ABSTRACT
As I mentioned in the acknowledgements, the first time I hand-processed motion picture film was with Robin Cline at her house in the late 1980s in Olympia, Washington, using an E-6 kit to develop Ektachrome. I think it is funny that I basically did the most difficult process first (it had something like eleven steps) with absolutely zero idea about how toxic the chemistry was. I don’t even remember what was on the film and the original is lost to time. Following that I began to experiment with black and white processing with kits designed for T-max still film. I hand-processed parts of Story of Sarah (1993), originally on Super-8mm, and was introduced to the joys of High-contrast black and white film by Michael Hoolboom. As I noted in the previous chapter, Hi-con was the cheapest, easiest-to-process stock and gave me the most interesting results. I was soon hooked on it and used it and various hand-processing techniques in my other 16mm films completed in graduate school, Razed by Wolves (1998) and Endless Present: Biography Of An Unknown Filmmaker, a film by Cornealius Thistle (1999). Endless Present even fore-grounded the act of hand-processing as part of the film.
