Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son

Original 1905 film shot and probably directed by G.W. ‘Billy’ Bitzer, rescued via a paper print. Reverently examined here, a new movie almost incidentally comes into being. The staging and cutting is pre-Griffith. An inspired indication of a path of cinematic development whose value has only recently been rediscovered. My camera closes in only to better ascertain the infinite richness, searching out incongruities in the story-telling, delighting in the whole bizarre human phenomena of story-telling itself and this within the fantasy of reading any bygone time out of the visual crudities of film: dream within a dream!
And then I wanted to show the actual present of film, just begin to indicate its energy. A train of images passes like enough and different enough to imply to the mind that its eyes are seeing an arm lift, or a door close; I wanted to ‘bring to the surface’ that multi-rhythmic collision-contesting of dark and light two-dimensional force-areas struggling edge to edge for identity of shape… to get into the amoebic grain pattern itself – a chemical dispersion pattern unique to each frame, each cold still… stirred to life by a successive 16-24 f.p.s. pattering on our retinas, the teeming energies elicited (the grains! the grains!). (KJ)