One of my favorite films from the 30’s is coming out on DVD next week–Rouben Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight, one of the most delightful and inventive films of the period–and I’m so excited I could scream. Now if only When Ladies Meet and The Animal Kingdom would come out, 2 surprisingly adult films, also from the 30’s, that deal with sexuality very candidly. It’s a miracle, truly, that somebody decided to release Mamoulian’s film on DVD, for it’s so not geared toward the 20-something male demographic, towards whom most DVD releases seemed geared. There is still hope that someone other than Quentin Tarantino will reach that demographic.
In other news, it’s no longer possible to get a type-R print made in San Francisco. Type-R prints are positive to positive prints–the medium of all of my editioned color work. Labs now scan the chromes and make digital prints from the scan. I can actually see the difference between my older type-R prints and these newfangled digital prints, which produce a very slight banding to differentiate slight color shifts in, say, SKIN, the subject of all of my photographs. Since I print my editioned work as it sells, I can no longer be assured that the new digital prints will match the earlier type-R prints in the edition. “I hate modern photography.”