SMACK smacks of reality

by Cameron Bailey - NOW Magazine

Smack (Steve Sanguedolce, 2000) takes Sanguedolce deeper into the tricks of biography, and further into risky terrain. For years one of the country¹s most daring diary filmmakers, he ventures to smear the lines this time between real stories and made ones. Smack takes too-true stories of drugs , petty crime and generally wasted youth, and weaves them together into a story of three brothers. That¹s the soundtrack. The images are another story. Smack marries its narration to a welter of scratched and hand-processed images. Tint and texture race all over the surface of the film, sometimes turning the most mundane pictures -- kids playing, a child in water, a guy prepping drugs - into non-stop, abstract canvases. This is an action movie of line and colour, with a homegrown Scarface plot burbling underneath. At times the match between image and narration is too direct for the film¹s open style, but then there¹s always another bit of beauty coming.

The Unrejectables: Review of the Salon des Refuses

Shannon Brownlee - Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto Newsletter

Amongst the few exceptions to the focus on female experience, the most notable was Steve Sanguedolce's SMACK, an intense transfixing canvas of hand processing and toning, accompanied by the subtle, sometimes gruesome, sometimes entertaining monologues of three brothers coping with various aspects of drug addiction. The film's psychological insights present an almost cannibalistic vision of family love in the interplay of hostility and loyalty amongst the brothers. The images work with the monologues to counterpoint, illustrate and complement the words by turns, lending a deep sensibility to the brothers' machismo. At times the adventurous toning and texturing techniques seem to strip their thick hides away, revealing a scarred frenzy beneath the skin.

Dr. Norman Weinberg

Berg Color-Tone, Inc.

Technically...as far as toning is concerned, it's very well done. I have always believed that to do excellent toning you need to start with excellent B&W photography...that is apparent here. I'm amazed at some of the incredible tones and other effects you were able to achieve, including the split toning and other colors, especially reds, which are hard to do. Perhaps you can share your processing procedures with me at some time. The story of growing up, innocence of youth, innocence lost and betrayed, addiction to hard drugs, the world of the drug addict, self-realization, determination and courage to climb out of the depths of addiction, the devotion of brothers, the 'tough love'...this is truly a heartfelt and touching account. The narration is wonderfully done. Using the tools at hand...images, psychedelic toning effects, music, the narration... this extraordinary and riveting work of art, by a talented filmmaker, recreates for the viewer the surreal world of the drug addicted. I believe this film deserves the widest possible distribution. Smack will be a controversial film: but, every teenager and every drug addict as well as those touched in some way by drugs directly or indirectly...and that's all of us...should see this extraordinary film

Handmade Tales

Steve Sanguedolce makes sure his hands get dirty.

By Gemma Files: eye Weekly

From cheap stuff like The Blair Witch Project and The Celebration to the high-budget morph effects and digitized flourishes of movies like Fight Club, filmmaking is gradually becoming less and less of a hands-on medium--an industry that's already pretty much discarded as obsolete such time-honored customs as cutting and splicing by eye rather than by mouse-click on an AVID editing system. But local experimental filmmaker and Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto activist Steve Sanguedolce isn't about to take that kind of nonsense lying down. So he takes it standing up, instead--in the basement laundry-room he's converted into his very own little do-it-yourself studio, a cramped wonderland where he personally develops, edits, prints and colors every foot of film he uses. "It's like cooking," Sanguedolce tells me, during my visit to his house. "You can do it from a book, but it's so much better when you get your hands right in there. Mess around with the ingredients, learn how to measure by touch, and smell, and look, and taste, just like your grandmother always used to tell you...a pinch of this, a dash of that..." Taste it? He pauses. "Well, yeah, that's not always the world's best idea, 'cause this stuff is toxic. But when you're working in the dark, it helps to know that not only is the emulsion side of the film usually the lighter side, but it's also the side that'll stick to your lip if you put it in your mouth." Tossing his film into plastic industrial buckets and swishing it around with his rubber-gloved fingers, Sanguedolce works celluloid magic by a painstaking process of experimentation and elimination, figuring out exactly what chemical ratios and dilutions work best for his own particular purposes, painting with light, toner and emulsions. And then, after all that work, he just grabs the whole gooey mess, and tosses it into a clothes dryer set on "delicate". Not all of it comes out, of course. "When I hand-tint," Sanguedolce explains, "I do stuff like running my film through an acid bath, which means sometimes I end up burning it, just erasing the emulsion completely. It lifts off, and all I've got left is a clear plastic strip. But since I worked out how to make contact prints on my Steenbeck editing flatbed, if and when that happens, I can just make myself another print of the original and start all over." Pretty risky business. But worth it, in the end--since what it produces is like nothing you've seen before. Sanguedolce's most recent opus, Smack: for example is 45 minutes of 16-mm pseudo-autobiography with Super-8 diary sections, in which he uses two of his own brothers and one of their friends to narrate a not-exactly-true story cobbled together from Sanguedolce family anecdotes. Like Sanguedolce's earlier works--particularly the 1997 short film Away , which told a similarly incestuous and half-crazed tale about twins (played by veteran CanCon actor Earl Pastko) who get caught up in the making of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now --it's poetic, evocative, strange and surreal right from the get-go, and this effect is only enhanced by the pulsing, hand-supersaturated colors that spill across every frame, clarifying and obscuring each successive image. "What I find really interesting," Sanguedolce points out, "is that suddenly, experimental standards have sort of become industry standards: you look around, and everybody's doing all the stuff we used to do--scratching, jump-cutting, inserting images, layering, deforming the negative in various ways...but the more they ingest our techniques, the further away from the process they tend to get, physically. I mean, you can digitally scratch your images now, but that means you don't really get to touch it anymore. And that's what I'm after." Sanguedolce says that learning to develop by hand has also helped him break the final back of every independent filmmaker's biggest nightmare: The fact that film, no matter how much more "organic" it looks than video, is so damn prohibitively expensive. "Right before I started Smack , I bought up a whole whack of the stock the optical track usually gets printed on, which was selling for roughly a tenth of the cost of regular Kodak stock. I bought about 15,000 feet, for myself and for LIFT--and almost immediately Kodak discontinued it which we're in the process of talking to them about right now. But one way or another, I've got about ten rolls of this stuff still on hold in my freezer, and you better believe I'm going to use it." Some Hollywood-trained inquiring minds might wonder why a self-taught celluloid magician like Sanguedolce would want to "restrict" himself to making experimental films, works that have little hope of distribution, and almost no hope of garnering the type of media or audience attention which most consumers equate with cinematic success. But for Sanguedolce, there was never any question of doing "normal" movies. "The stuff I do is cerebral, hermetic," he admits. "It's solitary, it costs a lot and it takes forever, and it just isn't for everyone, either--I do it for the one other person who might possibly get it besides me. And if that sounds elitist, then--I guess it's just--when it's gonna take you 10 years to get anything done anyway, you might as well do what you want."

Sumptuous images of life and death with heroin

* * * * Peter Goddard

THE TORONTO STAR

ENTERTAINMENT REPORTER. For weeks now, brothers Zed and Sybil find they¹ve been going to an awful lot of funerals for friends who have died of a drug overdose. But only Zed sees the irony of going to the wakes that follow, where the friend of the deceased celebrate with more crack and heroin. At one party, Zed, the unseen narrator, explains how Sybil overdosed. Sybil turned blue and dropped to the floor, not breathing. After pounding his chest, massaging his heart and applying mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, Zed dragged his brother into a cold shower, bringing him around just in time. Then, groggy, Sybil smiled. That was ³the big one,² he figures. Yes, Zed reflects later, ³It was those times that brought us closer together.¹ Hey, that¹s so cool you know these guys will soon be as cold as ice. Since Steve Sanguedolce¹s remarkable home movie, Smack describes itself as ³part-documentary, part-fiction,² it¹s impossible to know to what degree Zed¹s narration is factual--or for that matter, whether there is a ³Zed² (Sanguedolce¹s press bumpf insists the subjects talk about ³their own lives.²) But truth is not the issue for the 41 year-old Toronto-based director. It¹s memory, particularly familial memory. (Sweetblood, the English translation of the family name, is also the title of a 1993 film Sanguedolce constructed from family photos.) The narrative threading itself through Smack¹s sumptuous images - hand-painted on film by Sanguedolce - are about the hair-raising, disgusting, even scatological adventures the brothers get into. But to Zed, nothing is farther out than third brother Antonio¹s discovery of religion. Antonio is as hooked on religion as Sybil is on heroin, Zed thinks. The bright, cheery, nursery-room colours Sanguedolce has used only make the awful adventures seem all the more horrific. The images take you along, even if the brothers¹ story says not to go there. Smack is a beautiful film. It¹s an audacious one, too. Sanguedolce risked a lot letting it reach 55 minutes in length. But it works.

Slaughtered animals and dysfunctional childhoods

by Angela Baldassarre

Tandem

Steve Sanguedolce¹s experimental film delves in semi-documentary memoirs By Angela Baldassarre We¹re both in disbelief. Me in hearing that for filmmaker Steve Sanguedolce butchering your own animals in the basement of your North York home was a normal occurrence when he was a child. Him for hearing that this scribe, of his same generation and also a member of the Italian-Canadian Toronto community, had not only never experienced such a thing, but has never heard of it either. ³I think it was very typical of a lot of Italian Canadians¹ experiences,² says Sanguedolce. ³There were animals in the house and we foolishly as children thought they were pets. Y¹see, we had a cousin who was a butcher so he¹d come over and slaughter the sheep, rabbits, geese and goats we had in our basement. I know a lot of people who had a lot of animals who slaughtered them regularly. My parents are Sicilian and so they lived on a farm. They had their own animals, they slaughtered their own meat, they had their own milk and made their own cheese. So this was a way of life they exported into Toronto. It has since changed. I don¹t know how many others continue to slaughter their own animals in their own homes. But I saw a lot of it as a kid. I think it must have affected me in some way because I had a much different relationship to animals than I had then.² I guess ordinary pets like cats and dogs were out of the question for the Sanguedolce household. ³Definitely,² laughs the 40-year-old Steve. ³What¹s really scary is hearing about one kid in school, Italian as well, and he¹d talk about having all these cats that would get really fat after a year, like baby pigs. Then they¹d miraculously disappear. The luxury of pets is something that doesn¹t exist in a more peasant, southern culture. I have two little dogs, and my parents don¹t want me to bring them to their house.² Slaughtering animals is an important element in Sanguedolce¹s latest experimental effort, Smack, the story of three brothers who take different paths in life. ³The first character in the film, Antonio, almost seems distinct from the other two,² explains Steve. ³He¹s a little straighter, has more of a religious conscience, and he tries to get out of it as it¹s starting. And a lot of that has to do with the traumatic experiences as a child when he saw so many things that he loved being killed and kind of learned to equate the two in some way.² Antonio, in fact, is the semi-autobiographical creation of Steve¹s twin brother, Sam Sanguedolce, who provides the narrative to the character. ³We were taught that slaughter was part of life,² he says. ³We didn¹t have a concept of pets as kids and those stories that Antonio says, those are our stories from my childhood. It¹s as if anything that you¹ve become close to and learned to love is killed, and that¹s a kind of common, acceptable place to be. When love is held adjacent to death then you can almost understand in some way why somebody might move into a more dramatic or drastic existence, doing drugs and being rebellious and destructive. Those are the only things that I think are really important to children in terms of bonding, closeness, innocence. And when it¹s taken away at that level you can see how that can be construed in that destructive way.² Smack is an unconventional movie detailing the lives of Antonio, Sybil (Paul Dileo) and Zed (Robbie Magee) from ages five to adulthood as they deal with religious transformations, drug addiction and crime. Filmed in a documentary style using Super-8 footage, Smack is actually more fiction than fact. ³It¹s a little bit of both,² says Steve. ³Those are real people telling their own stories for the most part. What I¹ve done is recorded a lot people telling stories, five or six of us, transcribed them all onto paper and then made those 150 pages of stories into one linear story where I changed the names, turned the five or six characters into three characters who now are brothers. So it started as a documentary. It¹s taking original stories and turning them into a fictional context and making them into one story.² Yet elements of the Steve¹s background, and his personal knowledge of the Toronto¹s 70s-80s drug culture are in plain view. ³ I don¹t really delve into that as much as I¹ve done with my other work,² he insists. ³That last character is a surviving junkie and he¹s telling his own stories. So the drug culture is very important here because it¹s something I knew, and I thought the dramatic appeal would add something compelling to the story. In those days, in the 70s, the drug culture was much more liberal than it is today. So I tried to put that into the perspective. The near-death-defying experience is not exclusive to drug users, and a large part of the story addresses the recklessness of youth, of male youth and some of the underlying factors that might help push somebody in that direction.² After attending Sheridan College, Sanguedolce (which means sweetblood) has dedicated himself to making films using a diary methodology about the darkest and most intimate moments of the person¹s self. Full Moon Darkness (1983) is a portrayal of ex-psychiatric patients; Woodbridge (1985) attempted to deconstruct Italian mores; Rhythms of the Heart (1990) explored his own issues about romance; Mexico (1992) unraveled the world traveler; Sweetblood (1993) revisited his family photos; and Away (1996) focused on his search for his long-lost twin. If you¹ve never seen a Sanguedolce film, don¹t expect a conventional moviegoing experience. Avant-garde and experimental, his movies are a challenge even for seasoned film lovers. And Smack, although more accessible than his previous films because of its narrative, is a compendium of hand-processed and hand-toned colourized images. ³My sense of incorporating images is much more metaphorical and poetic,² he explains. ³When you deal with memory, and most of the film is told in past tense, it becomes coloured in a figurative sense. It¹s all very specific but unusual. Memory has become something truly unique, it¹s almost separate from the actual event. I¹m more interested in trying to tell stories visually where the images don¹t necessarily become slaves to the sound. I think that when somebody is speaking about almost dying or being let down, that we¹re talking about trust and fear and connection, and some of those images deal with a more metaphoric level going either inside or beyond the words. The colouring makes it real specific to a person¹s recollection, it¹s more dreamlike and goes beyond what images normally do in dramatic films.² But Sanguedolce¹s artistry doesn¹t limit itself to the screen. For years he¹s been the leader of Sweetblood and the Hounds, a psycho-horror rock band, which plays around Toronto quite often. ³Not anymore,² he admits. ³ I just decided to not play the club circuit anymore. It¹s too hard and greasy and there¹s not a lot of rewards. What the bars want is cover music, and original music doesn¹t fit in there. I feel like I want to try something else. It¹s the opposite of what cinema is. Cinema is more cerebral. I think I¹ll leave music behind for now.² Just don¹t stop making those movies.

In the Chemical Kitchen with Steve Sanguedolce:

A Recipe for Contact Printing (or how to make hand coloured films)

by Si Si Penaloza

If processing and developing film was like a Betty Crocker recipe bake-off, Steve Sanguedolce would be the teenage contestant Gidget on crack. I recently visited Hell's Kitchen (or Hog Heaven) and watched Steve at work. In the span of three hours the man can demystify the whole high brow technophilic altar of film processing. He does not heed any such film handling warnings and has long since thrown out the instruction insert on How to Care for Your Negative. There is no celluloid sanctity in the Chemical Kitchen. He's a bit of an alchemist really, devising his own chemistry ratios and dilutions. Sanguedolce develops his film in plastic industrial buckets, churning it as if he were making butter. With a rubber gloved hand he reaches into the toxic bucket and tosses the film in Dektol like spaghetti. I was not surprised when I noticed a black film developing tank a la LIFT sitting, a little dusty, like a totem door stopper. I like meeting with filmmakers who are designing and scheming alternative processes in the interest of liberating themselves from lab. It's problem solving enpowerment. In this spirit, they take more of the tactile craft of film literally into their own hands. With this do-it-yourself attitude, the filmmaker severs the umbilical cord with that mothership in the sky that is THE LAB. Going it alone in the dark under safe light is very liberating. You are one with your own chemicals. You are pulling and pushing all the stops. You are a free agent. To hell with that sniveling co-dependent relationship you once had with those fascists at the lab. A certain sovereignty is gained in not viewing the lab as the be all, end all light at the end of the proverbial tunnel. Lab technicians scoff in abhorrence at Sanguedolce's irreverent manhandling of the medium. Some might say he's a madman. This is after all the guy who, after hand developing his film, unceremoniously tosses it in a laundry dryer set on a delicate spin cycle. Technicians are puzzled at the scratches and strange substances (goo) that show up on his film. It is precisely the scratches and irregularities that activate his unorthodox filmmaking practice. He is a painter; he is painting with light, toner, and emulsion. The effect is surreal, sublime - not to mention hypnotically beautiful and kind of poetic. The man's a maverick; my appreciation for his work has been so enhanced by observing his process. He showed me a short film he "cut for the Council" about two brothers on the road. It was ethereal, even on a Steenbeck; I look forward to seeing it in a true projection. The colors were supersaturated. Sanguedolce's desire is to print ultra high contrast images, this allows for a trademark effect: a permeation of the positive/negative spaces with brilliant color fields. The whole piece possessed a pulsating momentum of sound and color. The hand-crafted quality of the work is unmistakable; its organic handmade feel produces a visceral, almost primal response. To my surprise, I responded in the way I would to a painting - appreciating painterly strokes, gestures, and texture. Sanguedolce's explanation of his contact printing method was actually quite easy to follow. It all started as he was experimenting with double exposures. It was because of this that Steve initially tried to run two tracks of picture at the same time. Realizing his steenbeck could take two tracks through the gate was all he needed to get the reels rolling unto his contact printing innovation: "... If I could do that, then I could run my original picture on this sprocket which is the second mag track and run my raw stock/unexposed film on the picture track. If I shone a light through it then I would in effect be exposing the film making a contact print. And a contact print is exactly as the term denotes - two pieces of film together with a light shining through. So all you really need is a mechanism that holds your film together and moves it in unison with the registration intact so when you shine a light through you're exposing the back piece of film." Steve pointed out that the raw stock he's printing on is a really slow film speed. He's found that with slow film, there's little chance if any of fogging. He runs the film at normal speed and uses a steenbeck overhead lamp supply (a regular IKEA light fixture) that is domed so light is contained and doesn't flare. The cardboard curtain is used to make sure the back film doesn't catch any light. The cardboard is folded slightly to fit in front of the prism. He uses a diffusion material in the small cutout window so the light is more even. Gaffer tape is used at the bottom of the cardboard to ensure that light doesn't seep underneath. Steve takes a final step in the effort to control light by draping his film change bag over the cardboard. This will ensure the film is not fogged. "I am processing it as a negative. That way I can do any hand tinting on the contact print and go and get a print from the lab and the neg is untouched. It enables me to work from my library of original sources." I should make mention of one slightly tricky thing in regard to this contact printing method. Sanguedolce reviewed it nice and slow for me: "In film there's a concern between A and B wind. Usually all camera originals are B wind when you get it from the lab. When you make prints of that it's A wind. Because I'm treating this as a negative I wind it on here as a B wind. It's kind of complicated. If people have questions about this, they should call me. It really just means - make sure emulsion is towards you when you're exposing film. The two emulsions are always together, facing each other." I thought I was the scratch n' sniff girl when it came to working with my outtakes and dailies. I thought I liked to defile and bastardize the surface of my pictures. In Sanguedolce's chemical kitchen I'm a lightweight. Sanguedolce uses all his senses in working with his film: "The emulsion side is usually the lighter color of the two sides. If you're not sure which side the emulsion is, put it in your mouth and it sticks to your lip." At this point I watched in amusement as he popped the film in his mouth. It did indeed stick to his lip. "I like the taste of film." I guess that's a helpful hint if you're trying to figure it out in the dark. Watching him work with his buckets and jugs of chemistry is like watching a mad scientist. There's a certain frenzied quality to his practice that translates into the chaotic play of the images. His darkroom (a converted laundry room) has the intensity of a very tightly controlled accident scene. I half expected to see chalk outlines of reels gone by the wayside. His hand tinting method is somewhat of a chancy venture. In doing such unconventional things as running your film through an acid bath, he runs the risk of erasing the emulsion completely. It burns and lifts off and he's left with a clear plastic strip. However with contact printing on his steenbeck all is not lost; he can simply make another print of his original and start hand tinting again. If you're interested making your own contact prints and cutting costs by going around the lab, here's a step by step account of the Sanguedolce method: HOW TO CONVERT A CONVENTIONAL STEENBECK INTO A CONTACT PRINTER 1. Cover all light leaks in room (cracks under doors, windows). 2. Remove Prism. 3. Turn off normal overhead lights. Turn on safe light. 3. Build cardboard curtain with small window cut-out. Insert curtain with small window in place of prism. 4. Wind original footage on the second mag track. 5. Wind raw stock on the picture track. 6. Make sure emulsions are facing each other. 7. Put a change bag or black cloth over the whole cardboard curtain. 8. Run the film at normal speed. 9. Develop in chemistry. I would recommend any workshop with Steve Sanguedolce; his approach is practical, his explanations clear and candid. I wanted to linger and learn, watching him at work all day. Unfortunately I had to get on the road to Montreal where I was on assignment to observe an anomalous urban colony of raccoons. They call them raton-laveur in French, meaning something like rats that wash. It was explained to me it is because they wash their food before eating it. But reduced to a rat? That's kind of a bad rap for such a nice animal. With these nine steps and a block of time on a LIFT steenbeck, you can make your own contact prints. It's an amazingly simple procedure yielding great results. Root around in your old outtakes and give it a whirl. Then make like a raccoon and wash n' rinse.