my film, 'the tao is down' will be playing for one show at 'the psychedelic and transpersonal film and music festival' on may 25.
https://www.psychedelicfilmandmusicfestival.com/may25
scroll all the way to the bottom to find the listing.
the film was made, i'd like to think, very much in the reaper spirit and reaper played no small part in finishing it.
the film was conceived in the late 1970s and shot in the early 1980s and was intended as a kind of community effort between the performers and technical people. it began as an improvised piece and, while it evolved into something, more or less, scripted, it retains improvised elements, mostly in the audio/music. it was, in part, inspired by the idea, new at the time, of the music-video. the idea was to meld visual and aural content into a large (feature length) narrative.
another intent was to, with no money, try to create something that could be executed by a small group of friends and collaborators, working improvisationally, that might, nonetheless, carry with it the same level of dynamism commonly only afforded to major studio fare.
shot on expired black and white film stock and processed by me, personally, it cost only a couple of thousand dollars to produce. problems arose, however, in the sheer volume of material we generated. over twenty three hours of film was acquired and, while we did have the technical means to work with it, the cumbersome nature of film made executing the vision for the piece pretty much impossible. the man-hours required overwhelmed the vision and the film was consigned to film cans for the next thirty-plus years.
enter things like inexpensive machine-vision cameras and reaper. come 2010 and i'd put together a scanning telecine for the artist-filmmaker i work with and we'd digitized his entire body of work. that left the telecine idle so i was able to use it to digitize our twenty three hours of footage, something that had been cost-prohibitive until then. (and, hey, i'd developed all of it myself thirty years prior, why wouldn't i digitize it myself?)
and, so, it got done. right on time! the festival is small and won't be able to show the surround dcp. they'll be running the stereo fold-down from it. that's something of a disappointment to me but, on the other hand, after almost forty years, somebody's actually showing this time capsule from the early 1980s.
i hope some of you might make it and let me know how it plays. there's a chance i might go but i'm on the other side of the country so, you know, expensive.
anyway, thanks for your attention and thankyou justin and the reaper team,
babag