Spectrum Reverse Spectrum

About This Screening

Cinema Project is honored to bring Los Angeles-based artist Margaret Honda back to Portland for a presentation of her two 70mm films. Spectrum Reverse Spectrum (2014) and Equinox (2019) are cameraless productions, made truly in the film lab, and are only projected from motion-picture film prints. For their silent and pristine exhibition, we are fortunate in Portland to have a (70mm) projector and a partner in the Hollywood Theater. In addition to her two 70mm films, we will also be presenting Honda’s Wildflowers (2015), which was shot and will be presented on 16mm with optical sound. 

Cinema, as an experience, an object, and an industry, is integral to these works. They are distillations of some of the very essential elements of the medium: light, color, and that traditional black-box triad of projector-screen-spectator. All three films are without representational imagery, and in fact the two 70mm film prints are without frame lines having no camera originals. Expect a shared and thoughtful evening of cinema that is somehow both inherently physical and conceptual. Following the films, Margaret Honda will be in conversation with Portland-based artist Roland Dahwen.  

Spectrum Reverse Spectrum is a cameraless film made by exposing 70mm print stock to precisely calibrated colored light in a film printer, resulting in a uniform field of color with no frame lines. Moving gradually through the visible light spectrum from violet to red, then back to violet, the colors’ relative densities and durations follow those in the spectrum itself. Symmetrical in its construction, it is the same film shown starting from either end. —Honda

Equinox begins with a uniform field of black, then gradually moves through progressively lighter fields of gray until it reaches white, then reverses toward black. The film was made by exposing a standard roll of 70mm print stock to colored light in a contact printer. This work was conceived in 2013 as a companion piece to Spectrum Reverse Spectrum, a 70mm film I completed in 2014 that presents the light spectrum from violet to red and back again. The material origins of both films, the equivalent of camera originals, are the timing tapes that control the lights in the printer. —Honda

Wildflowers is shot in 16mm on two fifty-foot Kodachrome magazines. Since Kodachrome color processing ended in 2010 it is only possible to develop it as black-and-white negative, rather than color positive. I set up ten-second shots of different wildflowers that bloom every year in Southern California. Like the Kodachrome itself, the flowers would be drained of the color that is their primary attribute. The negative stock, fifty years past its expiration date and suffering from base degradation, was returned from the lab with no discernible image on either roll. A description of each flower’s color and structure is read by a narrator at the moment when it would have appeared on-screen. The film is a record of something that is disappearing on something that has already disappeared. —Honda