Film is Forever — not!
Aaron Siskind said:
“Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever… It remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.”
Aaron Siskind was an abstract-expressionist photographer, the kind that took black-and-white pictures and developed them in his own little dark room over a bookstore in the West Village. Not sure when he said this, but he died in 1991, just as we (still and moving picture artists in the U.S.) were transitioning to digital. When I make a timeline for students, I date the year of transition to 1993, the year Spielberg released his first Jurassic Park movie (which began production with animatronic dinosaurs and ended with digital ones), quickly followed by Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! in 1996, which started with tangible Martian monster suits and ended with CGI.
Now I’m doing a Swedish Death Cleaning, which is forcing me to come to terms with several decades worth of film elements, photographs, Kodachrome slides, analogue video, reel-to-reel audio, cassettes. I’ve spent hundreds of dollars and countless woman-hours getting it digitized or digitizing it myself, though I’m painfully aware that film is more archival than video. Video is just a way of vaccum-packing it. And now that I lack projectors and audio players, digital is the best way for me to look at them.
It is true that whatever form these images and moving pictures are in, they make me remember. The little things that bring back the big things. Things that I hadn’t forgotten exactly, but that I’d buried deep. Film images, digital videos, my memories: they’ve all got about the same chance of survival in the lifeboat.