White Light 4 comment John Price

After having been invited to screen a selection of his films during the 2006 International Film Festival Rotterdam as part of the theme section 'White Light' on drugs and cinema, and after reading Gertjan Zuilhof's weblog on his work, Canadian filmmaker John Price sent the following message:

"I would have no problem coming up with an hour long program. I have been working on a longer 35mm film with several abstract one minute color rolls which would work well with the other 16mm material. I am also experimenting with the texture of some very old black & white 4x negative film... extreme grain and softness... very impressionistic.

Working with this new material has led me to think about how the films might 'fit' the context of your program. It strikes me that when one is in a 'normal' physiological state, the eye perceives exterior reality as 'normal'. I mean normal in the sense of how the chemists at Kodak perceive it - and how they make every effort to engineer film stocks and chemical processes which reproduce their perceptions as 'accurately' as possible. When one is in an altered state, the optical system of the human being still functions quite well - iris and focus control remain intact unless the individual has overdosed - but the texture of the signal as interpreted by the brain changes dramatically.

As I read in your blog, there is a dialectic in your program between films that are about drug use - which appear for the most part as relatively conventional looking dramas with the odd use of a camera trick or special optical effect when trying to evoke the 'trip' or a flashback and work like mine that strives to manipulate the visual signal in order to evoke an alternate reality.

There are some who maintain that the random movement of film grain over each frame can induce a trace-like state... the more grainy, the more intense the
effect. It's a bit of a stretch but it is certainly one of the specific properties of film. It is a bit ironic then that the main goal of the scientists at Kodak is to come up with a motion picture stock which is 'grainless'... to make the material as clean as possible so that once scanned the texture of the finished film can be determined digitally.
There is still for me a dullness associated with digitally manipulated films that exposes itself only in the cinema. On a monitor, the film may look quite good, but projected skin tones will appear grey and the colors lifeless. It's a technological gap - a voodoo curse that afflicts the ordered arrays of ones and zeros - from achieving the
richness of texture native to the analog film process. Here then arises a possible correlation... the giving up of control.

When I process film by hand, there are so many factors which affect the resulting texture. I generally shoot with film stock that I get for free... outdated color reversal... short ends of lab printing stock...stock which has been deemed unusable by those who are striving for a seemless looking reality.... for those who are investing heavily in their productions and want tight control. I am never absolutely sure how the emulsion will react... age affects stock in different ways... increased base fog, decreased contrast, decreased sharpness, oxidation of the color dyes... Often I am developing the films with chemistry not designed to 'work' with that particular stock. The results vary tremendously. The more one experiments with a process, the more confident one becomes that the result will yield a positive outcome if one is inclined to continue with the experimentation. Like taking drugs.

I would be quite happy to put together a program of films that form a progression of sorts... a visual trip where the texture of the image becomes a fundamental point of connection between films. Each one will express a different mood which was realized through a conscious departure from the generally accepted Kodak prescription. I think audiences respond to this kind of film in a very deep physiological way whether they are stoned or not. There is no doubt that the stoners will get off on the visual textures but I think that for those who are straight there is also a deep emotional experience derived from the confluence of the personal point of view (aesthetically not literally) and the richness of texture. "

John Price
Toronto, Aug 2, 2005