A Strange Site

I bought a new camera (a Yashica TLR) recently, and I’ve been testing it out. Not sure I’ve got the best out of it yet, but I love the format, and there’s something a bit magical about using a twin lens on a sunny day and seeing pictures appear on the viewfinder as if a miniature movie is playing. 

A bit late, but here’s the list I made of the first 100 films I watched last year. I stopped keeping count after this but I think I must have hit about 110 eventually. After making this list I subsequently remembered a few films that I’d definitely watched but forgotten to count as part of the sequence, which sort of invalidates the whole thing. Oh well, I think I can live with that.

Some notable entries:

Upstream Color (Shane Carruth, 2013)

His previous film - Primer -stayed with me after I watched it. This is better: a beautiful and completely unique film about the difficulty of overcoming trauma, full of strange moments and radical, challenging experiments in storytelling, but always completely earnest.

The Long Good Friday (John Mackenzie, 1980)

I spent some of last year working around the Docks and loved seeing them on film here. The scene where Bob Hoskins gives his rabble rousing speech about the future of London as his yacht slowly slides down the Thames, past Tower Bridge and into the gradually increasing dereliction and rot of the the old Isle of Dogs is fantastic.

Red Road and American Honey (Andrea Arnold, 2006 and 2017)

It took me a while to discover her, but what a fantastic filmmaker she is. Two profound and deeply intimate films.

El Sur (Victor Erice, 1983)

I wrote about it at length in an earlier post; it’s an achingly beautiful film about fantasy, longing, and unrealised dreams.

Victoria (Sebastian Schipper, 2015)

Now here’s something a bit different: I took all these using something called sunography paper: you can pick it up in arty shops or online and use it to make silhouette images by placing objects on it and leaving it somewhere bright. 

One thing that’s great about this paper is how easy it is to use. No fancy chemicals are needed to develop an image, all you need to do is rinse it off when you’re done to get rid of the excess chemicals and bring out the contrast in your image. 

I started thinking about the practicalities of using this kind of paper in a pinhole camera as a simpler alternative to traditional photographic paper, which requires a darkroom and proper chemicals (not things I have right now), but moved on after lurking on a couple of Reddit forums and realising people had tried and failed at this. The paper isn't sensitive enough to get a decent exposure, even when left for months, so I needed a better alternative. 

I hit upon the idea of placing the paper inside a normal film camera and exposing it through the lens, which would let in hundreds of times more light. The test at the top shows a paper negative I made by leaving a camera with it’s shutter open for about ten hours on my window ledge. I flipped the colours on Photoshop to get a lovely purple-brown image. 

I fixed this one myself so I breathed a sigh of relief when I got negatives back and they had something on them. And not just pictures, but decent ones! I don’t have a negative scanner at the moment, so I’ll have to capture the images properly later. 

So what's up with this camera? It’s a a Halina 35x, a rangefinder knock-off made in Hong Kong in about 1960. There’s a stamp on the underside which proudly declares this one “Empire Made”, and it certainly has a good heft to it, even if the finishing touches are a bit lacking. 

The focusing ring was jammed when I picked this up, so I removed the lens, cleaned out all the dried up lubricant and put some new grease in to get it working smoothly. The birds are my touch, not strictly necessary but a bit cheerier than the standard black leatherette.

Above: some of the books I’ve read in the last few months.

Special mention for Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and Seeing is Believing: two great books about American cinema of the Fifties and Seventies respectively. Easy Riders... is a juicy tell-all volume detailing all the worst habits of New Hollywood’s best-known filmmakers (Coppola, Altman, Friedkin, Scorsese et al). It’s snappy, page-turnable stuff, but at heart it offers a great analysis of the relationship between film, finance and authorship.