Unessential Cinema: An Interview with Andrew Lampert

A significant strand of experimental filmmaking consists of work by artists who use found footage, cutting apart and collaging it together oftentimes coalescing material from a multitude of sources, and sometimes employing radical alteration and transformation of the original image and sound. But then there also exists the occasional example that follows a more Duchampian ready-made model, where the filmmaker chooses to play a role analogous to the film preservationist, respecting qualities of the found material just as it is, adopted and presented in an untouched state:

Recycling found footage may require nothing more than finding it and showing it to someone who appreciates it. "A lot of film is perfect left alone, perfectly revealing in its un- or semi-conscious form," Ken Jacobs writes in a note on his Perfect Film (1986). . . . In a similar vein, [Hollis] Frampton's Works and Days reproduces an early documentary of a man and woman methodically planting their vegetable garden, to which Frampton has added nothing but the title and his logo. . . . In the same spirit of nonintervention— but not necessarily admiration— Craig Baldwin includes found footage in the avant-garde film series he regularly presents. . . . If these "left-overs" are also "perfect left alone," it is not because they are unrecognized gems of cinematic art, but because their very artlessness exposes them to more critical—and more amusing—readings than their original makers intended or their original audiences were likely to produce.¹

Whereas such works are usually the exception to a filmmaker's oeuvre, or works that are simply screened for their kitsch value as cultural detritus, Andrew Lampert, archivist at Anthology Film Archives, has taken this concept of the left-alone found-footage film and realized it on a monumental scale: he has taken this ready-made approach to the entire collection of thousands of unidentified, abandoned, and discarded works that sit in the basement at Anthology. For nearly the past ten years, he has been presenting these discoveries as Unessential Cinema. The Unessential Cinema is the public presentation of works ostensibly destined not to be preserved.

Joel Schlemowitz (JS):

Could you tell how Unessential Cinema was birthed into the world?

ANDREW LAMPERT (AL):

I started working on the theater side of things at Anthology in 1998, and at that point, through my regular evening activities, as well as coming in during days to generally assist Jonas Mekas and the staff, I came to encounter the collection that became Unessential Cinema, which was an entire cellar's worth of discarded films from deceased laboratories, widows, dumpsters, from the street, from every nook and cranny. Now these aren't necessarily the works that are characterized as canonical classics of the avant-garde, or independent film, or art cinema. These included everything from raw reels of news footage to airplane commercials, some home movies, unfinished film materials that had been left in laboratories, and some surprisingly notable materials that were later discovered once Anthology had an archivist, but at that point there really wasn't one. . . .

In 2002 I went to the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation to train as a film archivist and came back to Anthology after graduating. Anthology has storage in a variety of places; there is what we call the "cold vault" on the second floor behind the Deren Theater, there is some material in off-site storage in New Jersey as well as in Maine, and then there was the basement at our Second Avenue building. . . . The materials down there were rudimentally cataloged, largely uncataloged, or buried under a paper trail that was nearly impossible to reconstruct. Returning to Anthology with archival training, I felt that one of the most important first steps was to dive into the basement to try to organize, try to parse out what was legitimately important and what should be moved into different, better storage. We also needed to be honest with ourselves and ask, "What don't we need? What is not related to the mission statement of Anthology?" The shortened version of which would be "to preserve, promote, present experimental...