While the Sag Harbor Cinema’s Festival of Preservation has run its course, “Think Like a Filmmaker,” an extraordinary exhibition of art objects created by Alan Berliner from his extensive collection of filmmaking tools and equipment, is on view in the cinema’s third-floor gallery through January.
Mr. Berliner is not just a collector of film paraphernalia, but a filmmaker whose work has been shown worldwide and has won prizes, awards, and retrospectives at major international film festivals.
On Nov. 13 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the DOC NYC Visionaries Tribute at Gotham Hall in Manhattan, given for a distinguished output of documentaries. Previous recipients have included Michael Moore, Werner Herzog, Martin Scorsese, Wim Wenders, and Michael Apted.
Central to the exhibition at the cinema is the transition of filmmaking from an analog to a digital enterprise. As Mr. Berliner explains, “ ‘Think Like a Filmmaker’ lives in a post-motion picture film world where projection bulbs have gone dark, mechanical gears have stopped turning, shutters have stopped spinning, and metal tools have slowly begun to rust. All that’s left is the heavy, silent, stillness of the basic objects and materials of filmmaking, now relics of a bygone era -- sold and collected around the world as ‘mid-century’ antiques.”
Mr. Berliner, who divides his time between New York City and East Hampton, has been collecting things since he was a child, he said during a conversation in the gallery. Among those “things” are projectors, film splicers, rewinds, reels, cameras, synchronizers, and other tools of the trade.
“I put a lot of things in boxes over decades. Around Covid time, there was a space in my brain, in my life, in my psyche: What am I going to do now, I can’t go outside. I started opening up the boxes. That’s what led to this show. A lot of this was in storage in my basement.”
He showed what he’d unearthed to a longtime friend, the writer Phillip Lopate, who liked it enough to bring it to the attention of Wendy Keys, former executive producer of programming and now a board member of the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Ms. Keys in turn told Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan, Sag Harbor Cinema’s founding artistic director, about the collection.
If the exhibition has a centerpiece, it’s not an example of anachronistic film equipment but “Audiofile,” a long, waist-high metal cabinet with 108 drawers. Every drawer has a title, and opening each drawer initiates a recording of a sound.
For example, opening “No Trespassing” introduces the sound of a barking dog. “Time Bomb” yields ticking, “Out of Gas,” a futile attempt to start an engine, “Under Arrest,” a reading of the Miranda rights.
Mr. Berliner demonstrated some of his favorite duets. “Perfect Pitch” is a flawless “A” from an instrument and a human voice. Opening “Wit’s End” lets a scream out of the drawer. (He admitted he couldn’t have planned it, the scream is also in the pitch of “A.”)
“Water Torture” activates a slow drip-drip-drip. Due to the alphabetization of titles, “Wit’s End” is several drawers below. When both drawers are open, you hear the dripping water and the scream, “a terrific synchronicity,” said Mr. Berliner. “Another dimension, a spatial one.”
Other drawers have personal connections for the filmmaker. “Hard of Hearing” is a recording of his father, who was almost deaf, saying, “Please speak louder. I can’t hear you.” “Oral History” invites his Aunt Florence into the gallery.
Some of the sounds were recorded by Mr. Berliner, others are from sound-effects libraries. It took him seven months in 1993 to create “Audiophile.” While the drawers originally held analog audiocassette players, he subsequently converted the sound sources to digital.
Mr. Berliner played the device for a visitor like a musical instrument, opening and closing drawers and allowing multiple sounds to play at once. The effect is like listening to a concerto, albeit a sometimes cacophonous one. Looking ahead to the exhibition’s opening, he said, “Four or eight people opening drawers will make all sorts of other sonorous and completely unpredictable combinations. That’s also part of the smile behind the work.”
“I try to give every work in this show more or less a title related to the lexicon of cinema or moving pictures,” he continued. For example, “Slow Dissolve” consists of nine identical 16-millimeter film reels deployed horizontally along a wall. Because the reels were damaged in a flood, the progression, or “dissolve,” is from a pristine yellow reel containing film, to increasingly rusted and otherwise damaged reels, the last of which is so corroded it holds no film.
A cabinet contains an assortment of outdated cinematic tools, one of which, a 16-millimeter projector, is threaded not with film but with flexible metal plumbers’ strap, which happens to be 16 millimeters wide.
“Nickelodeon” is typical of the wit with which the filmmaker repurposes so many of his objects. Because the show is housed in a movie theater, he threaded a 35-millimeter metal reel with a huge roll of paper tickets. That would have been enough, but the roll of tickets descends to a splicer, which has been used to cut a single ticket off the roll. Next to the splicer is a spindle on which a tower of tickets has been skewered.
Another long wall is lined with 16-millimeter film reels threaded with leader, some clear and some colored, mounted on rewinds so they can be turned. The piece is titled “Translucence” because behind each reel is a light box that shows off the different degrees of translucence and densities of color. Regardless of their original function, the reels are beautiful objects.
There are reels threaded with yarn instead of film, reels loaded with electrical tape, even “Short Story,” a slice of a tree trunk embedded in a 16-millimeter reel. To Mr. Berliner, “It’s a metaphor for the whole show, because you have the concentricity -- but, like a reel of film, it’s a story, the story of the tree and of the environment from which it came.”
