Whispering Hope, or Grace and How to Get It.

I know of only one film-record of Oona Chaplin (nee O'Neill), this screen test made for a film in which she was cast and never appeared, having met and married Charlie Chaplin before shooting commenced. Some say that Chaplin himself directed her; history says otherwise. To hell with history. Hers was quite possibly the briefest film career ever. But then again, brevity is no obstacle to greatness.

I rephotographed the original screen test, doing 20 frame (as I recall...) lap dissolves from one from to the next. The idea was lifted wholesale from David Rimmer, though I've never seen the film(s?) in which he used the technique. Sailboat, I think, for one. I liked the brief transition from still to motion in Chris Marker's La Jetee, and wanted to extend it somehow. Anyway, I didn't like the result at first, as the image shifted a lot. So I made a duplicate negative and did some damage to it to obscure the hiccups. Ultimately, it was exposed to chemicals, buried, and left on the fire escape for a year. What remained I untangled, spliced together into something approaching a continuous strip of film, and had printed. The result became the master positive. The sound consists of a beat-up 78 of a song called "Whispering Hope," played at 33 rpm.

Brian L. Frye is a filmmaker, curator, freelance journalist, and lawyer. Born in 1974 in San Francisco, he spent his childhood in Santa Rosa (immortalized as the creepiest town in California in Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt), received a BA from UC Berkeley, an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, and a JD from New York University Law School. He is co-founder of New York's Robert Beck Memorial Cinema and has published numerous articles about independent and experimental filmmaking in publications including: Film Comment, Civilization, Cineaste, the Independent Film and Video Monthly and Millennium Film Journal, among others. His work has been shown in the Whitney Biennial, the New York Film Festival and the San Francisco International Film Festival.