Turning instead to digital restoration methods, Lampert imprecisely tacks on colours drawn from what he estimates to be the film’s original hues, which results in large polygons alternately drifting through or freezing within the frame.
Lampert then initiated a photochemical restoration of the film, only to have his efforts stifled by a lack of funding and, more crucially, a complete lack of technical savvy as to how to actually preserve a film print. Creating an apocryphal history of the fate of Robert Altman’s 1973 gumshoe classic The Long Goodbye, Lampert submits that the film’s negatives and release prints were destroyed in the mid-’70s, relegating it to the status of a “lost film.” The only existing copy (not actually), acquired by Lampert through an ad in a trade magazine (again, not actually), is an abbreviated, black-and-white 16mm copy, with the dialogue dubbed in Spanish (and, just so we’re clear, not actually). This material, at once translucent and reflective, ultimately becomes a fragmented beacon that persists as the only constant in a realm of variation.Īndrew Lampert’s El Adios Largos proved the most deliberately deceptive of the programme’s five films.
The reflection of the factory’s lights off of the thin plastic sheet at first disrupts the clarity of our focus on the young woman handling it, and eventually obscures the female subject beyond recognition as Rimmer’s photochemical processes take over. Recently restored by Mark Toscano as part of a larger effort to preserve Rimmer’s body of work, the film’s looping image of a factory worker waving a large piece of cellophane before the camera is subjected to a process of abstraction and reification through a number of drastic shifts in contrast, flickering, colour tinting, and negative-on-positive overlay, all set to a pulsing proto-synth score by Don Druick.
The programme began with a familiar yet nevertheless astounding bag of tricks, demonstrated by David Rimmer in his classic Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper. It’s easy to forget just how much smoke and mirrors there are behind the various constructions, durations and aesthetics that constitute the cinematic avant-garde here, we are reminded just how much mystified delight can be derived from having the proverbial wool pulled over one’s eyes. Entitled Variations On…, the programme foregrounded the formal repetitions and deviations pervading each of its five works, the title’s ellipsis suggesting that the audience’s requisite curiosity be matched by an equally imperative complicity in accepting each film’s distinct illusions. There was deception aplenty in the first of four Wavelengths shorts programmes at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival. Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper By Samuel La France