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(E-E) Evgenij Kozlov: Leningrad 80s >> ART>>
Reconstructing E-E KOZLOV's photo archive from the 1980s
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Chapter 9. Numbering the films To determine the original succession of filmstrips on the new pages, I again needed a numbering system, different from the previous one. This second film numbering system I created goes by letters instead of numbers. I figured out that if I started with AA, AB, AC, up to AZ, and then continued with BA, BB etc., this system yielded 26 x 26 = 676 possibilities. I calculated that going through the alphabet twice would suffice to identify all films, and it actually does, the last film now being NR, that is, the last of 356 combinations of two letters The AA-NR films make up two folders of rearranged paper filmstrips. The first, “Leningrad” folder – Book 1 – goes from AA to HK (7 x 26 + 1x11 films = 193 films). The second, “Peterhof” folder – Book 2 – goes from IA to NR (5 x 26 + 18 = 148 films). This makes 341 films in total. There are no pages for HL to HZ, because I deliberately started Book 2 with a new letter, “I”, keeping some spare pages for the “Leningrad” folder, Book 1. In other words, HL to HZ might be added to Book 1 later, although I very much doubt that a full thirteen “Leningrad” films should turn up unexpectedly.
The reconstructed films may contain any number of frames, from 1 to 39. In the case of films with a high number of frames, I sometimes distributed the paper filmstrips on two separate papers so that they wouldn’t stand too close to each other. In this text, I treat such double pages as one page. Over time, I managed to connect some of the “single frame” films to some other film and renamed them, so that the actual number of films is now below 341. Because Book 2 has more films consisting of a high number of frames (exceeding thirty and even close to forty), it has almost the same number of pictures as Book 1, although it has less pages. The next step was to name the film frames. Going by their original film numbers was no option, since, as we have seen, films display a large variety of numbering systems – ascending, descending, double numbers, or no numbers at all. On top of that, there is the problem of number intervals not corresponding to frame intervals. Consequently, the frames had to be renumbered with some kind of unifying numeration system that also constituted a database table or index for all frames. A frame numbering system with continuous numbers from 1 to 39 didn’t seem appropriate, because it wouldn’t allow me to identify a particular a particular frame with a particular filmstrip – which was important to locate the contact sheet it belonged to. If the frame was, for instance, number 10, it belonged to the second filmstrip if each filmstrip consisted of five frames, but if each filmstrip consisted of four frames, it would be part of the third strip. Therefore, continuous numbers required adding an extra identifier for the first frame of each filmstrip, such as 1i, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6i, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11i, etc. But this looked complicate. Furthermore, in case of a film with missing frames, how could I integrate those frames in the proper order if I identified them somewhere else later? How would I insert a strip with five frames between, say XX10 and XX11? It meant that I had to include those five missing frames from the very beginning, so that XX11 would be labelled XX16 instead, leaving a gap between XX10 and XX16. That in turn required knowing what exactly was missing where. Yet this was impossible. Returning to the example of the three filmstrips from film AE (8 CBEMA M10 83), we cannot say whether filmstrip 30985 with nos. 14-7 comes before or after the the other two strips (nos. 66-51). If it is prior to the others, the following frame numbers go down from 6 to 1 – and then to 88, and from there on down to 66. In this case, we have (6 + 22, divided by 2) 14 missing frames between the first (30985) and the second strip, (and if the films goes up to 90, we have 15 missing frames). Should the strip with frame nos. 14-7, however, succeed the other two (nos. 66-51), then we would have (50 minus 14, divided by 2) 18 missing frames – compared to the 14 or 15 from the first example. So how many missing frames should we inlcude: 14, 15 or 18? And what if the film numbers went up to 90 instead of 88? Although the examples are not even taking into account a shifting of numbers with respect to frames, the problem is clear. (In fact, if we calculate the shift parameter and the scheme of the distribution of the imprint, we may be able to find out what comes first and how many frames are actually missing, but that is a task for connoisseurs.) For all these reasons, a system with continuous numbers was out of question. What I needed was a system that was unambiguous and simple, but still allowed some flexibility for future corrections – including or excluding frames – without breaking the system completely. The solution I found consisted in combining a continuous with a discontinuous system. Once I had figured out that I had assembled all available (paper) filmstrips of a particular film, I placed them on “their” page, AA to NR, in ascending order from top to bottom. When the strips consisted of 6 frames, I used the page in a landscape format. The first shot of a film – or of what remains of a film – is the one standing on the left of the first strip. I then numbered each filmstrip from top to bottom. At first, I again used letters (AFA, AFB…), but then decided on figures instead, starting with 1, because this clearly separates a film name (XX) from a filmstrip (XX1). In the BB film, which has a total of 39 frames (a complete film without any missing frames), filmstrips go from BB1 (top) to BB7 (bottom), each with 6 frames, except for the last, which consists of 3 frames. BB’s seven strips are actually from four different contact sheets. Here is an overview of the seven strips and the corresponding contact sheets – 28, 29, 30, 31:
The letter “N” in the central column means that the respective filmstrip exists as a negative strip. When a filmstrip is from a vintage contact sheet (because no negatives are available), I use the letter “P” instead.
After naming each filmstrip, each of its frames got a sub-number, counting from left to right, in the order of shooting the film. Thus, the six frames of the BB1 filmstrip are BB11, BB12, BB13, BB14, BB15, and BB16. The next frames are BB21, BB22 etc. I wrote these inventory numbers onto the upper or lower film edge of the respective (paper) images, using a silver marker to make them stand out against the black edges. Using paper copy strips instead of photo prints makes it easy to correct mistakes without worrying too much about aesthetics. You can always make another copy if it gets messy.
Filmstrip BB6 has one entirely black picture, the print of a transparent, non-exposed negative (for instance when shooting with the camera lens cover closed). I decided not to name it, and the numbers for BB6 run from BB61 to BB65. I now think that I should have labelled the black picture, too, because it is an existing, not a missing frame. Labelling all existing frames helps to understand how many frames in a film are actually missing, and that is important when looking for lost pieces. I could still include it, and since the black picture is the second of BB6, it would become BB62, and, accordingly, all following frames of BB6 would change numbers: BB62 becomes BB63, BB64 becomes BB65, and so forth. The advantage of this nomenclature is that the changes wouldn’t affect the following filmstrip, BB7.
The main advantage of working with a notation of the XX11 type – of two letters followed by to digits – was nevertheless quite clear to me: when you are doing research, films and even frames can easily be remembered. I know that BB55 is a picture with Ivetta Pomerantseva and Georgy “Gustav” Guryanov, a key picture from the BB film. BB, in turn, is one of three films – BA, BB, and BC – dedicated to a dance party at the Lenin House of Culture in October or November 1984, from which Kozlov created his important series of painted photo-collages “Good Evening Gustav” (1984). (See Chapter 12 more >>) It is actually possible to create an equally unambiguous file name for BB55 with the numeration system of the contact sheets. The filmstrip number is 30285, to which we add 51, the first of the picture’s frame numbers (51, 52) imprinted on the film edge. Accordingly, BB55 corresponds to 3028551. Yet it is definitely much more difficult to recall 3028551 than BB55, even after removing the first two digits, 3 and 0, and just keeping 28551. On top of that, for films like AF that go without numbers, a numeration system would have had to be created starting at 01, and then the last two digits would have been faked. At the same time, like a notation consisting entirely of numbers, the XX11 alphabet-number notation can be managed by simple software programmes to create ascending and descending orders, and it can also be related to the vintage print notation quite easily. This can be shown with the help of a simplified notation. Instead of XX11 referring to single frames, we will use XX1, referring to single filmstrips. The example with the BT, BU and BV films demonstrates this principle with a database table created in word.
The table on the left shows the strips ordered according to the restored film sequence, and the table to the right shows the same strips ordered according to the vintage contact sheets. Regarding BT and BU, I identified only two strips for each of them, and in both cases, the two filmstrips relate to a single contact sheet: 63 and 7, respectively. The seven strips from BV belong to five different contact sheets: 12, 13, 15, 67, 68. The table on the right displays the ascending order of filmstrips according to contact sheets, which makes the “erratic” distribution of BV filmstrips quite obvious. It would become even more obvious with a table containing all films and all contact prints. In the case of the BB film, all seven filmstrips connect to each other directly, but I used consecutive numbers for filmstrips even when they are disconnected. The three strips for the AE film – the example given above and in Chapter 8 more >> – are now AE1, AE2, and AE3, with AE3 being the disconnected piece with numbers 14-7. As we have seen, I could have made the 14-7 piece AE1, and there is actually no reason that it comes at the end, except that I had to take a decision.
Likewise, in AB, AB5 follows AB4, although between them, a strip with five frames is missing, Tasma nos. 21 to 25. I didn’t want to introduce a nomenclature for what wasn’t there. Perhaps those five frames were underexposed and Kozlov had thrown them away.
But what if one of those missing strips turned up or if I identified it in another page? This was one of the reasons I had decided against a system of continuous numbers in the first place. Was the XX11 system more suitable to handle this problem? We will see that it is, to a degree. With regard to AB, the missing and found Tasma 21-25 piece could take the place of AB5, and what is now AB5 would become AB6 (and, accordingly, what is now AB6 would become AB7). Alternatively, I could add the 21-25 piece to AB45 – the last number of AB4 – and continue with AB46, AB47, AB48, AB49, AB50. In this case, I wouldn’t have to renumber AB5 and AB6. Instead, AB4 would consist of two filmstrips, with an odd AB50 number at the end (for Tasma no 25) that should have belonged, by logic of numbers, to the next strip. We see that adding new finds may break the “one to one” algorithm of the nomenclature. Systems “excluding” missing parts are never completely satisfactory, but the same goes for systems including them, as including what is missing requires some extra definition in the nomenclature, an additional letter or digit to make you understand that they are virtual frames, no factual ones.
© Hannelore Fobo / text / pictures / lay-out © (E-E) Evgenij Kozlov / artwork Uploaded 3 May 2021 |
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