[Frameworks] Resources on history of 16mm technology

[Albert Alcoz]

"Independent filmmaking" by Lenny Lipton could be a good reference:
https://www.amazon.com/Independent-filmmaking-Lenny-Lipton/dp/0879320109

On Wed, Jul 13, 2016 at 9:58 PM, Dave Tetzlaff <djtet53 at gmail.com> wrote:

> > I'm writing about the use of 16mm in experimental filmmaking of the
> 1970s and am looking for texts that deal with the history of film
> technology, scholarly sources that look, for example, at the emergence of
> 16mm as an amateur/documentary/artists' medium.
>
> Hmm. If we distinguish 'amateurs' from 'artists' 16mm emerged as an
> amateur medium decades before the 70s, and was all but submerged for
> amateurs by the 70s, in favor of Super-8. You'd be hard pressed to find any
> artists who worked with the 'amateur' 16mm cameras that were made at least
> through the 1950s: Kodak K100, B+H 240, Reveres… and only spare use of
> 'amateur' Kodachrome and Ektachrome stocks that didn't come back from the
> lab with edge numbers.
>
> The history of documentary tech is a whole 'nother creature -- all 16mm up
> to the 70s -- but marked by advances in blipping, sound sync, battery
> power, coaxial magazines, reflex finders, etc. etc. (I have an AC-power
> only Yoder-style chop-top in my closet, if anyone wants one…). Only in the
> 70s did portable video emerge as a documentary medium, e.g. in the ½"
> open-reel 'Four More Years' by TVTV.
>
> Experimental filmmaking was not articulated to 'amateur' filmmaking as
> much as industrial/educational filmmaking. Experimental filmmaking was
> dependent on the wide availability of cameras, projectors, stocks, labs
> etc. primarily used by the 'A/V' market. Once that market moved to video,
> those sources began to dry up, posing ever-increasing difficulties to
> photo-chemical experimental work. A tech history of experimental film in
> the 70s should also look at it's intersections/oppositions to technologies
> used in 'video art', e.g. in Scott Bartlett's 'Off/On', and computer
> graphics, e.g. John Whitney.
>
> All that said, for the history of 'amateur' film, it would be remiss not
> to mention the work of FRAMEWORKER Patti Zimmerman, noted on the CHM site
> Buck linked.
>
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