SITE INFO

NEW LOCATION? I decided to move Preservation Insanity (man, do I regret that name now) here from its previous location for various reasons, and fix it up a bit. All previous posts are intact. If you’ve bookmarked or listed the site on your site, please do update the address (and thanks for your support!) The following is just background/contextual information for new/masochistic visitors.

FIRST TIME HERE? For those who haven’t been here before, this site is basically an ongoing collection of material usually pertaining to the conservation and preservation/restoration of experimental films. Other stuff will creep in from time to time, but that’s the primary focus. My name is Mark Toscano, I’m based in Los Angeles, and have been a film preservationist specializing in experimental films since 2003, prior to which I worked at Canyon Cinema for three years, so I’ve been pretty deeply immersed in this work for quite a while now. I love what I do, and I also love sharing information, discoveries, filmic anomalies, and whatever arcane empirical knowledge I’ve picked up by doing this work, so thanks very much for your interest in this site.

Film Restoration Art: Réka Bucsi

My friend Réka Bucsi is a fantastically talented and imaginative animator, and so I was thrilled that she agreed to make an image for me on the subject of film preservation.  She loves Los Angeles, and is coming to spend some more time here soon, so I thought I’d add her amazing “little film archiving monster/god” alongside my latest post, which is very much about Los Angeles.

Future Perfect (1978) by Roberta Friedman & Grahame Weinbren / FIFTEEN YEARS? part 5: 2007

Future Perfect (1978)

In some ways, this film is a stand-in for other films by Roberta Friedman and Grahame Weinbren and in a larger sense for Los Angeles filmmakers in general. In yet another sense, it’s a stand-in for a very specific film by Roberta Friedman and Grahame Weinbren: Bertha’s Children (1976). But although Bertha’s Children was a major catalyst for me in 2006-07, its preservation wasn’t necessarily an immediate part of the ensuing path my work took, whereas Future Perfect (1978) — the first film of Roberta’s and Grahame’s that I worked on — most definitely was.

By 2006, I had brought a handful of filmmakers’ collections into the film archive, including Robert Nelson, Stan Brakhage, Richard Myers, Will Hindle, Phil Solomon, and Pat O’Neill. I had been speaking to a few other artists who would eventually do so as well (Chick Strand, Su Friedrich, Barbara Hammer, and others), but the process was gradual and a little bit scattered.

Film Restoration Art: Martha Colburn

As mentioned in my initial FIFTEEN YEARS post, I’ve asked a number of artist friends to send me an image that relates to the notion of “film restoration” somehow.  I’ve already gotten a bunch of a great ones from various people, but what better way to follow a post about a visionary animator than a drawing sent to me by another visionary animator, Martha Colburn!  This RIDICULOUSLY made my week when I got it:

Huge thanks to Martha Colburn for the incredible drawing – I didn’t expect this amazing portrait and can only wish that my job were as wild as this!

Five films by Adam Beckett (1973-75) / FIFTEEN YEARS? part 4: 2006

Flesh Flows (1974)

I had seen at least a few of visionary animator Adam Beckett’s films when I worked at Canyon Cinema. The iotaCenter put out an extensive DVD of his work a few years ago, and I should say very clearly up front that I was able to work on Adam’s incredible films thanks to iota, as they had negotiated with Adam’s family to move the films to the Academy and also applied for funding from NFPF so the films could be restored, so thanks much to them for that. Additionally, iota founder Larry Cuba, who had known Adam at CalArts in the ‘70s, is a big fan and even owned a couple of prints of Adam’s films, both of which ended up being quite helpful in the restoration of his films (more on that below).

So much could be said about Adam Beckett as an artist, as a person, as a near-mythological figure, but though I’ve learned a lot about him from his films (and working on them), and from numerous friends of his, I’m not really the one to say it (Pam Turner is), and plus that’s not really what this website is about! But let it just be said that he genuinely pioneered some visionary techniques in animation and image manipulation that are still being used today by special effects artists and independent animators. Although his drawing style and animation thinking was utterly virtuosic, his particularly visionary innovation was to use the optical printer in combination with his animation to extrapolate his images and forms into incredibly elaborate, kaleidoscopic, psychedelic phantasmagorias. His memory and legacy are still very strong with effects whizzes like Richard Edlund, Richard Taylor, and Robbie Blalack; esteemed friends and mentors like Pat O’Neill, Roberta Friedman, Beth Block, Sky David, David and Diana Wilson, and Chris Casady; and younger animators who’ve been inspired by Adam’s utterly unique and boundary pushing work, like Jim Trainor, Henry Selick, Jodie Mack, and Helder Sun. (These are just a paltry few of the names in each category – Adam Beckett’s memory and legacy are pretty large in the world of experimental animation.)

Sartre’s Nausea (1961) and Black Vision (1965) by Stan Brakhage / FIFTEEN YEARS? part 3: 2005

In early 2004, I was in touch with Marilyn Brakhage a number of times to arrange the use of material by and related to Stan Brakhage for inclusion in the Academy’s ‘In Memoriam’ segment of the broadcast that year. One unexpected piece of information that emerged from these conversations was the revelation (to me) that all of Stan’s originals were still in Marilyn’s possession, housed at Underground Vaults & Storage in Kansas. I had assumed they were already conserved in an archive somewhere, but this was unexpectedly not the case. Over the course of the next few months, many conversations were had and arrangements were made, with the result that just about all of Stan Brakhage’s originals, filling 56 boxes on three skids, were transported via truck from Kansas to be deposited at the Academy. Amusingly, we realized in the late planning stage that the length of truck that would be bringing the boxes would not be able to turn into our rear parking lot to our loading dock, due to the narrow street and sharp turn required. The alternative was to have the truck instead drop the boxes off at the Twentieth Century Fox lot, as we have a good relationship with Fox’s archive, and they were graciously willing to help us. On August 4, 2004, a group of us took the Academy’s cargo van over to Fox and picked up all of Stan Brakhage’s originals. And it definitely amuses me that for a few hours, Stan Brakhage’s entire body of work was on the Fox lot.