unterwegs in Sachen Film >>> <<< on the road making films!
“Unfelle und Nachladen”: untranslatable German, partly nonsense, playing with words and letters.
Thanks to the Filmuniversität Potsdam-Babelsberg (and Benjamin who is writing his master about my films!!) … I have a few more freshly scanned films now online!! The old forgotten ones …
Unfelle und Nachladen, click here to watch it on Vimeo!
I’m browsing through old workshop films … There will be a little exhibition at Dresden Schmalfilmtage / Small Format Days in March and they are celebrating 60 years of super 8 hoorayyy!!! Showing a variety of films including some of my workshop group films (I gave 2-days-workshops at their festival in 5 consecutive years from 2009).
Some snippets here!
My 4 favourite pictures, positive paper direct copies from pinhole negatives. Very old ORWO paper, developed in rape seed juice.
I got it! Original chemistry for old ORWO colour super 8 films! Also working well with Agfachrome films from the 70s. It will be a challenge. Pretty poisonous stuff …. don’t breath too much. Thank you, Adrian!!
This is a still image from a super 8 film. Expired East German ORWO material, very old, very fragile, very sensitive to temperatures …. The three colour layers tend to peel off until only one colour remains or none at all.
In this case I was lucky that content and form danced together!
It’s a win-win situation! Once there was a guy called Manfred, a photographer, who has filmed half of his life with 16 mm and super 8 and then stopped it. Put his stuff away in the attic
and yeeeears later discovered me on the internet. He wanted to get rid of his stuff and he gave it all to me, knowing that it would be received with open arms 😉 one good NIZO camera and a lot of Kodachrome 40 film cassettes (Kodak stopped processing this type of film last year. It’s impossible to self-process it. There’s only one lab in the world as far as I know that offers processing for a good price, it’s Dwayne’s in Kansas, USA!).
I’m very thankful, it’s a precious gift.
It reminds me of another legacy story: As everybody knows the GDR was over in ’89. ORWO was the Eastern photo and Super 8 brand. I always loved it. Before the wall came down I sometimes went over the border (how easy for me as a Westerner!) and bought ORWO photographic paper and super 8 films. Smuggled it over. No real danger actually, it was not really legal to export it, but some films in the bag if they checked you was ok, no bad experiences.
There was one lab in (East) Berlin-Adlershof that, after the GDR merged silently into Westgermany, still continued to develop ORWO films for 2 more years. Until 1992. I remember, I often went there with the S-Bahn (interurban train) and brought them my films and got them back some days later. I went there during the closing period and when I went there for the last time they were all packing, throwing old folders on trash heaps, emptying their offices. All in silence, it was so calm and sad, I felt the winds of history, honestly!! I went into a room, sneaking around, met a man in a white working coat who looked really sorrowfull and we had some conversation and in the end he gave me an ORWO book of chemical recipes! I told him that I’m a self-processor and that I’m in love with film making and especially with the ORWO grainy warm-colored quality and I felt he was a tiny little happy when he gave me the book, knowing that it would fall in loving arms 😉
Thanks guys!
