16mm Film Splicer

von Bettina Schulte-Strathaus

The Film Splicer has a dual function: 1st acute crisis intervention during analog projection (film tear) or 2nd care work in the 16mm archive (repairing perforation damage, attaching film leader etc.). If a crack is too splintered, the guillotine-like vertical knife removes the adjacent images. The tear becomes a cut. The knife retracts autonomously and then remains discreetly in the background. For gluing, the tape is stretched over the inserted filmstripe to the other side and pressed on. The horizontal blades cut precisely along the film edge and release the stripe with a new perforation. What remains is a piece, an initially flat and transparent film, that piles up into an opaque block with each gluing.

Bettina Schulte-Strathaus is the custodian of the 16mm Film Archive at the Goethe University Frankfurt. This text was written in June 2023 for a pop-up exhibition within the conference "Sticky Films". The conference was organised by members of the PhD program Configurations of Film, and took Sara Ahmed's notion of 'stickiness' as a point of departure to discuss histories, theories and technologies of film-making.