Just Sprouts (1976)

In Just Sprouts, my goal was to make a film completely divorced from the camera and from such concerns as composition, lighting, camera placement and exposure. To do this, I sprouted alfalfa seeds at stepped intervals on a large piece of glass, made a contact print, then cut the resulting negative into strips and taped the strips onto clear 16mm film stock, always aware of Stan Brakhage’s 1963 film, Mothlight, in which Brakhage glued moth wings directly on film. A second inspiration was Man Ray’s Rayogram film, Le Retour à la Raison, in which pins, salt and pepper and thumbtacks cavorted wildly on the screen and caused a riot when first shown in 1923. In another section I cut negatives of magazine advertisements into strips and taped them onto film stock, thus hugely magnifying the Ben-Day dots with which the ads were printed. - PvZ