The Films of MRW

Melvin Robert Wollenburg was a photographer. He once drove over a mountain with his 8-mm film camera frozen to the top of his Volkswagon Beetle. In 1997, I set up a video camera, a tripod screen, and a wonky 8-mm projector in my bedroom and set about converting his aging films to video. At that point, the emulsion on the films had already begun to thin so severely that much of the captured footage was nearly impossible to make out. And, because the regular 8-mm film did not capture audio, there was no audio to capture. So, I added my own soundtrack. Mel's soundtrack has been lost for a long time (it was on a cassette tape cobbled with manual splices and tape-to-tape transfers of music recorded off the radio). All of this is in service of disclaiming my musical choices in 1997. I can't tell you what I was thinking-- the distance between then and today is currently twice the distance between the original soundtrack and the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, and Rolling Stones songs that made up Mel's original soundtrack.

You can download the whole thing from the internet archive if you want a copy of it for yourself.