Posting #6

The release and world premier screening of PRISMATIC MUSIC  The Super 8 Films of Joseph Bernard at CCS.

All technical and historic information about the disc & booklet is already on the previous posting (#5) - - so here I’d like to thank everyone at CCS for the euphoric celebration and premiere of my films’ digital reincarnation. 

That gathering of friends, former students and colleagues was enormously gratifying. Events over those two evenings began with a live jazz and cocktail party at the Scarab Club benefiting the CCS Galleries. The next night’s beautifully projected program of films, followed by a perfect dinner at Selden Standard graciously hosted by Michelle Perron and Rick Rogers, attended by a full complement of friends. Not a moment could have been improved upon!

Another pleasurable occurrence, an old friend, Bill Gubbins drove up from Nashville to see the films and be part of the festivities. We hadn’t seen each other for 33 years. Bill is an exceptional, idiosyncratic photographer and noted publishing editor on the contemporary music scene, among his other exploratory activities. He appears in two of my better films (one of them is dedicated to him), and I appear in several of his photographs. All this happened back in the early 1980‘s. Two of the above portraits (JB & camera, 1982) are his. To be fair to him, both images have been cropped and manipulated far from the originals for publication purposes. 

While recently in Nashville, we were introduced by Bill to some of his acquaintances at Jack White’s Third Man Records, The Frist Center for the Visual Arts, area galleries and a few fine restaurants. Our road trip continued on to Columbus where, through the help of Caroline Koebel, we met with faculty and curatorial staff of the Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University. We talked broadly about independent film, its history and practitioners, the release of PRISMATIC MUSIC and academic venues that might provide programming possibilities.

Now that the digital version of the films has made its public debut, the mission will be to find audiences interested in something so singular as non-narrative, silent Super 8 films made almost 40 years ago with an obsessive commitment to light, color and movement.