Just two weeks before this text was written, the last professional 16 and 35mm cine film lab of the Netherlands, Cineco, went out of business; and of the last two mass manufacturers of film material, Kodak and Fuji, the first is in a bankruptcy process and the second is discontinuing all its cine film stocks. With the exception of film museums and micro cinemas, all Dutch movie theaters have switched to digital projection and - in most cases: literally - scrapped their 35mm film projection equipment. All of the above happened in only one year, 2012. As with all revolutions, whether they are political, economic or technological, there has been a long latent phase (with the end of film predicted as early as in the 1970s), which led many people to dismiss the prophecies as scaremongering or hypes, until change suddenly happens, overnight.
For mainstream narrative filmmaking (just as for mainstream photography, literary writing and music), the medium has to be as invisible to the audience as possible. Over the course of one century, 35mm film technology had been optimized to look clean, and even today films undergo noise filtering, image stabilization and retouching before they are mastered on DVD or broadcasted on TV, so that no film grain, jitter or dust hairs will be visible. For the film industry, it was logical to switch to digital cameras and projectors once they were good enough to provide a clean high resolution image combined with economic advantages.
What is now happening to analog film is very comparable to what happened to paint after the invention of photography: mainstream portrait painters abandoned while avant-garde artists reinvented it as an experimental medium, celebrating it for its own intrinsic, non-mimetic qualities, embracing the unfiltered materiality of celluloid moving images.
Filmwerkplaats at WORM, Rotterdam, has been doing that for more than a decade, as a vital node in a global network of artist-run, do-it-yourself 8 and 16mm film labs (that includes, among many others, Labonimable in Paris, LaborBerlin, Nanolab in Australia and LabA in Athens). Producing film stock is rapidly becoming a domain of small manufacturers such as the remains of Agfa in Belgium, Adox in Germany and Foma in the Czech Republic; cutting the stock into 8mm and 16mm film has even become niche territory for boutique-scale companies.
While avant-garde film from Man Ray to Stan Brakhage and film co-ops provided the point of departure for film labs, the death of analog mainstream cinema is propelling the DIY film labs into defining contemporary work with film, and preserving the medium. Some even experiment with making their own film stock. Analog film, in other words, has become an experimental medium (even in the last area where it's still being commercially marketed to consumers: plastic-camera "Lomography").
The beauty, and the appeal, of analog film to visual artists lies in its unmatched visual density (of structure, texture, gradation, colors) combined with extreme simplicity - films made with no-cost self-built pinhole cameras, for example, or without a camera at all. Admittedly, there is a danger of romanticizing the medium, while avant-garde filmmakers of the 1920s and 60s manipulated film material just in order to break it. On the other hand, the end of the film strip as an illusion machine frees the medium from its film industry baggage.
References:
http://filmwerkplaats.worm.org
http://www.filmlabs.org
Tacita Dean, Film, Tate Publishing, 2011
By Florian Cramer
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