TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

The use of already damaged, scratched and worn film stock (and often abandoned by distributors, who scrap it) is also the source of found footage films such as La verifica incerta (Gianfranco Baruchello and Alberto Grifi, 1964) and Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc. (Owen Land, 1966), just as it is decisive in experimental films, some of which re-use pornographic material, such as the films by Angela Ricci Lucchi and Yervant Gianikian (Essence d’absinthe, 1981), Naomi Uman (Removed, 1999) and Yves-Marie Mahé (Thèmes/Variations, 1999; Va te faire enculer, 1998).

In other cases, it is a question of deliberately damaging and scratching the film stock from a “structural” point of view. The most radical example of this is undoubtedly Paul Sharits’ film S:TREAM:S:S:ECTION:S:ECTION:S:S:ECTIONED (1968-1971), a work of 42 minutes in length examining the nature of the film stock and its vertical unspooling by presenting a series of 16 mm film loops which show water flowing over film stock scratched with multiple lines (the final section of the film has as many as 24 scratches). The visual contradiction between the (discontinuous) unspooling of the photograms and the (continuous) scratches on the film stock transforms cinema’s essential technical paradox into an experimental meditation on the passage of time.

Against the dogma of transparency, illusion and fiction, experimental cinema very early on found amusement in creating glitches in the machinery. For this cinema, it is a question of scuffing the apparatus and of letting spurt out a little of this potentially poetic material from the film transformed by accident.

La verifica incerta (Gianfranco Baruchello and Alberto Grifi, 1964-1965, 16 mm, colour, sound, 30 min.), by Enrico Camporesi

The title of the very simple announcement of the screening of La verifica incerta in Rome (which took place at the Feltrinelli bookstore on Babuino street from 6 to 8 April 1966), in very large type, was “An exceptional cast.” The list of actors and extras, printed underneath this remark, went from Clark Gable to Jennifer Jones and from Marcel Duchamp to Leslie Caron. The instigators of this screening, Alberto Grifi (1938-2007) and Gianfranco Baruchello (1924-), had acquired the contents of a truck filled with films: about 150,000 m of film sent out to be destroyed.^[1] Seen as having no value, ready to be discarded (Baruchello claims the truck was headed towards Milan to salvage the polyvinyl-chloride),^[2] the lot was purchased at the time for 15,000 lire. Among the prints, scratched and damaged from exhibition, were some 47 largely American feature films, most of which were in CinemaScope. After quickly carrying out the standard reconditioning (cleaning, splicing, putting the film on new reels), Grifi and Baruchello began editing the footage with an old second hand editing bench (a Gentilini-Prevost moviola from 1937).^[3] In this light, we should perhaps understand the word verifica (verification) in the title in its sense of check: checking the prints, which were certainly “uncertain” given their pitiful state.

The film began to be put together in the fall of 1964. It took seven months of work or, in the words of Alberto Grifi, “seven months of daily editing and re-editing, supported by amphetamines”^[4] – a montage that worked like a psychoanalysis. It was nevertheless doomed to failure: “at the moment when the diagnosis and the stylistic operation were identified, the neurosis was reinforced.”^[5] The adventures of the pseudo-hero Eddie Spanier, a “hypothetical character,”^[6] in Baruchello’s description, came out of the hysterical, hilarious and terribly frustrating editing which broke every kind of continuity in favour of lapses and sudden outbreaks of nonsense.

The screening of the film (rigorousely without the use of an anamorphic lens for the images in CinemaScope) should have been followed by a phase of actively destroying the material, thereby bringing about the irreparable dispersion of the print. This phase, the Disperse Exclamatory Phase, was abandoned, however, after the Parisian preview screening on 30 April 1965. Marcel Duchamp’s appreciation of the film, who with Man Ray and Max Ernst was present at the screening, was a fundamental factor in the two authors’ anti-iconoclast conversion. (Duchamp also appears in La verifica incerta, in the only “non ready-made” shots, made by Baruchello probably in 1964.) In this way, the film went from its (planned) destruction to its (unexpected) preservation: a 16 mm inter-negative was produced from the 35 mm print (with an optical soundtrack replacing the four magnetic CinemaScope tracks)^[7] – hence the proliferation of “copies in distribution, lost or stolen.”^[8] A few notable screenings followed: in Palermo, in May 1965, on the occasion of the meeting of Gruppo 63 (a neo-avant-garde literary movement); and in New York on 9 February 1966, by invitation of the curator of the Guggenheim Museum, Lawrence Alloway, who had the film introduced by John Cage (who enjoyed the sound editing).