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ACETATE DIARY written and directed by Russell Sheaffer
produced by Pulkit Datta and Russell Sheaffer
produced with funding from Indiana University’s College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Communication and Culture, Film and Media Studies Program, Office of the Vice President for
Research: New Frontiers in the Arts and Humanities Grant, and IU Cinema
with thanks to Austin Criner, Pam Clark, Jonathan Elmer, Jane Goodman, Joan Hawkins, John Lucaites, Josh Malitsky, Susanne Schwibs, Heather Sheaffer, Jon Vickers, Orphans Midwest:
Materiality and the Moving Image
© Artless Media, 2014
Film Contact: Company Contact:
Russell Sheaffer Artless Media
[email protected] [email protected]
1.760.822.4715 www.artlessmedia.com
U.S. Short Film
4 minutes – Handmade on 16mm Film – 35mm Blow-Up Exhibition Format – Handmade Optical Sound – 4:3 Aspect Ratio
ABOUT THE FILM
Logline
After receiving a difficult medical diagnosis, experimental filmmaker Russell Sheaffer decided to use a roll of 16mm film as a written diary. Projected, Acetate Diary is an expression of handmade sound and color. Examined as an object, the acetate contains words and drawings from a place of trauma.
Synopsis
Light, color, and sound are the ingredients of Acetate Diary, a handmade, cameraless film on 16mm that is at once a document of serious bodily trauma and a beautiful series of abstract patterns. Swarming with color and sound, Acetate Diary is a literal diary -- a series of words and drawings written after experimental filmmaker Russell Sheaffer received a particularly difficult medical diagnosis. Scrawled across the visual and optical audio tracks of 100 feet of 16mm film, Acetate Diary uses film stock as both a writing and projectable surface by which to simultaneously air and abstract its maker's internal emotional state.
ABOUT THE DIRECTOR Russell Sheaffer is an experimental film and documentary maker with a strong academic background. Born November 23, 1987, Russell grew up in San Marcos, CA. He completed his B.A. in Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine (where he won the Franco Tonelli Memorial Award for Film Theory) and his M.A. in NYU’s Department of Cinema Studies. He is currently working on his Ph.D. in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University.
While at NYU, a film he co-wrote and co-directed with James Franco, MASCULINITY & ME, was an official selection of the 2011 Torino LGBT Film Festival and was featured in Franco’s solo exhibition, “The Dangerous Book Four Boys” (where the NY Times deemed the piece “the best by far” and V Man described it as showing “irresolute, pop culture-inflected brilliance”). His films include: Acetate Diary (short), Memory of Objects (short), Monotony (short), Masculinity & Me (short), Alone. (short), The Forgetting Game (feature documentary), and Masculinity/Femininity (feature documentary, in post-production).
In addition to his own experimental work, he has acted in various capacities as producer on documentary and fiction films, including Jennifer Arnold & Senain Kheshgi’s The Diplomat, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2013, and Josephine Decker’s Thou Wast Mild and Lovely, which premiered in Forum at Berlinale in 2014.
Russell Sheaffer shooting super 8mm film for The Forgetting Game
Russell Sheaffer in Berlin while shooting The Forgetting Game
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT Diary films have an important history in the experimental and avant-garde filmmaking community. Everyone from Jonas Mekas to Sadie Benning have worked and re-worked moving images as a visual diary in ways that are both powerful and intimate. A year ago, I was stopped in traffic on a freeway in California. Unable to stop in time, a tanker truck collided with five cars in a chain-reaction collision that sent me to the hospital, split my jaw completely down the middle, and left me with no memory of the incident. Over the course of the last year, my body has begun to pose problems that I hadn’t expected and my mind has become washed by feelings of frustration at my inability to take my body for granted. Shuttled between doctors and x-rays, my body hasn’t been working like it used to and the potential of film as a tangible medium and as a dual object provides an area of release. After receiving a particularly distressing diagnosis roughly one year from the date of the accident, I decided to pick up a blank roll of 16mm film, using it as a literal diary on which to express my feelings of emotional and physical trauma.
Acetate Diary works in two ways: first, as a literal surface on which to express myself through words, scratches, and drawings (acting, essentially, as a writing surface like paper) and, second, as a projectable surface that will abstract those words, scratches, and drawings, creating something quite different than the written, acetate object.
By writing directly onto the film and the optical track, words and letters will stream by a bulb as the film is projected, turning words into beautiful abstract patterns. Acetate Diary, then, will be both public and private – even when it is projected, my writings will not be comprehensible to the viewer. This will be the case, too, for the audio. Words scratched into the optical audio track will take on sounds, but these sounds will not translate in any concrete way. Instead, the written word (and thereby my internal emotional state) will go from being fully abstracted (internal to my body) to concrete (written on the acetate) to fully abstracted again (projected on a screen as a series of colors, shapes, and sounds).
ABOUT INDIANA UNIVERSITY Made while in a Ph.D. seminar in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, one inspiration for Acetate Diary grew from “Orphans Midwest: Materiality and the Moving Image,” a film symposium held at Indiana University Cinema in partnership with the IU Libraries Film Archive and NYU. Indiana University’s developing film-‐related initiatives include its longstanding, renowned faculty and film studies program, a filmmaking curriculum that includes traditional celluloid, "handmade" films, and the latest digital technology, a FIAF-‐member film archive with over 80,000 reels of film, the papers of John Ford, Orson Welles, Peter Bogdanovich and others in the Lilly Library, an ambitious media preservation, digitization, and access initiative, a new Media School opening in 2015, and the 2011 unveiling of the IU Cinema, a world-‐class facility and curatorial program that has attracted major U.S. and international filmmakers. Partial funding for Acetate Diary came from Indiana University’s College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Communication and Culture, Film and Media Studies Program, Office of the Vice President for Research: New Frontiers in the Arts and Humanities Grant and IU Cinema.
Inside the Indiana University Cinema in Bloomington, Indiana
ABOUT THE CREW Pulkit Datta (producer of Acetate Diary) is a writer/producer/director based in New York City. After completing his masters from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, he has worked on a variety of film and media projects including feature films, documentaries, shorts, commercials, music videos and web video series. He has assisted award-‐winning director Mira Nair, headed development at international production company Dillywood, and worked on multimedia campaigns for human rights organization Breakthrough. He has also written extensively about films (reviews, interviews, features), and served as the editor of the film section at The NRI. As an independent filmmaker, Pulkit wrote and directed Jason, a short film that was broadcast on PBS, and produced Russell Sheaffer's The Forgetting Game, a feature documentary that is being distributed by IndiePix Films. Currently, he is producing The Taxi Takes, a collaborative feature documentary, and executive producing Three Shades of Brown, a British-‐Asian comedy web series.
Producer Pulkit Datta
TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL SCREENING TIMES Acetate Diary screens as a part of the "Digital Dilemma" short film program.
Press & Industry Screening Friday, April 25, 10:15am (Bow Tie Cinemas 8)
1st Public Screening Wednesday, April 23, 6:45pm (Bow Tie Cinemas 8)
2nd Public Screening Friday, April 25, 9:45pm (Bow Tie Cinemas 8)
3rd Public Screening Saturday, April 26, 12:45pm (Bow Tie Cinemas 8)
4th Public Screening Sunday, April 27, 11:00am (Tribeca Cinemas 1)
FULL CREDITS ACETATE DIARY
written and directed by Russell Sheaffer
produced by Pulkit Datta and Russell Sheaffer
produced with funding from Indiana University’s College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Communication and Culture, Film and Media Studies Program, Office of the Vice President for Research: New Frontiers in the Arts and Humanities Grant, and IU Cinema
with thanks to Austin Criner, Pam Clark, Jonathan Elmer, Jane Goodman, Joan Hawkins, John Lucaites, Josh Malitsky, Susanne Schwibs, Heather Sheaffer, Jon Vickers, Orphans Midwest: Materiality and the Moving Image
© Artless Media, 2014
