Browse Exhibits (1 total)

August 20 – December 9, 2018

ARK is a cinematic installation featuring a film by Michael A. Morris made from archival 35mm film prints held in the G. William Jones Film and Video Collection. This work is installed on a looping film system devised by the Collection’s Jeremy Spracklen and Scott Martin, and in conjunction with Brad Miller from Film-Tech Cinema Systems. The looping film is a new mosaic of images and sounds created by contact printing and hand processing of short lengths of films selected from the archive. Highlighting the mechanics of projection typically hidden from the viewer, the space of the Hawn Gallery performs as a small cinema. The metaphor of both Noah’s Ark and the Ark of the Covenant serves as a parallel for the archive as it rescues hundreds of films from the deluge of time. These films are reactivated by bringing them back into the light and onto the screen in a new looping film installation. Such assemblage embodies our cinematic heritage.

ARK is a film made from 35mm prints held in the G. William Jones Film and Video Collection’s archive. The film was made from a selection of individual films in the darkroom to create new contact printed strips of film. The process involved experimenting with methods of exposure in response to the visibility of the 35mm projector, normally hidden in a booth behind the audience. The film is based on a rare version of the 1928 silent epic Noah’s Ark, which makes use of optical sound added in the 1950s, along with a number of other films. The Ark depicted in the film is intended as a stand-in for the archive, a holding place to preserve films from the passage of time and a refuge from which to repopulate the world with images.