page from Recipes for Disaster: A Handcrafted Film Cookbooklet, by Helen Hill, 2005
There are roughly
65 film labs
left in the world, of which around 20 are in North America. These
ranks, along with the number of film stocks being manufactured, dwindled
as digital technologies have saturated the realm of production and
studios have moved away from film. When it comes to labs that process
16mm film—a mainstay of experimental film—and small-gauge stocks, only a
few commercial options exist, mostly in the United States:
Cinelab, in Boston;
ColorLab in Maryland;
Dwayne’s Photo in Kansas; and
Fotokem
in Burbank. One of the most recent casualties of this technological
shift has been Pac Lab, which closed in New York, leaving the city
without any facilities to process and print 16mm.
The decline in commercial film production, however, has been countered
by a rebirth in the phenomenon of artist-run film laboratories. What in
the early Nineties was limited to a handful of cooperatively owned,
independent labs, mostly in France, has grown into an international
network of over 30, many of them formed within the last several years.
The decline of film processing created a surplus of cheap, unwanted
equipment that, in the right hands, could be repurposed for the
smaller-scale operation of an artist-run lab. Saved from the scrap heap,
many discarded contact printers and lomo processing tanks have begun a
second life as artists’ tools.
For many, this historical juncture between film and digital media has
been cause for lament. But among those in the growing artist-run film
lab community, the view is considerably more sanguine. Many are younger
filmmakers drawn to the creative possibilities of hand-processing in
workshops at places like
Mono No Aware, in Brooklyn, or
Big Mama’s Cinematheque
in Philadelphia. For these artists, film offers a range of textures and
expressive possibilities not available in digital formats. Others are
drawn to the “home-brew” DIY spirit that celebrates the autonomy of
artist-run labs. Josh Lewis, who in 2012 founded the
Negativland
lab in Ridgewood, Queens, describes it as “a more involved way of being
a filmmaker. You can’t rely on an industry that serves Hollywood. You
need to be a technician
and a filmmaker.”
For filmmakers like Lewis, the current moment offers the opportunity to
sever cinema from its industrial tether. In many ways, this is the
culmination of the avant-garde dream to become fully independent.
Experimental film, at least at the level of materials, has been
invariably tied to the commercial conditions of the film industry at
large, though its output may have more in common, aesthetically and
culturally, with the types of objects that circulate in the art world.
Now, in response to a collapsing apparatus for the production of film,
avant-garde filmmakers are developing the means and momentum to adapt
and design their own methods of making films.
Brûle la mer
The current artist-run lab movement has historical roots in the
independent strain of the avant-garde. In 1966, the London Filmmakers’
Co-op, modeled after the shared distribution structure of the
Filmmakers’ Co-op in New York,
added to its operations a darkroom and lab space for making films.
Later, a few small labs were established in Europe, including, in the
Eighties, Studio Één in the Netherlands, and
Métamkine,
or MTK, in Grenoble, France. Both of these were open to anyone who
wished to use their facilities. MTK became a hand-processing hub for
filmmakers in France, Switzerland, and Belgium, and by 1995 it had
proved so popular that it had to shut its doors to newcomers. The
founders, however, offered to assist others in establishing new labs.
Among the many facilities that MTK helped to build was
L’Abominable,
which has become the largest collective artist-run film lab today.
L’Abominable, founded by 10 filmmakers in 1996, set up residence in a
basement on the outskirts of Paris. It initially operated with no
funding, scavenging equipment wherever it could, and later acquired
support from the CNC (the National Center for Cinema and the Moving
Image), a branch of the French Ministry of Culture. Hundreds of
filmmakers came to use its facilities over the course of its first
decade. In 2011, L’Abominable moved into the kitchen of a former school
in La Courneuve, a municipality that provides additional financial
support to the lab. Even with their expanded facilities, which includes,
rare among artist film labs, a continuous processing machine,
L’Abominable has not been able to keep up with the demand, admitting a
maximum of 40 new members per year. But like MTK, it has done much to
assist others in forming their own labs. From 1995 to 1999, it published
the newsletter
L’ébouillanté,
which organized a European network of labs that could share resources
and information. Since 2005, following an international meeting of
artist-run labs in Grenoble, the website
filmlabs.org,
along with two listservs, has provided crucial support for maintaining
this network and expanding it to North America and Asia.
The most distinctive quality about the current artist-run lab movement
is the international circuit that sustains it. In its current
manifestation, the artist-run film lab can be both an autonomous unit in
Toronto (
Niagara Custom Lab), Seoul (
Space Cell), Bogota (
Kinolab),
or other locales, and a satellite attached to an international network.
The idea of a collective, which stems in part from the cooperative
organizations of the Sixties, persists in terms of the labs’ mostly
open-door policies as well as this broader global unit. These collective
dimensions are both political and practical. On the political side of
things, some labs are more explicitly anti-commercial than others: Anne
Fave and Emmanuel Carquille, in their statement “
We Remember (1995–2002)”
on the L’Abominable website, pointedly describe “the necessity to
establish our own means of production” apart from the industrial system,
and many labs operate as non-profit organizations, securing grants to
not only provide workshops to their communities, but to stage screenings
as well. But not every facility operates according to these ideals.
Some labs more strictly restrict membership, functioning as barely more
than a shared artist studio. And some like no.w.here in London, the
Super8 Reversal Lab in the Hague, Niagara Custom Lab, and
Nanolab in Australia even offer processing services for a fee, particularly in those areas where commercial facilities have shut down.
Seoul Electric
Practically speaking, resources are limited. Equipment, even when
acquired cheaply, is often difficult and laborious to maintain. Beyond
the basic setup of a sink, a lomo tank (or bucket), and a contact
printer, few labs have the plumbing capacity necessary for continuous
processing machines. When Lewis came across a 35mm processor with
25-foot tanks from a lab that was closing in New Orleans, he found he
could afford the equipment, but couldn’t manage a space adequate for it.
Running an artist lab, moreover, comes with the reality of rising
rents, the necessity of having a day job, and members who don’t always
get along or stick around. Expertise in maintaining equipment can be
learned but takes time. A few, like Lewis, are former employees of
commercial labs; more often the people who run and service equipment are
self-taught, like Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie of Nanolab, or gain
experience by visiting other labs, as in the case of Kevin Rice, one of
the founders of
Process Reversal.
And many labs, even well-established ones like L’Abominable, have
struggled to find and maintain a workspace. Collectivity, more than a
political ideal, may in fact be most effective as a survival strategy in
an age of austerity and economic decline. Instead of rejecting the
dictates of capitalism by declaring oneself independent, the pooling
together of resources serves more appropriately as a calculated
response
to inevitable conditions. Where physical space is not guaranteed, the
network helps to maintain and redistribute knowledge and equipment until
a temporary home can be found. Quite simply, labs help secure the
existence and future of each other.
In many instances, the idea of the collective, and the sharing of
resources, has been more important than the establishment of a physical
space. In 2011, L’Abominable was evicted from its cellar headquarters
before moving to La Courneuve. Fave and Carquille maintain that it was
“a collective, well before it was a space.” Process Reversal, a new
organization located in Colorado, has yet to build a workspace, though
its members have in the meantime acquired enough equipment to build
several labs, and they devote their efforts to touring workshops and
assisting the formation of other labs. Rice explains: “We don’t see
ourselves as a site-specific organization. Our original intention was to
set up some public workspace that all of us could access. Now it’s more
of a supportive role, going to communities and helping them to set up
their own labs.”
Tuohy and Barrie, in addition to maintaining Nanolab in Daylesford, a
rural community outside of Melbourne, are just as busy visiting and
setting up labs elsewhere. The pair has visited roughly two-thirds of
all the artist-run labs in the
filmlabs.org
network, and as their activities show, creating a lab also means
instructing others in lab work. What was once a set of carefully guarded
industry secrets has become a matter of open access, with expertise and
salvaged equipment shared among a loose federation of film artists. A
typical lab origin story goes like this: two years ago, at the Rotterdam
Film Festival, Tuohy, who was there showing his own work, met a group
of filmmakers from Indonesia who were interested in setting up their own
lab. They had been offered a space in a vacant government building that
had, in fact, formerly housed a film laboratory. Tuohy and Barrie
visited the facility, helping the filmmakers restore equipment and build
a new printer out of various parts to get the lab functional. Its name,
Lab Laba-laba, translates to Spider Lab, which is as good as any metaphor for the international web of artist-run labs.
The
practicalities of survival are also a part of an enduring DIY ethos. In
his workshops at Mono No Aware, which he runs in conjunction with
Negativland, Lewis advocates the simplicity of the “bathtub model,”
where film can be hand-processed at home. “There’s no secret knowledge,”
he says. “You can make any kind of chemistry you need.” Hand-processing
has the advantage of being cheaper and having a faster turnaround than
commercial facilities, which often require shipment to an offsite
processing center. Some artists, like Joel Schlemowitz (
Incantation of the Spirit of the Silver Halide,
97) and Tony Conrad (in his cooked and electrocuted films from the
Seventies), have made hand-processing part of their performances by
shooting, developing, and projecting filmstrips in front of an audience.
Among the resources available on
filmlabs.org is Helen Hill’s
Recipes for Disaster: A Handcrafted Film Cookbooklet,
a handmade, liberally illustrated and collaged 2005 collection of tips
and procedures for making and processing films on one’s own. It includes
a page on Hill’s 2001 film
Madame Winger Makes a Film (A Survival Guide for the 21st Century),
which also serves as a primer for DIY filmmaking. In it, the animated
Madame Winger, a gravel-voiced Southern dame, asks: “When your film lab
is reduced to rubble, how are you going to keep making films?” Much as
the threat of “nuclear war or gigantic terrorist attacks” serves as the
impetus for creating a “film lab bomb shelter” in
Madame Winger,
Recipes for Disaster
was shaped by catastrophic events. The text exists only in photocopied
form; the original was destroyed along with many of Hill’s films during
Hurricane Katrina.
The decline of commercial film laboratories in the last 15 years was a
result not of violent natural or man-made disasters as Hill mordantly
predicted, but gradual technological and industrial change. Artist-run
labs have sprung up to fill some of these gaps, though these are
unevenly dispersed. The majority of independent labs are in France and
other parts of Europe; the fewest are in the United States.
Paradoxically, the persistence of a few major American commercial labs
like Deluxe or Fotokem has undermined the establishment of artist-run
labs domestically. Abroad, where commercial facilities closed far
earlier, the necessity for independent labs has been around longer. Film
manufacturing, which is more or less limited now to Kodak, along with
places that process film, have historically had their base in the
American film industry. It might seem then that where commercial
facilities exist, there can be few or no artist-run labs. Yet, as many
see it, the commercial base is necessary for the existence of even
autonomous labs, if only for the continued manufacture of 8mm and 16mm
film. (Though there are recent efforts to create homemade film
emulsions, including the work of Esther Urlus of
Filmwerkplaats
in Rotterdam and Alex MacKenzie in Vancouver, as well as various
emulsion workshops in the U.S. run by Lewis and Process Reversal, these
are not enough to sustain the level of production among the artist-run
lab circuit.) However atrophied these commercial facilities have become,
they function as the de facto base for which
any filmmaking
can occur. The continued industrial operations in the United States,
then, enables the formation of artist-run labs elsewhere. Tuohy
observes: “Kodak will last as long as Fotokem lasts. The artist-run film
lab needs you to have commercial facilities in the U.S.”
The artist-run lab, however, is not only about reproducing the
technical mechanisms of filmmaking. There is an aesthetic range between
those that seek to approximate professional standards in processing and
those who wish to use the laboratory as the site of experimentation.
Moreover, many independent labs have engineered new equipment and
techniques. In part, this is a pragmatic innovation: machinery acquired
from defunct commercial labs or university classrooms usually has to be
modified to fit the scale of the artist-run lab. But it also offers a
new set of creative possibilities. Instead of the fetishism or the
resuscitation of a “dead” medium (though that element certainly
persists, perhaps most commonly in the art world), filmmaking finds new
life in the autonomy afforded by the artist-run lab, fulfilling a
longstanding avant-garde conception of the medium defined as an artistic
one, well before its technological determination. Like more traditional
artistic forms like painting and sculpture, it might be defined as a
method of making whose tools can be changed and renewed, but whose
governing impulse remains the same. Pip Chodorov of L’Abominable writes
in “The Artist-Run Film Labs” in last fall’s issue of
Millennium Film Journal:
“There are no format wars, no compressing or codecs, no backing up or
transcoding, no upgrades or obsolescence problems, no corporations to
force us to buy new equipment. We are not in an economy but an ecology…”
Film need not compete with digital media—and filmlabs.org serves as a
crucial communicative infrastructure to the artist-run lab movement—but
might coexist as a related form alongside it.
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