Flicker #35
August 27, 2001
Here's what we screened:
Steve Daniels, I Walk Alone
super 8 to video, 3 min.
Steve Herold, H.R. Pukenshette
16mm to video, 10 min.
Neal Hutcheson, Vollis Simpson's
Whirligigs
super 8 to video, 9 min.
Thomas Griffin, Deli Very
super 8 to video, 3 min.
Jason Middleton & Natasha
Desai , Untitled
super 8, 3 min.
Flicker Hat Trick #5: Michael
Sandler, Black Forests
super 8, 3 min.
Sid Lavarents, Multiple SIDosis
16mm to video, 9 min.
Jen Ashlock, Untitled
8mm, 3 min.
Norwood Cheek, The Last Time
I Saw the Moon
super 8, 3 min.
Georges Melies films
16mm, 5 min.
Cory Ryan & Doug Ferguson,
Ridin' High
super 8 to video, 3 min
Michael Corbett, The Death
of John Stephens
16mm to video, 14 min.
Tom Harned, Found Images
16mm to video, 14 min.
Flicker #35
Hello again, and thanks for coming to the 7th anniversary Flicker screening. This is usually the time where the person writing the program gets all maudlin about where Flicker's been, and misty-eyed about the future, when there will be Flickers spreading the gospel of super 8 all across the land.
As I sat down to write this I realized something. That future is now. Over the past year, the number of Flickers across the fruited plain almost doubled--up from four to seven. Austin, Texas, New York City, and our own Asheville, NC join Athens, Georgia, Chapel Hill, Richmond, Virginia, and L.A. as hosts to their own Flicker fests. This Flicker idea has steadily caught fire and no doubt there will be even more cropping up in the next year.
So I'm happy to report that the state of the Flicker union is stronger than ever. And all the Flicker organizers have pledged to do a better job of circulating films between cities, which will give both audiences and filmmakers a wider selection of fare to entertain and inspire.
Words can't covey this well enough, but thank you very much for coming out and keeping Flicker alive for the past seven years. This Flicker thing is a constant source of inspiration to me, and I hope, to you, too. Thanks for watching, reacting to, and making your own films. This, after all, is what Flicker is all about.
And a billion thanks to Frank Heath and the gang at the Cat's Cradle for their unswerving dedication to the Flicker cause. The Cradle doesn't make a lot of money on this, they do it for other reasons, and that's a rare thing these days. Yikes, I got maudlin after all. Thanks again, and enjoy the show--
A peek inside the western hemisphere's only Kodachrome movie lab
When Fuji shut down
its Kodachrome processing facility in Arizona a few years ago, it looked
like super 8 filmmakers would have to rely on Kodak's Switzerland lab to
get their K-14 movies processed. Luckily for us, though, Dwayne's Photo
of Parsons, Kansas stepped up to take on the mantle of "the only Kodachrome
movie film processor in the Western Hemisphere." Jenny Gartner, the
Kodachrome chemist at Dwayne's, gave me the lowdown on life in the lab.
Jenny Gartner: The way Kodachrome differs from other processes is that instead of one developer, like you would have in a negative process, or two developers, like you have in a reversal process, in Kodachrome you have four developers. Kodachrome is basically a black and white film that is laid down in special layers with a yellow filter in between a couple of the layers. When light hits your film, it develops silver in each of the layers and then as the film moves through a processor it develops each layer separately. That's how you get such a fine grain on Kodachrome: each layer is developed separately and there are no dye couplers incorporated into Kodachrome film, like there are in every other color film in the world. Someone once told me that Ektachrome is like a two year old: it doesn't require a lot of hands-on attention, it can kind of take care of itself and fend for itself. But Kodachrome is like a newborn baby. It requires a lot of hands-on correction almost all the time.
Flicker: How did Dwayne's start processing super 8?
Gartner: We started processing it to secure a big account. We are a wholesale photo finisher--we have big accounts, like the major supermarkets and the major discount stores and some of the camera shops. We had been doing Kodachrome still processing since 1993. And the big thing with Kodachrome is controlling the process. After you've got the process under control you can run whatever the heck you want to in it. It's all the same process. If you're running K-64 still films or K-25 16mm film, it's all the same. So when we said we were going to do super 8 and 16mm, we decided to advertise, which we'd never done before. I knew there was a market out there for it, but we just didn't know where to begin! We started by contacting film schools. And then Norwood Cheek got in touch with me, and he was such a huge help. And you wouldn't believe how fast it spread. As soon as people found out we were doing it, we jumped from single digit percentages to 30 and 40 percent of our business coming from our independent customers. It was unbelievably fast. I don't know what kind of grapevine you guys have, but...[laugh]
Flicker: Do you ever get to watch the movies you process?
Gartner: It depends. Usually I try not to. I'm always afraid to run it through an editor or projector or something, because the more you touch it, the more likelihood you have of scratching the film. I look at several rolls a day to make sure we haven't inadvertently scratched something. But I take one of these little rewinders and use a loupe and cotton gloves.
Flicker: Were you a photographer before you started this job?
Gartner: I am now, especially since I have children. I shoot a couple of rolls of Kodachrome stills every once in a while because the color's so good--it's still gonna be there in 40 years when my kids are grown.
Flicker: Any advice for super 8 filmmakers?
Gartner: Not advice, but I have an announcement. We're thinking about offering some new services, capitalizing on the unique properties of Kodachrome. For example, if you run Kodachrome upside down you expose the different layers at different times, and your film looks reddish brown, kind of a septia tone. We're thinking about offering that as a service. We're thinking about going so far as to turn off different printers during the processing, so that you'd be missing a color and you'd get a whole other look with that. We'll have a whole special section on the website when we're ready to offer these, we're just looking into them now to see if anybody would be interested.
Want to see these new processing options? Let Dwayne's know via their website, www.k-14movies.com, or call them at 1-800-522-3940.
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