On Aug 11, 2026, at 2:39 PM, Dominic Angerame
<[email protected]> wrote:
Hi Fred to add to the reproduction of your scan, in the image
that the Modern Art Museum used even the sprocket holes are on
the wrong side if one is running the film on a set rewinds.
Obviously whoever did this design knows nothing about celluloid
film. They are just using it as decorative art.
Dominic
On Tue, Aug 11, 2026 at 4:09 AM Fred Camper <[email protected]> wrote:
This admittedly harsh rant is in response to a little ad for
a likely very worthy program of experimental films coming up
at the MoMA. My objection is to an image shown below. The
post is at
https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=pfbid0JuRUP85Wnng2eC3bzcaZUSG2FoNdxaKnkvrBXvai6mkUrARdjcxrVRhZ1j4jcyX7l&id=100021319367953
<https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=pfbid0JuRUP85Wnng2eC3bzcaZUSG2FoNdxaKnkvrBXvai6mkUrARdjcxrVRhZ1j4jcyX7l&id=100021319367953>
<MoMAStrip.jpg>
Thank you for making me aware of the fact that the Museum of
Modern Art's Department of Film has stolen one of my many
scans of strips from films by Stan Brakhage off of my Web site.
<https://www.fredcamper.com/Film/BrakhageS.html>
Forgive me, because this rant may seem somewhat insane, but I
believe it to be justified. My many scans of strips from
prints of Brakhage films were made over two decades with
scanners I purchased myself, the images selected as carefully
as I could based on my feel for his aesthetic and knowledge
of his films. They were made, more importantly, out of love
for the films, and I tried to find images that would be
interesting or attractive on their own but would also
represent the film well. Hence many scans, such as this one,
were chosen to display particularly meaningful cuts. These
choices were made by someone whose life was changed by
discovering Brakhage films at 16, attending the world
premiere of “The Art of Vision” at Yale at 17, and by showing
and speaking on his films at various venues throughout the
world after having shown them at a film society I co-founded
in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1964, which included the
presentation of the premiere of “23rd Psalm Branch,” with
Brakhage in attendance and me projecting, as well as other
programs of films by Peter Kubelka, Bruce Baillie, and Warren
Sonbert, with each of them in attendance, and more.
When I showed Brakhage the first pages of stills on my site,
right after setting it up, in the fall of 2001, only a little
less than a year before he died, he really liked them. I want
to say he loved them. He asked how long they would be up on
the Internet. When I said something like “permanently” or
“indefinitely,” he seemed surprised and pleased. Twenty-five
years later they are still up, and are still being used
without permission in ways that misrepresent the films.
Isn’t “stolen” a little harsh? I haven't tried to copyright
my choices of stills; I assume that they can't be, and that
seems just. But that doesn't mean people should use them
without permission. The so-called “Brakhage Center” did that
some years ago, mixing them in with a student-designed mashup
of images. Had the Museum of Modern Art, Department of Film,
New York, bothered to write me for permission, the strip
would have been free, but they would have gotten a sharper,
higher-resolution strip than what I put on the Web. They also
would not have been able to misuse it the way they did.
Marilyn Brakhage and I have never permitted the strips to be
run sideways. Run that way, they are false to the film. The
whole point of trying to get people to run strips rather than
single-frame enlargements is that Brakhage’s ever-changing
film spaces are best suggested by strips. But sideways?
Really? The baby shown sideways? Would you do that with a
single-frame enlargement? Run vertically, the strips can
encourage one to imagine an instant of the film.
Horizontally, they are reduced to decoration.
What’s even worse: we tend to “read” a horizontal strip left
to right, in the direction in which we read text. Seen that
way, the viewer will infer that the baby is right side up,
and that it appears after the blue light. But in this brief
segment of “Anticipation of the Night,” the baby is shown
upside down, and the blue light comes after. In the film, the
camera swirls about the baby, and it is seen in what feels
like all possible orientations.
I suppose it’s possible that someone made their own scan from
a print of the film. That would explain the absurdly
“decorative” presence of three different lines of sprocket
holes running along the edges of the film, two very thin ones
and a full one. Or would it? This kind of stupid and false
paste-in job, adding sprocket holes (which in fact some of my
strips do include), has been done before with my strips. But
how would they have managed to choose exactly this cut? In
any case, their image is not only less sharp than mine, but
far too “overexposed.”
My dear friend Kirk Winslow said at a dinner in 2002, when I
complained about a bad editor trying to introduce factual
errors into my film writing, after the other three of us
complained about poor film projection in New York, “Fred!
People just don’t care,” pounding his fist on the table once
for each word. I perhaps would not remember this so vividly,
and cite it so often, if it were not the last time he went
out. He died of HIV a month or two later.
If we wish to make the world better, we need to stop
thoughtlessly slapping things together, and instead, to start
caring.
<http://www.fredcamper.com/> Fred Camper
<http://www.fredcamper.com/>
Chicago
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