Alright here’s a quick look at hand processing 16mm motion picture film. The stock I shot for this film is called Kodak 3378, it’s a high contrast black and white reversal film stock, which basically means it doesn’t develop as a negative but as the actual viewable image. The process of “hand development” is an interesting one. First 100 ft of film are loaded into a light proof tank. The chemical process I used is called E6 and it consists of a few steps that can be performed at room temperature: first developer, second developer, rinse, bleach, fixer, photoflow. Exposing the film to these chemicals four particular times results in the final image. This step is the rinse, the 3378 stock is the slightly purple film.
Hand processing creates strange patterns and aberrations, disturbances created by a process that is inherently imperfect. It allows the artist to play with the parameters of 16mm image making but maybe more importantly, its results are a direct effect of the artist’s hand on their work. This is why we shoot film in a digital world: it’s something we can physically affect as true human beings.
