From: Keith Sanborn (email suppressed)
Date: Thu Apr 19 2007 - 22:06:54 PDT
Alan Sondheim asked me to forward this to Frameworks.
Keith
>Lines: 45
>X-Original-To: email suppressed
>Delivered-To: email suppressed
>Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2007 00:50:29 -0400 (EDT)
>From: Alan Sondheim <email suppressed>
>To: Keith Sanborn <email suppressed>
>Subject: My Lost Films (please forward to Frameworks if ok w/ you)
>
>
>
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>My Lost Films
>
>
>I made films from 1969-1993; 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.
>
>http://www.asondheim.org/canyonfilm1.jpg
>http://www.asondheim.org/canyonfilm2.jpg
>http://www.asondheim.org/canyonfilm3.jpg
>http://www.asondheim.org/canyonfilm4.jpg
>http://www.asondheim.org/canyonfilm5.jpg
>http://www.asondheim.org/canyonfilm6.jpg
>http://www.asondheim.org/canyonfilm7.jpg
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