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Emulsified #4: Surface Tensions
SURFACE TENSIONS, the latest installment of EMULSIFIED, an ongoing screening series of 16mm film prints selected from the archives of the Department of Media Study, features a program of abstract animation from the 1920s to the 1980s (Richter, Eggling, Breer, Vanderbeek, Priestley), followed by a rare screening (of excellent prints) of Paul Sharits' dual-projection film Razor Blades. As a companion film to Razor Blades we will also screen the Buñuel/Dalí Surrealist "classic" Un Chien Andalou.
Rhythmus 21 (1920, Hans Richter)
Symphonie Diagonale (1924, Viking Eggling)
66 (1966, Robert Breer)
69 (1969, Robert Breer)
70 (1970, Robert Breer)
What Who How (1957, Stan Vanderbeek)
Rubber Stamp Film (1983, Joanna Priestley)
Un Chien Andalou (1929, Luis Buñuel / Salvador Dalí)
Razor Blades (1966, Paul Sharits)
Curated by Carl Lee.
About Emulsified: There is a room off the fluorescent-lit white corridors of the Department of Media Study at the University at Buffalo called the Bone Yard.
The Bone Yard is where pieces of equipment not yet completely trashed come to wait out their days. A limbo of sorts. A purgatory of tech souls. The objects sit on shelves holding onto the feeble hope that maybe in a few years their particular approach to rendering an image or sound—with tubes, or alternating scan lines, frame buffers and 8-bit audio, magnetized particles on tape—will come back into favor. Like a comet returning after 17 years. Or the eighties.
In the same room, sit rows of metal cans, each a bit wider than 16 millimeters. In each of those cans is a reel of film, each containing a series of thousands of emulsified images rolled up on acetate. Light struck images, but kept in the dark. These films are what remains of the university's 16mm film collection, saved (barely, and some quite literally) from the trash bin of progress.
Most of these prints haven't seen the light of day in years, possibly decades. Animation. Documentary. Industrial films. Other Sundry and Miscellaneous. Some are visionary works. Some are less profound, but speak to us nonetheless—of film, of light, of the time of times, of all time.
