17 Reasons Why
Directed byNathaniel Dorsky
Distributed byCanyon Cinema
Release date
  • October 6, 1987 (1987-10-06)
Running time
19 minutes
CountryUnited States
LanguageSilent

17 Reasons Why is a 1987 American avant-garde short film directed by Nathaniel Dorsky. Working with a collection of secondhand portable cameras, Dorsky used the unslit 8 mm footage to create a split screen with four quadrants. Normally screened on 16 mm film at 16 frames per second, it is one of his only works to have been shown as a digital transfer.

Description

17 Reasons divides the screen into four quadrants. The top and bottom images are offset by a single frame.[1] The left and right sides usually use different shots but sometimes show the same image out of sync.[2]

The content of the images varies between landscapes, interior scenes, faces, extreme close-ups of objects, and color fields. These are sometimes combined through multiple exposures.[1][2]

Production

Double 8 mm film is made by shooting along each side of a 16 mm film strip and splitting it in half during development. Dorsky used unslit Double 8 to create a 16 mm film with four images per frame.

The split screen in 17 Reasons Why was produced through Double 8, a technique common within experimental cinema during the 1970s.[3] Double 8 mm film uses a single film strip that is 16 mm wide. Only half the width is exposed at any given time, and the camera operator flips the roll once one side is complete. When the roll is developed, the strip is slit along the center to separate it into two 8 mm strips. To create the quadrisected image, Dorsky created a 16 mm strip from printing the unslit 8 mm strips, such that each 16 mm frame contains four smaller 8 mm frames.[4][5]

Dorsky made the film using old 8 mm cameras he purchased secondhand.[6] To prevent the two sides of the strip from facing different directions, he held the camera upside down when shooting the second side of each roll.[3] His use of multiple cameras and film stocks produced different colors, textures, and gate shapes in the resulting footage.[1][7] He edited the footage together, using much shorter shot durations than is common in his work.[8]

The title 17 Reasons Why comes from a rooftop sign at 17th and Mission Street which appears in the film.[7]

Release

The film premiered on October 6, 1987, at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, in a program with Pneuma and Alaya.[6] It screened on October 20 at the Collective for Living Cinema in New York.[2] Dorsky requests the film be projected at 16 frames per second, slightly slower than the 18 fps frame rate of his other films or the 24 fps frame rate of typical sound films, to emphasize the articulation of individual frames.[3]

17 Reasons Why is one of few films by Dorsky to have been presented digitally. A 2019 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Private Lives Public Spaces, featured 100 works of "artist's cinema, amateur movies, and family filmmaking". 17 Reasons Why was presented on a digital screen in front of a dark background at the exhibition's entrance, in addition to two 16 mm screenings. MoMA had wanted to show the film as a 16 mm loop, but the wear and tear would have destroyed the print. Dorsky was concerned that rendering the film at 16 frames per second would require the insertion of duplicate frames, which would interfere with its single-frame effects. Upon seeing the installation of the digital version, Dorsky remarked that it "has less feeling of body and light, delicacy of color, and tenderness of fragile beauty" than the film version but that he was "very pleasantly surprised with how good the MoMA technicians made the film look in its own newly acquired digital terms."[9][10]

Reception

Critic Amy Taubin described the film as "lively, glittering, and mysterious", writing that it "has the surprise and resonance of accomplished ensemble jazz improvisation."[2]

References

  1. 1 2 3 Kleinhans, Chuck (February 1988). "Margin notes". Afterimage. Vol. 15, no. 7. p. 21. doi:10.1525/aft.1988.15.7.21.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Taubin, Amy (October 27, 1987). "Being Here Now". The Village Voice.
  3. 1 2 3 Proctor, Maximilien Luc (February 15, 2022). "Nathaniel Dorsky: Shimmering Golden Music". Notebook. Retrieved December 16, 2023.
  4. ↑ Wolff, Kurt (February 1988). "Filming Grains of Sand". San Francisco Bay Guardian. p. 30.
  5. ↑ MacDonald, Scott (2006). A Critical Cinema 5: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers. University of California Press. p. 88. ISBN 978-0-520-93908-0.
  6. 1 2 Ahlgren, Calvin (October 4, 1987). "Making an Art Form of Chemical Breakdown". San Francisco Chronicle. p. 37.
  7. 1 2 Sicinski, Michael (2010). "The Bay Area as Cinematic Space in Twenty-five Stops or Less". In Anker, Steve; Geritz, Kathy; Seid, Steve (eds.). Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–2000. University of California Press. p. 269. ISBN 978-0-520-24911-0.
  8. ↑ Nelson, Max (July 2016). "Heavenly Host". Film Comment. Vol. 52, no. 4. p. 53. Retrieved December 16, 2023.
  9. ↑ Hudson, David (September 27, 2019). "Archived and Revived". The Criterion Collection. Retrieved December 16, 2023.
  10. ↑ Dorsky, Nathaniel (September 22, 2019). "17 Reasons Why by Nathaniel Dorsky is the welcoming moving image for MoMA's new installation". Retrieved December 16, 2023.
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