This year's program guide at Ann Arbor FIlm Festival 2012 was the year Eastman Kodak filed for bankruptcy, a year when it seemed that the hopes for celluloid were dim.And yet at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, there were films that existed only because of the unique and tangible properties of a roll of 16 or 35 or Super 8mm film.
The most powerful example of this was Jennifer Reeve's "Landfill 16." Faced with a mountain of outtakes destined for a landfilm from her previous film, Reeves decided to bury the film stock in her backyard, let the natural process of enzymes and decay work on the face on the film, then dig it back up, chemically stain some parts of it, hand-paint others and feed it through a projector reel sometimes two frames on top of each other to generate incredible images of color and decay.
