Harvesting the Frame

(2002, interactive journal)

Harvesting the Frame: Handcrafted Film At the Changing of the Centuries was a special DVD issue of the Journal of Film and Video (volume 54, number 1) that I guest edited. I was fresh out of two summers in a row at Phil Hoffman's film residency on a farm in Canada, and I was really interested in exploring the surge of handcrafted film in the indie-experimental art scene, but in the context of creating a space for academic response to film texts that could be available for further study.

This issue has five tremendous films on it, with essays along with them that can be read as PDFs from the data disc, or even read on screen. On the disc is: Coreopsis (Pat O’Neill, 1998, 6 min.) with response by Willie Varela; Twilight Psalm Ii: Walking Distance (Phil Solomon, 1999, 23 min.) with response by Deron Albright; Site Visit (Maia Cybelle Carpenter, 1999, 10 min.) with response by Mary Slaughter; Hardwood Process (David Gatten, 1996, 14 min.) with response by Kenneth Eisenstein; The Light In Our Lizard Bellies (Sarah Abbott, 1998, 8 min.) with response by Roger Beebe.

I also encoded and authored the disc myself, with the intent to hand-craft it as much as possible. When preparing the MPEG-2 compression for the films, I set the "i-frames" (the only frames in a temporal compression that can be decoded without needing information from any other frames) by hand based on my intimate knowledge of the films, rather than relying solely on the compressor. I took all the images for the menus from my barn and surrounding property, again to give a sense that this digital disc was crafted by people in a specific place at a specific time.

Most research libraries should have a copy of this disc.

From the DVD menu of Harvesting the Frame (JFV 54:1)