On Thursday last week my 16mm film + video class had a field trip to the Documentary Film Studio in St. Petersburg, right by the Mariinsky Theatre. The trip was to learn about how they put together old 35mm documentary films in St. Petersburg back when it was Leningrad, but as one of the Russian girls in my class exclaimed, the trip was more like "a field trip back to Soviet times."
Absolutely nothing in this studio looks like it has ever changed since it was built in the CCCP. First, we met the man who runs everything there, our professor's friend, as you really can't get in there for our kind of a tour just walking in off the street. He took us to an old projector room, and showed us an hour's worth of documentary film clips -- news shorts, the kinds of things they showed at the beginnings of movies -- spanning from 1930 to 1994. Two minutes of a man making a schwarma in a kiosk in the square, footage of hot air balloons hovering over St. Isaac's Cathedral, clips of Che meeting with Russian officials, all kinds of things. They were all black and white and gritty and choppy and beautiful, god I love that kind of thing. What was most funny to me was the tone of the voice of the narrator, though speaking Russian, was exactly the same kind of narrator voice they have in the same kinds of old documentary clips done in America back in the day. I don't know if that is because of the quality of the sound, or if that is just how they got narrators to talk during that time period...
So after we watched the clips, the man who runs everything kind of shrugged, as if to say that was it, and our film professor asked if he would show us around. "What is there to show?" he asked her, everything being so ordinary to him, not really understanding what we would be interested in seeing. "Well, what about the machines where you sync up the sound and the visual images?" He skeptically agreed and showed us....
.... and gave us the most fabulous tour of the entire place, all of us, including the Russian students, felt like we were suddenly taken into the CCCP in the 70s or something. They use the same old use Soviet tables to sync up the movies and the audio tracks, they have stacks and stacks of the old film tins, the place is full of dust and sunlight and potted plants, and was a photographic haven for me. I wanted to move into that place and just photograph the hell out of it for the rest of my life.
It was funny to watch how our tour guide gathered speed, finding more and more things to show us and getting more excited as we expressed our enthusiasm at seeing all the old equipment and how things are done. We ended up staying about an hour longer than we planned on there, running out of class time, forcing our professor to make our mid-term exam we were supposed to take after the field trip a take home. OH WELL.
The best part was at the end though one of the more fiesty, outgoing Russian girls in my class got up the courage to ask our guide if she could have one of the spare old rusting film tins lying around. He said of course, sure, would anyone else like one too? Well, of COURSE, we all wanted one, and it became like New Year's or Christmas, our tour guide shuffling through old cabinets and pulling out tins, reading off the years on them, trying to match birth years and giving us the oldest tins possible.
I got two tins that actually still have unexposed old 35mm color movie film in them, which I can wind off in portions and load into my regular 35mm still film camera. It'll be an experiment to see if left over Soviet film from 1981 and 1991 will still work. I might get some cool, distorted colors.
1 comment:
best field trip ever!
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