“Now there’s two, kinds of people, in the world, I can’t stand,” he croaks from his gut. “That’s a lying woman, and a, monkey man.”
I wish this were a line from January Jaguar, but alas. This is taken from an old ragtime single performed by Blind Boy Fuller. Perhaps we can work it in somewhere…
I’m not going to sit here and say that old records sound better than what technology can put out now. Without argument, the fidelity in a modern studio far surpasses the old gramopohone techniques. However, in the old recordings, you capture more than just the music. You capture the process.
You can hear the wailing voice funneling down the horn and working on the diaphragm. You can hear the stylus cutting into the wax. You can hear the size of the room and where everyone has been shuffled to by the time this record was cut. “Come now. We need to get the rhythm section in closer. Closer now. Yes. We still can’t hear the bassist. Yes. Well, that’s alright. He’s really just here for the band… You, young man. You with the trumpet and the lungs of god. Go stand in the corner. Go on. It’s either play softer or play in the corner. I prefer the corner option.”* And the result isn’t perfect, but the life is in there. The whole recording has a light, aural strobe caused by whatever fluctuations were inherent in the sensitivity of the recording instruments. And that strobe and pop and hiss are probably the main delights of listening to these old records.
It’s the same with film. Celluloid. Thirty-five. Sixteen. Eight. Those old movies that you find clips of on YouTube now (if you’re lucky, you’ve caught some high-res scans of them at some exhibition) which flicker on the screen because the guy turning the crank never quite got the rhythm perfect thus giving the cells varying lengths of exposure. You’re not only seeing the stream billowing from the horses’ nostrils, you’re also seeing (somewhere in the mind’s eye) the tendonitis forming within the wrist of this poor camera operator, who is long since gone. Having the opportunity to see Vertigo at the Castro Theatre, projected in 75mm, was one of the most humbling experiences of my life…
For anyone who has had the pleasure to shoot film, it can feel so cold sometimes to work in a digital format. I started shooting on MiniDV. Some old JVC camera that I traded my skateboard for. And that camera took me all sorts of places and the freedom of having a little monitor on the side and a tiny microphone near the front allowed me to have a certain confidence in what I was capturing and to focus on other things – usually lighting, composition, the performance of the actors. But I will never forget the strange bond I felt with that film when I had to load a Bolex in a lightproof bag for the first time.
The campaign is moving forward. We’re on day five and we’re at about eleven percent of our ask. I am grateful to our contributors. If we had the budget or schedule, we’d love to be shooting this on Super 16. Alas. We will move forward and happily shoot in 4K. Please visit the page and share the link igg.me/at/janjagfilm.
Until tomorrow,
-WB
*This tangent reminds me of the day I had to pleasure of sitting in on a recording for the final track on an early James Rabbit album, but I’ll develop that another time.
sterlingworth 