From: Fred Camper (email suppressed)
Date: Mon Oct 01 2007 - 05:25:26 PDT
Saul, sorry, I should have seen your irony. The point about video
formats and film printing formats is a good one, of course. Many
filmmakers (including Brakhage in the 60s) printed their color films
directly from the camera original to 7387 ("Kodachrome") print stock
before Kodak stopped making it in the 80s. This had a unique look, real
solid intensity to the colors, and I know of no way to get the "look" of
those prints today. But it's also true that film prints can decay into
vinegar in less than 50 years. And even though filmmakers could be
careless in approving prints, and least in theory they did approve (if
we know they looked at them) prints issued in their lifetimes.
When a filmmaker shows his film and says, "This is a good print, and it
was projected well," we can feel reasonably sure we saw something like
what she or he intended. For prints made later, who knows.
As I like to say, these media, cinema and video, which we used to think
was wonderfully reproducible, are actually branches of performance art.
Fred Camper
Chicago
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