Handmade Tales

Steve Sangeudolce makes sure his hands get dirty

By Gemma Files, for eye Weekly

November 25/99.

From cheap stuff like The Blair Witch Project  and The Celebration

to the high-budget morph effects and digitized flourishes of movies like Fight Club , filmmaking is gradually becoming less and less of a hands-on medium--an industry that's already pretty much discarded as obsolete such time-honored customs as cutting and splicing by eye rather than by mouse-click on an AVID editing system.  But local experimental filmmaker and Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto activist Steve Sanguedolce isn't about to take that kind of nonsense lying down.

     So he takes it standing up, instead--in the basement laundry-room he's converted into his very own little do-it-yourself studio, a cramped wonderland where he personally develops, edits, prints and colors every foot of film he uses. 

     "It's like cooking," Sanguedolce tells me, during my visit to his

house. "You can do it from a book, but it's so much better when you get your hands right in there.  Mess around with the ingredients, learn how to measure by touch, and smell, and look, and taste, just like your grandmother always used to tell you...a pinch of this, a dash of that..."

     Taste  it?

     He pauses. "Well, yeah, that's not always  the world's best idea, 'cause this stuff is toxic.  But when you're working in the dark, it helps to know that not only is the emulsion side of the film usually the lighter side, but it's also the side that'll stick to your lip if you put it in your mouth."

     Tossing his film into plastic industrial buckets and swishing it

around with his rubber-gloved fingers, Sanguedolce works celluloid magic by a painstaking process of experimentation and elimination, figuring out exactly what chemical ratios and dilutions work best for his own particular purposes, painting with light, toner and emulsions. And then, after all that work, he just grabs the whole gooey mess, and tosses it into a clothes dryer set on "delicate".

     Not all of it comes out, of course. "When I hand-tint," Sanguedolce

explains, "I do stuff like running my film through an acid bath, which

means sometimes I end up burning it, just erasing the emulsion

completely.  It lifts off, and all I've got left is a clear plastic strip.  But since I worked out how to make contact prints on my Steenbeck editing flatbed, if and when that happens, I can just make myself

another print of the original and start all over."

     Pretty risky business. But worth it, in the end--since what it

produces is like nothing you've seen before.  Sanguedolce's most recent opus, Smack: for example is 45 minutes of 16-mm pseudo-autobiography with Super-8 diary sections, in which he uses two of his own brothers and one of their friends to narrate a not-exactly-true story cobbled together from Sanguedolce family anecdotes.  Like Sanguedolce's earlier works--particularly the 1997 short film Away , which told a similarly incestuous and half-crazed tale about twins (played by veteran CanCon actor Earl Pastko) who get caught up in the making of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now --it's poetic, evocative, strange and surreal right from the get-go, and this effect is only enhanced by the pulsing, hand-supersaturated colors that spill across every frame, clarifying and obscuring each successive image.

     "What I find really interesting," Sanguedolce points out, "is that

suddenly, experimental standards have sort of become industry standards: you look around, and everybody's doing all the stuff we  used to do--scratching, jump-cutting, inserting images, layering, deforming the negative in various ways...but the more they ingest our techniques, the further away from the process they tend to get, physically.  I mean, you can digitally scratch your images now, but that means you don't really get to touch  it anymore. And that's what I'm after."

     Sanguedolce says that learning to develop by hand has also helped him break the final back of every independent filmmaker's biggest nightmare: The fact that film, no matter how much more "organic" it looks than video, is so damn prohibitively expensive.

     "Right before I started Smack , I bought up a whole whack of the

stock the optical track usually gets printed on, which was selling for

roughly a tenth of the cost of regular Kodak stock. I bought about

15,000 feet, for myself and for LIFT--and almost immediately Kodak

discontinued it which we're in the process of talking to them about

right now.  But one way or another, I've got about ten rolls of this

stuff still on hold in my freezer, and you better believe I'm going to

use it."

     Some Hollywood-trained inquiring minds might wonder why a

self-taught celluloid magician like Sanguedolce would want to "restrict" himself to making experimental films, works that have little hope of distribution, and almost no hope of garnering the type of media or audience attention which most consumers equate with cinematic success.  But for Sanguedolce, there was never any question of doing "normal" movies.

     "The stuff I do is cerebral, hermetic," he admits. "It's solitary,

it costs a lot and it takes forever, and it just isn't for everyone,

either--I do it for the one other person who might  possibly get it besides me.  And if that sounds elitist, then--I guess it's just--when

it's gonna take you 10 years to get anything done anyway, you might as well do what you want."