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"Unfortunately, time will soon no longer be master. Wrapped in their aura of doubt and error, this day's events, however insignificant they may be, will in a few seconds begin their work, gradually encroaching upon their ideal order, cunningly introducing an occasional inversion, a discrepancy, a confusion, a warp, in order to accomplish their task..." (The Erasers/Les Gommes, Alain Robbe-Grillet) |
Wiper was made in 1977 at the Birmingham Filmmakers Co-operative. At the time they had very few resources other than enthusiasm and a 16mm Bell & Howell camera on loan. The only publicly accessible resource of the type required to produce the frame by frame manipulation in "Wiper", was the optical printer at the London Filmmakers Co-operative (LFMC). As with "Windowframe", the production required the filming of the original footage and subsequent re-photography to produce, in this instance, the intervention and restructuring of the frame order down to single frames. Photography took place on the outskirts of Birmingham using an electric drive Bolex camera borrowed from the Arts Council in Piccadilly. The subsequent re-photography took place at LFMC using the optical printer. This machine is a camera with a lens set so that it can focus on an entire 16mm frame of film – about the size of a quarter of a postage stamp. Consequently, it can make a 1:1 copy of any frame on a film laced in the film holder in front of it. Both film holder and camera can be controlled synchronously or individually by stepper motors. The time manipulations in Wiper were made by rephotographing frames from the original footage in the new order required. For example, in the section of the film where the wiper blade flutters almost vertically, the original footage was run through to select only the frames where the blade was in this upright position and only those frames recorded to create the final sequence. Choice of frames could only be done by estimation by eye, and considerable testing was done to get the smoothest effect possible. This re-photography took several weeks, travelling to London each weekend. Laboratory processing was out of the question for tests, the short lengths of tests being difficult to deal with on machines designed for continuous operation, but also the time taken to review test material and test again would have extended the entire procedure of testing and analysing results for months. Consequently, weekly travel to London was with an accompanying mini-laboratory of Ukrainian made 16mm processing tanks, bottles of developer and fixer, and a borrowed hair dryer so that tests could be processed immediately and further tests carried out.
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