The Flamethrowers started in 1988 with finding a damaged 16mm print of Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali in a film library in Cambridge, Mass. I re-filmed close-up sections of the damaged film onto 3 rolls of super8 and, because the footage was inspiring and other-worldly, sent the processed film along with 3 fresh rolls to Alte Kinder in Bielefeld, Germany, proposing that they create a second series of images after viewing that initial material (and that perhaps this project should be called The Flamethrowers). Matthias Mueller and Alte Kinder invited me to Bielefeld for the Intercom Festival, where we presented parts 1 and 2 of this project, using 3 projectors to create a film tryptiche. I arrived as Matthias, Maija-Lene Rettig, Christiane Heuwinkel and Thomas Lauks were putting the final splices on their 3 rolls, perhaps the only time all 3 had worked together on a film (and they used Kubelka-style measuring tape to determine shot lengths!). After this experience I suggested that the material be handed off to Schmelzdahin, the Bonn, Germany trio who have inspired so many filmmakers to mix their own chemistry, that this project was a subliminal homage to their work. The film was passed along and Scmelzdahin (Jochen Lempert, Jurgen Reble and Jochen Mueller) made a third extraordinary section of film. There was talk about a grant received to make a 35mm version of the piece, but this evidently did not turn out well. (This may also have been one of the last projects Schmelzdahin worked on as a group.) Matthias re-filmed the reels using 3 projectors, inter-cutting that with fullscreen images, and put together what is the definitive version of the piece, a brilliant synthesis of all of its parts, complete with soundtrack. The Flamethrowers is in some ways the creative culmination or result of the Film Almanac project.


view excerpt THE FLAMETHROWERS

contributor   Schmelzdahin