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In this episode of BABE AREA, we’re joined by Elise Schierbeek: writer, media archivist, and film programmer who recently moved to San Francisco from Chicago. Elise takes us inside her day job at the San Francisco Film Preserve, a small nonprofit that organizes, funds, and curates restorations of early cinema alongside labs and restorers around the world. Then Elise and the ladies get into the ethics of restoration, AI "magic," internet folklore, and how an archivist's attention carries into art and everyday life.
Make sure to catch Revision, SFFP’s first-ever festival of rediscovered and restored films, at the Roxy Theater September 24–27!
Some of the themes we explore in this episode…
* Where restoration turns into interpretation, and why “it’s always interpretive, and there’s always loss”
* The trouble with AI upscaling, from the Jaws and Inland Empire controversies to YouTube’s “rare footage” channels and promise to “restore the impossible”
* Why young archivists bring more critical thinking to AI than older generations, and why Vine now lives on as oral tradition
* The fear of the storage unit, and the one box of keepsakes Elise lets herself keep
* Elise’s collage practice built from 16mm educational films: clowns, falling, felled redwoods, and Paradise Lost
* PLUS, insider tea on The Lodgers of Euclid, a 3D motion-capture thriller about an occult motorcycle gang from filmmaker Tanner Masseth, with Elise producing and starring as The Girl!
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SYLLABUS
* Elise Schierbeek + Elise on IG!
* San Francisco Film Preserve Re:Vision Festival of Restoration and Rediscovery
* Tate: Media in Transition Part 01 Introduction November 2015, re-published 2021.
* YouTube’s Sneaky AI ‘Experiment’
* Trevor Paglen Society of the Psyop - images look back
* Becoming Press Cinematics archive + internet cinema anthology
* Topaz Labs “Restore the Impossible”
* Onion City Experimental Film Festival
Cover image: Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) by by F. W. Murnau.
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