Dinner and "The Making of Empire Strikes Back" with Erik Sirke and Geremy Lague

Erik is in town for a while, on a break from the Banff Centre where he will be for the next year. The three of us met up at Ngoc Van for supper. I shot this set of images to stitch together and did so with a couple different variations. One variant, shown only in an excerpt, has Erik obviously wary over Geremy's lack of face.
 

After supper they asked to watch "The Making of the Empire Strikes Back" on 16mm, something I'd promised them two years ago. As it seemed warm, I invited them to a backyard screening of it. The event didn't begin smoothly as Margaret had begun pickling in my absence, but William joined us and I grabbed the two cans of film I'd acquired from Darrell Prohor's items he left behind after he'd retired from our department. Only when I went to load the first reel did I realized that I'd never opened the cans but had simply trusted the label on the outside. Somebody should make up a saying about covers and believing the contents because if they did, this would be a time use such a saying. The first reel was three variations of a puppet public service announcement from 1985 to stop smoking. The commercials then repeat in French. Reel two was something else about racing and the film began jumping right away, obviously due to the reel being used for found footage, so we didn't watch it. Instead, I switched over to super-8 and began to run "Zamba", a 1949 film which Melanie Wilmink gave me a feature length silent version of. Based on the somewhat lurid cover art on the super-8 cans, I had believed that this was a 1960s European film but instead was a version released with German subtitles. Silent, black and white, and boring, we watched until the family landed inexplicably together after parachuting from a plane onto a tropical island. The boy seems to suck on his mother's cheek for a moment before they basically throw him from the plane. Surprisingly, the boy was played by Beau Bridges in one of his earliest features. I continued to put up random reels including the ending of Metropolis on standard 8, a shortened version of The Wolfman on super-8, and "Anansi the Spider", a peculiar 1972 African folk tale on 16mm (also courtesy of Melanie). It rained for a couple minutes but the projector was under the umbrella and the canopy of trees lets very little through, so we were okay. I think we ended up having a good movie night without really watching any good movies.