Curriculum issues. Reduce, reuse, recycle. Then the projector broke with no one to repair it.
When we recently moved from Chicago to Brooklyn we brought the old wooden library card catalogue box with us.
There is a certain irony that we will be using it as a stand for our TV screen.
No longer holding cards with the names and Dewey decimal system code on them, the tiny drawers have for the past twenty years held paper clips, keys, rubber bands and picture hooks.
How did we get the card catalogue? It goes back to the day when our elementary school’s LRC collection was being transferred to digital.
When I learned that the LRC director was going to toss the file boxes out in the trash I claimed one and took it home.
It was not the only thing from my school I reduced, recycled and reused.
Our district had a pretty good collection of 16 millimeter educational films about art.
But the district LRC director decided to convert everything to CDs and toss out the reels of educational films and the old school film projectors.
The color of masterworks of art on the CDs just did not have the clarity of the old films.
I couldn’t save the films.
But I did grab a projector.
I also got hold of a few cans of old educational films. I didn’t care about the subject matter because I spent a Saturday in the Art room when there were no students around and stripped all the films of their content with rubber gloves and bleach.
My students were going to make art by marking directly on the blank strips of film.
How did this work?
The film was laid out across the work surface and fixed into place. My students would then ignore the fact that traditionally film runs through the projector at 24 frames a second.
The French film director Jean Lucy Godard once said, “Photography is truth. The cinema is truth 24 times per second. Ce n'est pas une image juste, c'est juste une image.” Film is not an image. It is the image, Godard said.
By ignoring the cells, my students would be going after a different kind of truth.
My students could treat the film just like a tiny piece of paper. They could draw anything they wanted as long as I provided them with media that would affix to the film.
They could scratch into it. Punch holes in it. They could sand it. They could do anything so long as it wouldn’t jam up the projector when we ran the film through it.
Of course, what teacher in the old days of school movie projector days didn’t have the film jam up no matter what.
Within two years my projector was broken with no-one to repair it.
And all the film stock was gone.