A screening and talk at Plymouth University, Robert Shaller had brought 16mm prints and some of his homemade 16mm cameras. Shaller was Stan Brakhage’s projectionist in Boulder, Colorado, USA. He visited to talk about his projects that explore the representation of landscape, projecting examples of his work from 16mm film. Marcy Saude kindly brought her projector as ours all have ‘issues’ and the university has none that are working.
The films were great and his low-tech cameras – one made from empty Kodak 16mm film boxes – caught the imagination of the audience. His devotion to the materiality of film was inspirational.
The event info:
Robert Schaller the renowned American film-maker and founder of the Handmade Film Institute in Colorado, USA, will be here on Tuesday and Wednesday to talk about his projects that explore the representation of landscape, and will be using a 16mm film projector to screen examples of his work.
Wednesday 9 May 4.30pm > 6.00pm
Room 102 Scott Building, University of Plymouth
About the artist:
For more than twenty years, Robert Schaller has been making films that are fundamentally concerned with two essential aspects of film-making: the materiality of the film medium itself, and the creation of ‘visual music’ through applying the formal structures of music to film-making.
His approach is based on the fact that film, consisting merely of a transparent strip of plastic that can be held in the hand and seen with an unaided eye, is accessible to the artist in a direct and tactile way. He has been a pioneer in re-envisioning the industrial model of celluloid film-making into an embodied human-scale practice for the individual artist who seeks greater control of the means of artistic production.
His is an anti-consumer world of film-making in which the work of creating and re-conceiving the materials, tools, and methods of the medium on a personal non-industrial scale is as essential to the art as are the images light casts on a screen after passing through it.