prints exclusively on film projectors, a lot of us who shoot film have almost no way to share it without digitizing it. On the scale that I operate, I could set up screenings myself and provide my own projector and films (many artists do this), but even though I love old tech, I find it to be something I just don't have time for. On the other hand, it's a shame to throw out those old original film prints. If I ever had made a full film print of anything, I would keep it for archival purposes, but generally when I shoot film, it gets edited digitally, and the raw material (super 8, or whatever) never sees the light of day, not to mention a projector bulb, after it's first and only capture to video.

My feeling is that the best thing to do in this situation is to make yet another project out of that raw footage. I know some film and video artists who continually re-mine the same media trove with surprising results.

A couple of years after I finished Stealing Away, I painted and marked on sections of the original super 8 film to create yet another project. I was interested, at that time, in the idea of “palindrome films”. That is to say, films that play the same way backwards as they do forward. If you were to play this film in reverse it would be identical.

It's called “There and Back in 23 Minutes”.

It is a silent film.

Unlike Stealing Away, this film does not rely on video resolution glitches, and and upscales a lot easier, so I made a 4K version.

Thanks for watching.

-Tyrone Davies