Hand Crafted Films

In June 1981, my family packed up the Pontiac station wagon and embarked on a roadtrip from Baton Rouge, Louisiana to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. While the ultimate purpose was my cousin’s wedding, we used the vacation to visit several malls, Holiday Inns and McDonalds, Walt Disney World – and of course the Kennedy Space Center (KSC).

I was an eleven-year-old space fanatic, and tracked everything about the space program. Visiting KSC was a particular highlight of my childhood, and my father captured the day on Super-8. The tour bus took us from the visitors center, past the vehicle assembly building, and ultimately to the launch pad used for both the Saturn V of the Apollo program and also for the nascent space shuttle program: launch complex 39-A. The resulting Super-8 film was a particular favorite of mine – we played it over and over again to relive that special day.

This video was commissioned for an installation of emerging artists at Los Angeles’ A+D Museum in mid-2010. I approached this piece from the vantage point of a film theorist providing interpretive commentary on the Super-8 film itself.

For many reasons, this is my favorite film: the animated cartography; the voiceover by Matthew Clayfield (which consistent of translating the narration from English, to Dutch, and back to English); and of course the original footage. The video has since screened at several film festivals including SXSW, the Dallas Video Festival, and at a festival in Germany (Webcuts) where it won the award for Best Documentary.

In early-2023 I had the original Super-8 film rescanned at 4K resolution – is there more detail hiding in the film grain? This new master, along with all of the original graphic elements, has been used as the basis for reassembling and remastering “39-A”.

Evan Mather’s short film is one mindfuck of a travelogue.

Film Threat

39-A: Een Reisverhaal Van Eindeloos (A Travel Tale Of Interminable) is an experimental film that challenges and subverts the typical elements of documentaries, thus making us all reflect upon important questions in documentary filmmaking such as What material can be trusted, can the voice-over narrator be trusted, where does documentary end and fiction start? Besides these questions, that the film raises, it has managed to convince the jury by it’s unusual and alienating collage of super 8 footage, by its investigative style and suspense. The film is putting audiences continuously on the wrong track yet consistently intriguing, leaving the viewer bewildred and pensive. Through its hybrid form, 39-A: Een Reisverhaal Van Eindeloos (A Travel Tale Of Interminable) is showing inventive ways of dealing with documentary footage and transforming reality into film.

Webcuts.11

… a high brow spoof on art theory, deconstruction, documentaries, and reality itself.

D Magazine

Weirdest of all is 39-A: Een Reisverhaal Van Eindeloos (A Travel Tale Of Interminable), which seems specifically designed to make the viewer feel as if he or she is experiencing some abnormal brain activity. In the short, Old Super 8 footage of a trip to the Kennedy Space Center is overlaid with an animated roadmap and a narration track that sounds as if it’s been run through Babel Fish half a dozen times. It’s proof—if more were needed—that finding the festival’s hidden treasures sometimes requires a little digging.

The Onion A.V. Club

2010
Short
U.S.A.
English
7-1/2 minutes
Evan Mather

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Screenings
SXSW
Dallas Video Festival
Webcuts.11, Berlin, Germany (Winner: Best Documentary)