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Film: An Object Lesson

A talk and tour through the film medium as object and experience.

Program by Mark Toscano

Film, as a medium based on our real-time temporal experience of it (and our ex post facto memory of it) is beautifully transient, existing largely in our minds, hearts, and memories as a deeply subjective, mutable, shareable experience. But another equally powerful aspect of the medium is its rich physicality: negatives, soundtracks, and prints, waiting to be activated by machinery to perform their contents for us. These objects sit in vaults, on shelves, under beds, on inspection benches, powerfully sensual and beautifully, fragilely, humanely physical, but the vast majority of people don’t experience or even consider this aspect of the medium. In most filmmaking, the makers have gone to great pains to hide the medium behind a wizard’s curtain. But in some filmmaking, this physicality is in intimate dialogue with that ephemerality.

“I’ve always appreciated Andrei Tarkovsky’s notion of “Sculpting in Time”, in relation to filmmaking, but over the years it has come to mean something very different for me as a filmmaker and archivist. Working for years now with film in a hands-on way has made me hyper-conscious of the medium as having a vividly and fascinatingly dual nature – as ephemeral experience in time, and as physical object in space.“
–Mark Toscano

Mark Toscano is a film preservationist for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Archive. Among other tasks, he searches out and preserves experimental and avant-garde cinema, particularly work from West Coast filmmakers.

Mark is aware that archivists can have a big impact on film culture. By selecting films to save, they expand the canon and invite researchers to consider work that might otherwise be missed. A curator’s enthusiasm can fuel new scholarship, and part of Mark’s mission is to bring the inventiveness of lesser-known avant-garde filmmakers to new prominence through both his capacity as a preservationist and as a programmer.