Rick Hancox, Interviewed
Interview conducted by Bing Wang on March 31st, 2015. The interview was conducted by phone and is reproduced here in full with minor changes made for flow and ease of readability. All changes have been approved by Rick Hancox.
Take Two: You initially studied poetry and English literature at the University of P. E. I. How did you become interested in films?
Rick Hancox: I was interested in writing, music and also photography. And I could combine all of those in one media, in one media of film. I dropped out of Saint Dunstan’s University in PEI during 1967-68 and went to Montreal. I was just kind of lost about what to do with my career. I knew I was a creative person but wasn't really getting much satisfaction working in Montreal – particularly in my role as a taxi driver.
One day, I parked the taxi and walked into Paragraph bookstore, where there were two film books on sale. One was Screenplays by Ingmar Bergman and the other was An Introduction to the American Underground Film, written by Sheldon Renan. Of course, people in Canada were hearing of the underground film movement coming mainly out of New York and San Francisco. These were notorious and sensational films and they were very anti-Hollywood.
I opened Renan’s book first, and there were these great photographs in there of the filmmakers and stills from their films, and interesting bios of them. So I decided to buy that book instead of Screenplays by Ingmar Bergman, and it turned out to be a major decision. I got so enthusiastic when I started to read about people like Stan Brakhage, Ron Rice, and Jack Smith, and you know, Jonas Mekas and so on, and what I couldn't understand was how this incredibly creative work had been so hidden from us? So, when I went back to Charlottetown in the summer of 1968, with the intention of going back to University in the fall, I bought an old, broken 8mm camera for a dollar, fixed it, and started teaching myself.
Then in the fall, Prince of Wales College was granted university status, and I enrolled there as an English major (in 1970 it merged with St. Dunstan’s to form UPEI). At Prince of Wales, during its first and only year as a university, they brought in some amazing instructors including George Semsel, who had an MA in Creative Writing from Iowa, but had grown up in New York and knew and worked with a number of the experimental filmmakers I had been reading about in Sheldon Renan’s book. This was an amazing coincidence for me when Semsel was asked to teach film for the English Dept. at Prince of Wales that year (1968-69). George rented all these experimental films from the New York Independent Filmmakers Cooperative. Some of the filmmakers came up to PEI as guests. Semsel was good friends with Willard Maas and Marie Menken, and he later introduced me to them when he took me back with him to New York, where I worked in the film industry during the summer of 1969.
I noticed that in a letter you wrote to George Semsel in 1969, you had a feeling that Canadian film was not visible at that time. You said, “let's look at film in Canada. There is none. Comparing to any other country in the world, there IS none.” When did you feel this changed? When did you feel that Canadian independent films and filmmakers, especially Ontario and Toronto-based independent filmmakers became visible [to yourself]? And Were there any characteristics you feel were distinctly “Toronto”?
I don't know exactly what year. In my last year at university, 1969-70, there was no one to teach film, since George had returned to New York. So, I offered to teach a student workshop, and we started the UPEI Film Society. And what we did was bring in independent films, new Canadian films as well as America ones to show, with great support from the Student Union.
Actually, when we started the Film Society, I think Keith Lock and Jim Anderson’s films were among the first Canadian student films we brought in. They were students at York, and I had met them at the first Canadian Student Film Festival in the fall of 1969, held at Sir George Williams University in Montreal. Around that time also I started hearing about Michael Snow's work. When I continued on to graduate school at NYU and then Ohio University, between 1970 to '73, I saw quite few of Snow's films. Snow came as a guest to Ohio University, and I got to know him. When I graduated from Ohio in 1973, I moved to Toronto in the fall of 1973, to teach at Sheridan College in Oakville. It was then I started to get actively involved with the Toronto Filmmakers Co-op and CFMDC [Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre]. And when I got to Toronto, I of course met Michael Snow again, and Keith Lock and Jim Anderson, who were also actively involved with the TFC [Toronto Filmmakers Co-op] and CFMDC.
What about Joyce Wieland?
Yes, I also admired Joyce Wieland, whom I knew as Michael's wife. Rat life and Diet in North America (1968) had been one of my favorite experimental films, and Joyce was an inspiration.
Snow made a film called New York Eye and Ear Control in New York in the 1960s [1964], and one of the things that characterized these films by Toronto artists was the incorporation often of the personal surroundings of filmmaker’s domestic landscape. In 1972 my film A House Movie was made in Ohio where I lived at the time. It shared a similar interest in one’s immediate surroundings as these early films by Toronto experimental filmmakers. George Semsel was advocating what he called the ‘personal documentary,’ which influenced me greatly. But I think in Toronto we were also interested in pushing this further – by taking these personal landscapes and experimenting with the form and structure of the film. So, if you look at other films by Snow, like Short Shave (1965), Breakfast (Table Top Dolly) (1976), again, these are basically domestic landscapes, sort of re-imagined and turned into something else. You can find on my website [http://rickhancox.ca/writings.htm] a piece entitled “Independent Film-making in Ontario” by Ian Birnie, of the Art Gallery of Ontario, who was one of the first critics to recognize this domestic aspect of Ontario and Toronto experimental films of the period.
So, since we already talked about your films, when people talk about your later films like Waterworx (1982), Landfall (1983), Beach Events (A Clear Day and No Memories) (1984), and Moose Jaw: There's a Future in Our Past (1992), people always use words like “personal documentary” that you already mentioned, and “experimental documentary,” these kinds of words. How would you describe or define your style or aesthetic in your early films, for example Rose (1968), Cab 16 (1969), Tall Dark Stranger (1970), I, a Dog (1970), Next To Me (1971), and Rooftops (1971)? Do you think there are any differences in terms of style or aesthetics between your early films and later ones? And how significant were those early films in your filmmaking career?
I should also mention one of my other major influences in addition to Michael Snow – Arthur Lipsett. Lipsett was known as one of the few experimental filmmakers at The National Film Board of Canada, and was famous for his collage films of the 1960’s. He was one of the first found-footage filmmakers, in addition to people like Bruce Connor. Lipsett’s film Very Nice, Very Nice (1961) received two Academy Award nominations [Best Short Subject, Live Action Subjects] in 1962. Then there were his short films 21-87 (1964) and Free Fall (1964), which were the first Canadian experimental films I ever saw. I was very influenced by Lipsett’s films when I started seeing them in the 1960’s, especially his disruptive editing style and his views of science and technology as the new religion.
Now, you are asking about the early films. I think I was just trying to experiment with different forms, trying to find something that was really my voice. Rose was a collage film. That was my first film. Cab 16 was a documentary. Both of these were made in George Semsel’s class. Tall Dark Stranger was a dramatic film. They were all made in PEI.
Then when I went to New York, I spent the summer of 1969 in New York, and while there, filmed I, a Dog and Rooftops, and later, Next to Me. Next to Me was a film I made at New York University during 1970-71. I would call that the first film where I think I started to find a voice. I wanted to make a film that was about my - again, domestic - surroundings in New York and others things I noticed in the urban landscape. I was very influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photography and his notion of the ‘decisive moment,’ which we had being studying as part of an NYU photo history course at the Museum of Modern Art. I wanted to experiment with making, in a sense, a series of decisive movements. I had this idea of filming short actions, of a few seconds. And then, they would be separated by black leader later to give an impression of a slide show, not of stills but of motions. I didn't know how to edit the film – what sequence to put the ‘movements’ in. And finally, it dawned on me, that the shots that I conceived were not accidental. They were actually related and personal, not just formal constructs supposedly inspired by Cartier-Bresson. When I realized this I was able to finally structure the film and make a more personal, poetic statement by juxtaposing the images in a manner inspired by Arthur Lipsett. In addition, I was able to add a certain amount of reflexivity while creating the soundtrack, where I am actually reading aloud some of my own instructions from the initial shooting script.
After the Next to Me experience, I was able to start making personal documentaries with greater artistic consciousness. This really began when I continued my MFA studies at Ohio University in 1971. I think that as my films developed, they became directly autobiographical and personal. I also started to see the connections between the personal and political, especially with Moose Jaw (1992).
Professor Hancox, was Cab 16 a commissioned film or was it a student film?
It was a student film. It wasn't commissioned. It was a film about a man who had been in the local newspaper because of his public service and voluntary work. He was a cab driver, who transported the disabled children around Charlottetown between home and school for free (there was no bus service at the time). I thought that was a lovely story and I learned a lot from the whole experience.
After you received your MFA in 1973, you returned to Canada and finally became the Executive Chief of Filmmakers Co-op, will you elaborate how did you become the Executive Chief of Toronto Filmmakers Co-op or how did you become part of the Co-op?
Well, I wasn't the Executive, there was several of us. It was called the Executive Committee. It was sort of like the Board of Directors but we were volunteers. And we did things like hire the Director of the Co-op, and other important decisions. I contributed articles to our newsletter, Rushes. We were a small committee, maybe there was about six or eight of us, made up of people who did most of the work.
I became a member of the CFMDC in the early '70s, before I moved back to Canada from Ohio. In the summers, I would bring my new films up to Toronto for distribution. At that time, the offices of the TFC and the CFMDC were in Rochdale College. I resigned from the Filmmakers Co-op because it was evolving into, what I saw, as more of a commercial enterprise. It had been started by independent filmmakers, experimental filmmakers, by people who were not interested in making commercial, narrative or educational films. But what happened was, that since it was hard for Canadian feature directors to get distribution and screenings (owing to Hollywood’s dominance) they started infiltrating the Filmmakers Co-op, using it as kind of a lobby group to try to get funding from the government for a Canadian feature film industry. These members of the Executive Committee railroaded in a new director who had no background at all in independent shorts or experimental films. The Co-op started moving towards an industry model, more and more commercialized. Eventually, of course that is exactly what happened. It couldn’t operate that way for long, and eventually they went broke around the late '70s [1979]. What was reborn out of the old Co-op funding was LIFT [Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto], which is more what the Co-op should have been in my view.
Is this also the same reason why you resigned from CFMDC?
Yeah, similar. The CFMDC had decided to expand and take on regular commercial short films, educational films that would sell. The Distribution Center saw that by distributing these films and selling hundreds of prints to libraries across Canada, this would help pay for ‘the experimental films.’ There had been no categories in the early days of the Distribution Center. No categories like educational, dramatic, documentary, etc. They were just independent films. Now the CFMDC wanted to separate off these works into a category called ‘the experimental films,’ which effectively meant ghettoizing them. To me, all of our short films that were truly independent were, in a sense, experimental - experimental documentaries, experimental narratives, etc. They started hiring staff to put their energies into this commercialization, which I felt would dilute our original mission. They were effectively competing with independent commercial distributors, which didn’t seem right for a publicly funded, non-profit organization. To a certain extent, the National Film Board was guilty of this too, undercutting commercial distributors in price.
So you were also a Board Member of CFMDC?
Yes, I was a Board Member. And Mike Snow was also on that Board, and I had the good fortune to work with him.
I think we already touched on this part, but, our research also involves filmmakers, such as Jim Anderson and Keith Lock. They were also members of the Toronto Filmmakers Co-op and CFMDC, at that time. What did you think about their works? What was your relationship with other filmmakers of Toronto Filmmakers Co-op and CFMDC at that time?
They were on the Executive of the Filmmakers Co-op. I knew and loved their films. Their film Work, Bike and Eat (1972) is one of my favorite Canadian narrative films. I also loved Jim Anderson’s Young Street (1972) and wrote about that [ “Short Films,” Cinema Canada, Second Edition, No. 14, June/July 1974]. I admired Jim and Keith’s work and we talked a lot about independent filmmaking. Keith made a film called Everything Everywhere Alive Again, that was in the '70s [1975]. That had a big influence on me, particularly on my ‘poetry film’ trilogy. Keith’s film was a really beautiful, meditative landscape piece - I would call it a poetic landscape film. I should mention another person, not a filmmaker, but a key figure who was an influence on all of us, was Jim Murphy, who had been running the CFMDC for years. He was a draft dodger who came up from the States. He was really supportive and enthusiastic about our work, especially its irreverent and reflexive quality. Jim had been a member of SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] an outlawed organization, so he couldn’t go back to the U.S. in any case. He went on to work in commercial distribution, but unfortunately died about 10 years ago.
How are you at preserving your films now? Are they preserved by you or preserved by an institution?
Well, I have all of the elements here at home. I have the A & B roll reversal originals, but the problem is they just can't be printed anymore because nobody is making reversal prints now. The only way to do it is to get an internegative made of the reversal elements, but it's very, very expensive. A lot of us independent filmmakers from that generation are stuck with work that we can't reproduce. I’m lucky enough to have some good quality prints around. I’ve got good reversal prints of all of my films, which I've kept here at home. There is also the problem of there being few places where one can still see actual films projected properly on reliable, 16 mm projectors. CineCycle is an exception, as is Available Light Collective in Ottawa.
Rick Hancox: I was interested in writing, music and also photography. And I could combine all of those in one media, in one media of film. I dropped out of Saint Dunstan’s University in PEI during 1967-68 and went to Montreal. I was just kind of lost about what to do with my career. I knew I was a creative person but wasn't really getting much satisfaction working in Montreal – particularly in my role as a taxi driver.
One day, I parked the taxi and walked into Paragraph bookstore, where there were two film books on sale. One was Screenplays by Ingmar Bergman and the other was An Introduction to the American Underground Film, written by Sheldon Renan. Of course, people in Canada were hearing of the underground film movement coming mainly out of New York and San Francisco. These were notorious and sensational films and they were very anti-Hollywood.
I opened Renan’s book first, and there were these great photographs in there of the filmmakers and stills from their films, and interesting bios of them. So I decided to buy that book instead of Screenplays by Ingmar Bergman, and it turned out to be a major decision. I got so enthusiastic when I started to read about people like Stan Brakhage, Ron Rice, and Jack Smith, and you know, Jonas Mekas and so on, and what I couldn't understand was how this incredibly creative work had been so hidden from us? So, when I went back to Charlottetown in the summer of 1968, with the intention of going back to University in the fall, I bought an old, broken 8mm camera for a dollar, fixed it, and started teaching myself.
Then in the fall, Prince of Wales College was granted university status, and I enrolled there as an English major (in 1970 it merged with St. Dunstan’s to form UPEI). At Prince of Wales, during its first and only year as a university, they brought in some amazing instructors including George Semsel, who had an MA in Creative Writing from Iowa, but had grown up in New York and knew and worked with a number of the experimental filmmakers I had been reading about in Sheldon Renan’s book. This was an amazing coincidence for me when Semsel was asked to teach film for the English Dept. at Prince of Wales that year (1968-69). George rented all these experimental films from the New York Independent Filmmakers Cooperative. Some of the filmmakers came up to PEI as guests. Semsel was good friends with Willard Maas and Marie Menken, and he later introduced me to them when he took me back with him to New York, where I worked in the film industry during the summer of 1969.
I noticed that in a letter you wrote to George Semsel in 1969, you had a feeling that Canadian film was not visible at that time. You said, “let's look at film in Canada. There is none. Comparing to any other country in the world, there IS none.” When did you feel this changed? When did you feel that Canadian independent films and filmmakers, especially Ontario and Toronto-based independent filmmakers became visible [to yourself]? And Were there any characteristics you feel were distinctly “Toronto”?
I don't know exactly what year. In my last year at university, 1969-70, there was no one to teach film, since George had returned to New York. So, I offered to teach a student workshop, and we started the UPEI Film Society. And what we did was bring in independent films, new Canadian films as well as America ones to show, with great support from the Student Union.
Actually, when we started the Film Society, I think Keith Lock and Jim Anderson’s films were among the first Canadian student films we brought in. They were students at York, and I had met them at the first Canadian Student Film Festival in the fall of 1969, held at Sir George Williams University in Montreal. Around that time also I started hearing about Michael Snow's work. When I continued on to graduate school at NYU and then Ohio University, between 1970 to '73, I saw quite few of Snow's films. Snow came as a guest to Ohio University, and I got to know him. When I graduated from Ohio in 1973, I moved to Toronto in the fall of 1973, to teach at Sheridan College in Oakville. It was then I started to get actively involved with the Toronto Filmmakers Co-op and CFMDC [Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre]. And when I got to Toronto, I of course met Michael Snow again, and Keith Lock and Jim Anderson, who were also actively involved with the TFC [Toronto Filmmakers Co-op] and CFMDC.
What about Joyce Wieland?
Yes, I also admired Joyce Wieland, whom I knew as Michael's wife. Rat life and Diet in North America (1968) had been one of my favorite experimental films, and Joyce was an inspiration.
Snow made a film called New York Eye and Ear Control in New York in the 1960s [1964], and one of the things that characterized these films by Toronto artists was the incorporation often of the personal surroundings of filmmaker’s domestic landscape. In 1972 my film A House Movie was made in Ohio where I lived at the time. It shared a similar interest in one’s immediate surroundings as these early films by Toronto experimental filmmakers. George Semsel was advocating what he called the ‘personal documentary,’ which influenced me greatly. But I think in Toronto we were also interested in pushing this further – by taking these personal landscapes and experimenting with the form and structure of the film. So, if you look at other films by Snow, like Short Shave (1965), Breakfast (Table Top Dolly) (1976), again, these are basically domestic landscapes, sort of re-imagined and turned into something else. You can find on my website [http://rickhancox.ca/writings.htm] a piece entitled “Independent Film-making in Ontario” by Ian Birnie, of the Art Gallery of Ontario, who was one of the first critics to recognize this domestic aspect of Ontario and Toronto experimental films of the period.
So, since we already talked about your films, when people talk about your later films like Waterworx (1982), Landfall (1983), Beach Events (A Clear Day and No Memories) (1984), and Moose Jaw: There's a Future in Our Past (1992), people always use words like “personal documentary” that you already mentioned, and “experimental documentary,” these kinds of words. How would you describe or define your style or aesthetic in your early films, for example Rose (1968), Cab 16 (1969), Tall Dark Stranger (1970), I, a Dog (1970), Next To Me (1971), and Rooftops (1971)? Do you think there are any differences in terms of style or aesthetics between your early films and later ones? And how significant were those early films in your filmmaking career?
I should also mention one of my other major influences in addition to Michael Snow – Arthur Lipsett. Lipsett was known as one of the few experimental filmmakers at The National Film Board of Canada, and was famous for his collage films of the 1960’s. He was one of the first found-footage filmmakers, in addition to people like Bruce Connor. Lipsett’s film Very Nice, Very Nice (1961) received two Academy Award nominations [Best Short Subject, Live Action Subjects] in 1962. Then there were his short films 21-87 (1964) and Free Fall (1964), which were the first Canadian experimental films I ever saw. I was very influenced by Lipsett’s films when I started seeing them in the 1960’s, especially his disruptive editing style and his views of science and technology as the new religion.
Now, you are asking about the early films. I think I was just trying to experiment with different forms, trying to find something that was really my voice. Rose was a collage film. That was my first film. Cab 16 was a documentary. Both of these were made in George Semsel’s class. Tall Dark Stranger was a dramatic film. They were all made in PEI.
Then when I went to New York, I spent the summer of 1969 in New York, and while there, filmed I, a Dog and Rooftops, and later, Next to Me. Next to Me was a film I made at New York University during 1970-71. I would call that the first film where I think I started to find a voice. I wanted to make a film that was about my - again, domestic - surroundings in New York and others things I noticed in the urban landscape. I was very influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photography and his notion of the ‘decisive moment,’ which we had being studying as part of an NYU photo history course at the Museum of Modern Art. I wanted to experiment with making, in a sense, a series of decisive movements. I had this idea of filming short actions, of a few seconds. And then, they would be separated by black leader later to give an impression of a slide show, not of stills but of motions. I didn't know how to edit the film – what sequence to put the ‘movements’ in. And finally, it dawned on me, that the shots that I conceived were not accidental. They were actually related and personal, not just formal constructs supposedly inspired by Cartier-Bresson. When I realized this I was able to finally structure the film and make a more personal, poetic statement by juxtaposing the images in a manner inspired by Arthur Lipsett. In addition, I was able to add a certain amount of reflexivity while creating the soundtrack, where I am actually reading aloud some of my own instructions from the initial shooting script.
After the Next to Me experience, I was able to start making personal documentaries with greater artistic consciousness. This really began when I continued my MFA studies at Ohio University in 1971. I think that as my films developed, they became directly autobiographical and personal. I also started to see the connections between the personal and political, especially with Moose Jaw (1992).
Professor Hancox, was Cab 16 a commissioned film or was it a student film?
It was a student film. It wasn't commissioned. It was a film about a man who had been in the local newspaper because of his public service and voluntary work. He was a cab driver, who transported the disabled children around Charlottetown between home and school for free (there was no bus service at the time). I thought that was a lovely story and I learned a lot from the whole experience.
After you received your MFA in 1973, you returned to Canada and finally became the Executive Chief of Filmmakers Co-op, will you elaborate how did you become the Executive Chief of Toronto Filmmakers Co-op or how did you become part of the Co-op?
Well, I wasn't the Executive, there was several of us. It was called the Executive Committee. It was sort of like the Board of Directors but we were volunteers. And we did things like hire the Director of the Co-op, and other important decisions. I contributed articles to our newsletter, Rushes. We were a small committee, maybe there was about six or eight of us, made up of people who did most of the work.
I became a member of the CFMDC in the early '70s, before I moved back to Canada from Ohio. In the summers, I would bring my new films up to Toronto for distribution. At that time, the offices of the TFC and the CFMDC were in Rochdale College. I resigned from the Filmmakers Co-op because it was evolving into, what I saw, as more of a commercial enterprise. It had been started by independent filmmakers, experimental filmmakers, by people who were not interested in making commercial, narrative or educational films. But what happened was, that since it was hard for Canadian feature directors to get distribution and screenings (owing to Hollywood’s dominance) they started infiltrating the Filmmakers Co-op, using it as kind of a lobby group to try to get funding from the government for a Canadian feature film industry. These members of the Executive Committee railroaded in a new director who had no background at all in independent shorts or experimental films. The Co-op started moving towards an industry model, more and more commercialized. Eventually, of course that is exactly what happened. It couldn’t operate that way for long, and eventually they went broke around the late '70s [1979]. What was reborn out of the old Co-op funding was LIFT [Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto], which is more what the Co-op should have been in my view.
Is this also the same reason why you resigned from CFMDC?
Yeah, similar. The CFMDC had decided to expand and take on regular commercial short films, educational films that would sell. The Distribution Center saw that by distributing these films and selling hundreds of prints to libraries across Canada, this would help pay for ‘the experimental films.’ There had been no categories in the early days of the Distribution Center. No categories like educational, dramatic, documentary, etc. They were just independent films. Now the CFMDC wanted to separate off these works into a category called ‘the experimental films,’ which effectively meant ghettoizing them. To me, all of our short films that were truly independent were, in a sense, experimental - experimental documentaries, experimental narratives, etc. They started hiring staff to put their energies into this commercialization, which I felt would dilute our original mission. They were effectively competing with independent commercial distributors, which didn’t seem right for a publicly funded, non-profit organization. To a certain extent, the National Film Board was guilty of this too, undercutting commercial distributors in price.
So you were also a Board Member of CFMDC?
Yes, I was a Board Member. And Mike Snow was also on that Board, and I had the good fortune to work with him.
I think we already touched on this part, but, our research also involves filmmakers, such as Jim Anderson and Keith Lock. They were also members of the Toronto Filmmakers Co-op and CFMDC, at that time. What did you think about their works? What was your relationship with other filmmakers of Toronto Filmmakers Co-op and CFMDC at that time?
They were on the Executive of the Filmmakers Co-op. I knew and loved their films. Their film Work, Bike and Eat (1972) is one of my favorite Canadian narrative films. I also loved Jim Anderson’s Young Street (1972) and wrote about that [ “Short Films,” Cinema Canada, Second Edition, No. 14, June/July 1974]. I admired Jim and Keith’s work and we talked a lot about independent filmmaking. Keith made a film called Everything Everywhere Alive Again, that was in the '70s [1975]. That had a big influence on me, particularly on my ‘poetry film’ trilogy. Keith’s film was a really beautiful, meditative landscape piece - I would call it a poetic landscape film. I should mention another person, not a filmmaker, but a key figure who was an influence on all of us, was Jim Murphy, who had been running the CFMDC for years. He was a draft dodger who came up from the States. He was really supportive and enthusiastic about our work, especially its irreverent and reflexive quality. Jim had been a member of SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] an outlawed organization, so he couldn’t go back to the U.S. in any case. He went on to work in commercial distribution, but unfortunately died about 10 years ago.
How are you at preserving your films now? Are they preserved by you or preserved by an institution?
Well, I have all of the elements here at home. I have the A & B roll reversal originals, but the problem is they just can't be printed anymore because nobody is making reversal prints now. The only way to do it is to get an internegative made of the reversal elements, but it's very, very expensive. A lot of us independent filmmakers from that generation are stuck with work that we can't reproduce. I’m lucky enough to have some good quality prints around. I’ve got good reversal prints of all of my films, which I've kept here at home. There is also the problem of there being few places where one can still see actual films projected properly on reliable, 16 mm projectors. CineCycle is an exception, as is Available Light Collective in Ottawa.