ELEGY TO THE PAMPA GRASS - Author´s Note

Last autumn, I shot the short film "Elegy to the Pampa Grass" using a few meters of old Kodak Ektachrome 7285 film, expired in 2012. Carefully removed the film from its original Super-8 cartridges, I reload it in 7.5-meter batches to Single-8 cartridges in order to use my loyal ZC1000N camera —a companion of a lifetime— which has followed me since my student years, from the deserts of Africa to the desolate Taylor Dry Valley in Antarctica.

I developed the film myself, in my own lab in La Corunna (Galicia, NW of Spain), using a JoBo Classic CPP processor and original chemicals. The initial edit was done the old-fashioned way: with a Goko viewer and a Fujifilm splicer, cutting and joining each shot with the same care one might use to bind a book.

Slide Ektachrome 7294

Over that first cut on film, this weekend —in the symbolic contrast of a new Mac computer— I’m writing a script that seeks to accompany the images with a slow reflection on the movement of species. A notion that some today attack in the name of ecological purity, yet one that has always been present in the very history of life’s evolution on Earth: life is movement, mixing, transformation.

This short film, like all my cinematic work, is a fully handcrafted creation: I shoot, develop, edit and write it myself. I may not manufacture the raw film —that’s still Kodak’s domain— but I come close: I repackage it, in dark room,  from Super-8 to Single-8 cartridges, a film system that officially ceased to exist in 2013.

Luckily, I’m not alone in this endeavor. In the editing, reloading and processing, I count on the help of my factotum Álex, who, like me, believes that real film cinema is more than just images —it’s a way of seeing the world.

For the musical accompaniment, I’d love to include a piece by the great Galician gaiteiro, Anxo Lorenzo.
But that… we’ll tell you more about soon.

PS Last minute: finally, I will record the locution in Spanish (with English subtitles): herr kommandat Javier, a patriot, convinced me with his arguments.