Print Generation
Oct 06, 2013
(J.J. Murphy, USA, 1974, 16mm)
Director in attendance!
Rarely screened and newly available in a meticulously restored print, Print Generation is J.J. Murphy’s seminal exploration of film and memory. In Print Generation, Murphy took one minute of footage and re-printed it fifty times, pushing the limits of film’s materiality, radically transforming the image, and creating a profound journey from abstraction to representation (and back again).
Summing up “concerns that have marked independent filmmaking since the late Sixties: intrinsic film structure and personal diary," (Mike Reynolds, Berkeley Barb), Print Generation harnesses image and sound deterioration to elegantly address the intricacies of perception, memory and time: how we remember, what we remember and how the fleeting nature of memory itself reveals and recedes.
This recently restored archival print is courtesy of the Academy Film Archive. Special thanks to Mark Toscano. Screens with two other J.J. Murphy shorts!