filmscratch junkies

So, after watching the Scratch Film Junkies after the several weeks of learning to do some of the things that they have done, and I have to say that I do respect what they do more.
It wasn’t that I ever dismissed that type of art film, but knowing all the tedious things one has to do in order to create the visuals that they came up with is impressive, and I can appreciate it more. When you watch something like that for the first time, it is easy to forget the fact that they’re working with incredibly tiny frames of film, doing even more incredibly tedious actions when the image is projected so large up on the screen.
The act of film scratching seems sort of anarchic when you first see it, and I wasn’t a fan of it really the first time I ever saw it. However, once you do it, it feels somewhat liberating to be “deconstructing” your images, and distorting them.
This might be my own interpretation of the act of film scratching that although it can be tedious, and requires an intense amount of concentration to create the image you want (being that you have to scratch 24 miniscule frames by hand to create the one second of film), but I just feel that no one really knows what they’re going to do while scratching until they actually start doing it. The scratch film junkies’ video is really interesting to watch, and it does move through many various different moods and aesthetics. But I get this feel that it might just be a collection of the “best ofs” from several different collaborators and being stuck together in an arbitrary pattern.
I am really just thinking this based on my own private experience of scratching, and the fact that the Junkies’ film was so long (the song was also quite catchy, thankfully) that it seemed they’d need as much footage as possible, good or bad, to create the bulk of their work.
There is also something kind of sad and creepy about seeing old footage being “reworked.” I felt a little uneasy at one of the images in the Junkies’ film of the little baby having all the scratches surround his head. It has a very dreamy quality to it, and it instantly gives a feeling of nostalgia because the moment the image is being projected you’re seeing things that have been lost.