The 1960s were an extraordinary time for the arts, and for film in particular. But it’s easy to forget this—and it’s very easy for contemporary students to miss it completely. In the wake of the demise of 16mm as a production and distribution format, the birth and death of the experimental film movement in New York in the 1960s seems both remote and essentially unknowable, in large part because the bulk of work created during the period was shot in 16mm format, and today, there are no more 16mm projectors—even at universities and in most archives.
We also live in an era that has witnessed the demise of books, magazines, and most printed material, in favour of streaming media. I browse the web on a daily basis, and maintain a blog site that I update regularly, but there’s a world of difference between something viewed online, and settling down with a print book, where you can turn the pages, read the text, and actually touch the material physically.
The end of film as a format means the end of an embrace of the real. You can’t hold up the frames of a film to the light anymore, and see what’s there with the naked eye, because you’re forced—forced—to work in video. You’re further removed from the vision you documented by the intervention of digital technology, which reduces everything to 1s and 0s.
There’s no real image to see, unless you use technology to do so. There’s an essential unreality to the digital images that you can’t overcome, no matter how hard you try. Nothing is fixed; all is ephemeral. It’s not for nothing that the major Hollywood studios routinely cut a 35mm negative of all the materials from the digital films they produce for long-term conservation. For the 16mm filmmakers, and the “orphan” films they produce, there is no future, and no present—only the past.