credit: “mordancage” by stacey svendsen, CC BY 2.0

Following our screening with Lindsay McIntyre on Wednesday, April 29th, AgX will be hosting a workshop on the process of Mordançage led by Lindsay McIntyre. This workshop is primarily for AgX members, but if you’d like to be added to the waitlist, please email stefan@agxfilm.org

Mordençage: Emulsion Decay
(instructor: Lindsay McIntyre)

Originally pioneered by Jean-Pierre Sudre in the 1960s as a subversive alternative to traditional still photography, Mordençage has been reimagined for the 16mm format. Mordençage is a bleach-etch process that destabilizes the very structure of the film. By chemically attacking the silver-rich areas of the emulsion, Mordençage allows the filmmaker to physically lift, reshape, and drape veiled images back onto the base. This gelatin relief process, done outdoors in daylight, both chemically bleaches the images so that they can be redeveloped (and sometimes solarized) as well as lifts the dense blacks of the emulsion away from the base creating dancing veils of emulsion. 

Participants can bring black and white found footage or their own black and white film that they are comfortable experimenting with. (Note this is a somewhat unpredictable process, so it's not recommended to experiment on any material that you consider precious). We will also be able to produce material to experiment with by creating photograms and contact printing other material.