Scratching the Surface: Handmade Cinema in the Digital Age

Posted April 20, 2020

External Article: Los Angeles Review of Books

Gregory Zinman, assistant professor in the School of Literature, Media and Communication, had his book Making Images Move: Handmade Cinema and the Other Arts mentioned in the article "Scratching the Surface: Handmade Cinema in the Digital Age" in the Los Angeles Review of Books on April 17, 2020. 

Zinman's book, which was published earlier this year, explores the practice of filmmakers creating expressive visual sequences by physically altering the film. In the article, author Holly Willis uses it as a gateway for exploring these aspects of filmmaking.

Excerpt:

To explore the history of handmade filmmaking in more detail, I turn to Gregory Zinman’s brand-new book Making Images Move: Handmade Cinema and the Other Arts, which echoes the title of Christopher Horak’s 1997 book, Making Images Move, an analysis of work of photographers who venture into the realm of filmmaking. Zinman, a faculty member in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology, in some ways continues Horak’s exploration of the boundaries that only ostensibly separate media forms by chronicling a rich, 100-year history of handmade moviemaking in which artists similarly trespass into other areas of creative practice.

Written with careful precision and breadth, the book opens on the extraordinary 75-minute film by Spanish filmmaker José Antonio Sistiaga titled ere erera balebu izik subua aruaren. Sistiaga could not afford to shoot and process footage to create a traditional film, so he instead spent two years — between 1968 and 1970 — painting and drawing on transparent film by hand. In some cases he painted frame by frame, and in others he crafted sequences across sections of film. The result is a dazzling explosion of color and texture which, according to Zinman, “is almost too much to process.” He writes, “Sistiaga uses cinematic spectacle to overwhelm the viewer’s senses, to bring us in and out of our minds.”

Read the full article here.