Look What Anthology Dragged In
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Since its founding in 1970, Anthology Film Archives has amassed a collection of more than 11,000 experimental, underground, and avant-garde films. Of course, terms like “avant-garde” and “underground” are as easy to toss around as they are difficult to define, so Anthology’s curatorial policy has had to remain as open-door as space and funding could allow.
Through the years, the archive has pursued, acquired, and preserved films and materials from Jonas Mekas and Stan Brakhage, Andy Warhol, Ken Jacobs, and other leading lights of American cinematic counterculture. It has also opened its vault doors to contributions from a dizzying variety of sources.
Meanwhile, since the early 1970s, dozens of small New York City film laboratories have gone out of business as their bread and butter clients moved from film to video. A film lab doesn’t just process film; most offer to store negatives, soundtracks, and the various elements that combine to make a film print, in the expectation that more prints will be required. When a lab goes under, those materials often go from climate-controlled storage to a dumpster.
In the early years of Anthology’s mission, Mr. Mekas and company would comb the dumpsters outside shuttered film processors in the hope of preserving films that would otherwise become landfill. Soon enough, labs, libraries, distributors, schools, and filmmakers began sending AFA hundreds of orphan film prints, negatives, soundtracks, tape-spliced work prints, and raw dailies of every conceivable film gauge, origin, and condition.
Archivist Andrew Lampert, himself an experimental filmmaker, supervises Anthology’s restoration work. But he is also in charge of the flood of often mislabeled and mismatched films coming over the archives’ transom.
“At Anthology we have thousands of important and unique films covering the entire breadth and canon of avant garde cinema,” Mr. Lampert said.
Anthology’s two screens host around 700 public screenings a year. The backbone of the programming, called “Essential Cinema,” is a cycle of classic, pioneering films. But thanks to the fluctuating fortunes of the laboratory business, AFA’s collection also includes training films, porno reels, home movies, forgotten experimental shorts, advertisements, and trailers by the score. For the past few years, Mr. Lampert has organized quarterly programs culled from this slush pile that he calls “Unessential Cinema.” This season’s edition, entitled “What Is on Shelf #510?,” will be presented tomorrow night at AFA.
Previous “Unessential Cinema”shows have featured such “titles” (whatever label the film can bears, no matter how inscrutable or inaccurate) as “Dissection of a Rat,” “Malakapalakadoo, Skip Two,” and “In the Pants of the Universe.”
Double Projection Theater, an “Unessential Film” segment in which two or more films are projected over one another, has become a staple of Mr. Lampert’s programs.”There’s a belief among film archivists that every film should be saved, “Mr. Lampert said,” but that doesn’t mean every film should be watched, and it also doesn’t mean that every film should be watched on its own. For Double Projection Theater you’re not just looking to juxtapose individual films against each other, but on top of each other. You have to ask yourself, ‘What’s the value of this film?'”
A past “Unessential Cinema” Double Projection Theater segment combined a misprinted 35 mm section of George Romero’s “Day of the Dead” with unedited 16 mm rushes from “Dawn of the Dead,” depicting “extras bumping into glass doors,” and a reel titled “light experiments,” which Mr. Lampert described as “some hippy playing with a light.” As Mr. Lampert manipulated the frame line and switched soundtracks, the films took over.
“It was just so stunning,” he said. “I was overtaken by the power of the combined image and the two 35 mm xenon projector lamps fighting it out. Some sort of secret relationship started to appear.”
Tomorrow’s program poses more questions.
“We’ve spent a lot of time and effort returning materials to filmmakers and passing worthy stuff on to other archives like the Library of Congress, but there are so many unidentified cans that no one here remembers what the deal is with that one particular shelf.”
A quick perusal revealed such tantalizing titles as “Unknown Negative (Color) With Bees” and “Playground-Outtakes.” And a slightly deeper examination of the contents of another can yielded “a truly odd reel of hairy, naked Eastern Europeans doing some kind of arty sex ritual that I hope is performance art.”
Both a showman presenting the unpresentable and a keeper of a flame that in many cases extinguished itself decades ago, Mr. Lampert is as eager to display what’s on shelf #510 as he is to see it himself.
“If you come to ‘Unessential Cinema’ expecting a laugh a minute, you may not get it,” he said. “But if you come expecting to fulfill some hypothesis about what happens when a CIA training film is projected on top of ’70s porno, you’ve come to the right place.”