#multiple sidosis

In some ways, this short film is a throwback by a middle-aged man remembering a past career that never quite panned out, down to the old-fashioned opening music resembling a carousel organ. The first segment, which runs a bit overlong in my opinion, depicts a Christmas morning, a holiday whose popular conception is tied to reminiscing with family and sharing traditions. While the depiction of creator Sid Laverents being gifted a sound recorder by his wife is most likely scripted, it calls to mind a common form of amateur filmmaking: the home movie. In 1923, Eastman Kodak launched the 16mm film format (the name referencing the width of the film itself). Compared to the 35mm format used by professionals, 16mm cameras were smaller, cheaper, and more mobile. Advertising for this type of camera emphasized ease of use for the average consumer who lacked specialized knowledge, and also the creation of private, domestic films of happy life events. While the first part sticks to what was expected of amateur filmmaking, the second part deviates into something else completely.

Laverents had played theaters and busked in the street as a one-man-band vaudeville performer. By roughly 1929, he aspired to make it in New York City. The city had a wealth of entertainment options which made it difficult for individual performers to stand out, and he was especially unable to compete with the recently introduced synchronized sound films. With the Depression on the horizon, he had to take any available job such as sales or dishwashing. Unlike some vaudevillians which found success transferring to film, his early work did not succeed in finding a wide audience in the public space of mainstream entertainment. By the 1960s, he was employed as an engineer at Convair, a part of the aircraft industry. When discussing his vaudeville past with coworkers, he was prompted to fix his instruments and recreate the act. This was the reason his 1964 film One Man Band exists. 

Made years later, Multiple SIDosis is a higher-tech riff on the same concept. Laverents heavily edits and plans out how to perform every instrument and vocalization of the 1910s Felix Arndt novelty ragtime song “Nola.” If this film had nothing going for it except nostalgia, it wouldn’t have gotten the same amount of later recognition. His ambition was to make the cinematic equivalent of Les Paul and Mary Ford’s multitrack recordings, in which they would record on the tape, play it back, and record it again so it sounded as if they were harmonizing against themselves. The number of different onscreen Sids increases throughout the film, peaking at eleven. The look of the film was created through a complex system of mattes. With each take, parts of the camera were blocked off save for a hole where one part of the song would be filmed. Then, he would record the next part on film through double exposures until all takes were completed. Since the whole thing was filmed in-camera without help from an optical printer, one mistake would throw off the entire enterprise. 

In 1960, movie writer Jonas Mekas predicted a total collapse of barriers between amateur and professional film in the future. This never fully came to be, but Laverents’ work offers a unique perspective on how amateurism shifted over the decades. He exhibited films to fellow members at the San Diego Amateur Movie Club, finding a community with likeminded interests. Many similar clubs faced difficulty with the advent of video, which existed in some form since at least the mid-60s with 1965’s Sony Portapak but really proliferated in the late 1980s. Video was supposed to make moviemaking more accessible, but many club members found the editing prohibitively complicated in comparison to cutting up film strips, especially once computer editing came around. Neither Laverents or the San Diego club quit here, though. The club lasted until the early 2000s, while Laverents continued making films into the same decade. By this time, younger generations were utilizing digital video, which offered similar visual quality to professional cameras, and desktop editing software such as Final Cut Premiere, Adobe Premiere, and i-Movie. (Also Windows Movie Maker, not that anyone would mistake my school projects on that software for a professional project). 

Social media became a route for amateur filmmakers to gain a higher visibility than ever before, especially YouTube, which launched four years before Sid Laverents’ 2009 death at age 100. Traditional media outlets exerted heavy influence over smaller creators through copyright claiming unauthorized remixes of their material, uploading officially sanctioned videos that compete with amateurs, and collecting user data for targeted advertising in new ways that didn’t exist in the era of pre-internet film clubs. Despite still-existing barriers and disparities in resources between studios and individuals, amateur filmmakers still make unique and creative art distinct from what the professionals are doing. Half the theater kids on that site unintentionally echo Multiple SIDosis in their own music videos, both in the editing structure and the general attitude of earnestness and sincerity.

This one’s a collaboration of two people instead of a one-man-band, but they still deploy similar person-harmonizing-with-himself techniques.

While Multiple SIDosis may not be among the most historically significant or well-known films on the registry, it’s a novelty that required a lot of technical expertise and innovation on less resources than the major studios had. Even if Laverents failed to “make it big” in entertainment in his youth, his recollections on that time ended up foreshadowing much later generations of amateur creators.

Sources

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/multiple-sidosis-and-disneyland-dream-two-amateur-masterpieces-1-180949236/

https://www.centerforhomemovies.org/other-histories/essays/multiple-sidosis-melinda-stone/

https://www.vice.com/en/article/im-short-not-stupid-presents-multiple-sidosis-456/

https://amianet.org/wp-content/uploads/Resources-Oral-History-Laverents-2006-1.pdf

https://cinema.usc.edu/archivedassets/098/15844.pdf