Print Generation
Once the images are brought up to full colour, Print Generation heads back toward abstraction. The viewer, having built a picture from an abstract pattern of dots, now must literally choose what is seen, whether to hold memory’s trace of the representation or swim into the dancing crystalline waters of emulsion.” -Anthony Bannon, Buffalo Evening News
Print Generation by J.J. Murphy is a rarely screened structural gem that harnesses image and sound deterioration to its fullest. Murphy started with sixty one second shots, a one minute film. He then made fifty contact printed copies from each successive version, consciously degrading the film one “generation” at a time. Print Generation is structured so we begin watching obscured images and work toward the original and back again… while the soundtrack of lapping ocean waves does the opposite. The film elegantly addresses the intricacies of memory and time: how we remember, what we remember and how a fleeting ‘home movie’ reveals and recedes. Spoiler alert? Well, not exactly, as with all films, structural and otherwise, the magic of the experience is also in the sharing… so we hope you will join us for this special screening alongside the launch of PUBLIC issue #44 on the 2010 Experimental Media Congress, edited by Peggy Gale. Sneak peak of the issue here.
Print Generation by J.J. Murphy (1974, 16mm, 50 minutes)
@ the PUBLIC #44 Experimental Media launch
Monday 16 January 2012, 6-9 PM
Gladstone Hotel Ballroom (1214 Queen Street West, Toronto)
*NOTE: SCREENING at 6:30 SHARP*
Recently restored archival print courtesy the Academy Film Archive.
Special thanks to Mark Toscano, May Haduong and Canyon Cinema.
Print Generation
Print Generation (JJ Murphy, sitting)