On a sunny afternoon in late August, 16 people gathered in the grass of Northwestern’s sculpture garden to make a film. A cohort that included Northwestern faculty, Chicagoland graduate students, and analog film fanatics of all varieties, they came armed with 600 feet of 16mm film, film processing supplies, film splicers and tape, an array of plant matter harvested partially on-site and partially at attendee-selected locales around the city, and, notably, no camera.  

The second in a series of workshops aimed at engaging patrons with analog film education, Block Cinema’s Phytograms on 16mm Film workshop offered a crash course in an eco-friendly cameraless filmmaking technique. 

“It’s one of, we hope, a number of workshops that Block Cinema will continue to offer that give people hands-on experience with these different aspects of the medium, whether it be on the creative, practical side or technical – like projection as we’ve done in the past,” said Block Museum Pick-Laudati Academic Curator for Cinema and Media Arts Michael Metzger. 
 
The phytogram method was developed in 2014 by filmmaker Karel Doing using plant matter and a mixture of soda and vitamin C to chemically approximate the process of traditional film development without harsh industrial developers. Because many plants contain phenols, the same classification of chemicals that work to initiate development in standard methods, they can be used in tandem with an activating system that releases the phenols and renders the plant a suitable developing agent. Thus, the cellular structure of the plant is transferred directly onto the film. Exposure to sunlight speeds up the process dramatically.  

“This felt so accessible and, and in some ways got me more enthusiastic about working with the medium and getting my hands dirty,” Metzger said. 

Metzger documented the afternoon on expired Super-8mm film.

“Part of my motivation in using Super 8 was just for fun, and because I had some expired film I needed to use up,” he said. “But ideally we’ll be able to project these Super-8 films along with finished workshop films and films made by workshop participants in future programs dedicated to the project.”

Those films – one color, the other in black. and white (see left) – were as collaborative in their making as the group’s phytogram films; Metzger’s camera was passed from person to person through the afternoon, each filmmaker lending their own influence.

Northwestern Assistant Professor of Instruction and workshop facilitator Christina C Nguyen said phytograms are an accessible, inviting way of working with film. 

“People are kind of scared to start shooting on film because it feels expensive, it feels scary because the cameras are big and heavy, and there’s a lot of knobs on them, and you can’t see what you’re doing,” she said. “Without having a camera, being able to do a process right in front of yourself that’s pretty immediate, I think also just sort of lowers the bar in terms of how much you might actually have to know to make a film.” 
 
Tristen Ives, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee MFA student, experimental filmmaker, and former Block Cinema projectionist also joined in teaching the workshop.  

Artist and workshop participant Teresita Valdez had been interested in phytograms since seeing Doing’s how-to video a few years prior. Having never gotten around to giving it a try, she was interested in the collaborative element of Block Cinema’s workshop.  

“I’m really interested in camera-less processes, particularly ones that are organic and that are for me like a collaboration with the earth,” she said.  

Through the afternoon, participants harvested plant material from Northwestern’s campus and mixed it with selections of outside leaves, stems, flowers, and, in some cases, vegetables (one participant, interested in the impact of decay on the chemical processes, provided a rotten tomato) before soaking them in a solution mixed by Nguyen and Ives. Plant matter was then meticulously arranged across rolls of 16mm film laid out on folding card tables in the shining sun and worked on in collaborative groups. 

Metzger and Nguyen met with Eli Suzukovich III, Assistant Professor of Instruction in Northwestern’s Environmental Policy and Culture program and faculty affiliate of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research Institute, to identify native plants and invasive species participants could pick without disrupting campus landscaping. 

“I appreciated the opportunity to use this workshop as a way to learn more about the environment on campus and to make sure the collective film expressed something specific about the location and the region,” Metzger said. 

Ordinarily, sunlight and film development do not mix – expose undeveloped film to light and the image will be, at best, splotched with the luminous banding of light leakage, at worst overexposed beyond recognition – but here, the sunlight helps activate a process that exposes the film chemically rather than photographically. Literally speaking, the result is more a print than a photo.  

After sufficient sun exposure, the strips were fixed with an eco-fixer (for time efficiency; a saline solution can also be used, but it takes 24-48 hours to work) and hung from a clothesline to drip dry before being trimmed and spliced by Ives and Block Film/Video/Audio Technician Ben Creech.  

The idea for the workshop emerged from Metzger’s work with the Climate Crisis + Media Arts Working Group and Nguyen’s interest in eco-friendly analog filmmaking practices. Additional funding came from a grant through the Earth Rising Foundation’s Sustainable Visions program. Metzger had already had interest in folding ecoprocessing and phytograms into some of Block Cinema’s moving image programming, but the Earth Rising grant provided it shape.  
 
“When the opportunity to apply for this grant came along, it really helped kind of focalize that set of interests and led us to put forward a very specific idea of doing a workshop like this,” he said. 
 
Funding from the grant allowed Nguyen to attend a phytogram workshop hosted at Los Angeles analog media organization WHAMMY! By NYC-based film nonprofit MONO NO AWARE. 

“It was important to connect with a network of organizations and artists who are invested in this set of tools,” Metzger said.  

In keeping with that connectedness, Block Cinema’s workshop aspires to be part of expanding that network to its patrons and Chicagoland. The second in a series of workshops following a November 2023 analog film projection workshop, the Phytograms on 16mm workshop provided attendees with learning materials that will later be compiled into a free online resource with hopes of expanding accessibility of analog film practices.  

“All of these workshops are being documented with the idea that after we’ve done three and we feel like we’re on solid footing in terms of the recipes and the environments that we’re working in we would assemble the knowledge gathered into a toolkit that we could then make available freely for other people who want to do this, either in their individual practice or to host these kinds of workshops,” Metzger said. 
 
Attending the workshop was Alice Boone, Manager of Art + Engineering Initiatives at the McCormick School of Engineering, whose takeaways were both personal and professional. Having previously drawn inspiration from The Block for an engineering challenge, she approached the phytograms workshop wanting to engage, as an artist, in a new practice for herself and think, as an educator, of its potential as a learning experience.  
 
“It was a nice way for me to think about what I learned from this workshop that I want to take forward as an educator, but also as someone who is really trying to create new kinds of experiences in the engineering school,” she said.  
 

One very literal takeaway that might help create those experiences is the roll of 16mm film that Boone, along with other participants, was given at the end of the workshop for further exploration.  
 
“I thought to myself at the end of it ‘There’s no way that I can use this entire roll of 16mm film that we were gifted,’” Boone said. “I can’t use it all by myself, so how could I think about sharing this film even in some kind of workshop through the design school and how would that look different from one that Block Cinema runs?” 
 
As well as informative, Nguyen hopes that the workshop proved demystifying for participants. 
 
“You don’t need formal training to make films,” she said. “You don’t need lots of money to make films. You don’t need all these things that maybe the industry has made it seem like you need.” 
 
“All you need is sunlight,” Ives added. 

– contributed by Chris Forrester, Executive Assistant