January 20-26, 2005

cityspace

Interior Shot

REEL TO REAL: Ellen Renolds (foreground) works with Bianca White in the Scribe Video Center, outfitted with both modern Macs and old-school Ampex machines. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

A close-up on the Scribe Video Center, Philly's indie film capital, in its new West Philly home.

by A.D. Amorosi

There is nothing to see at Scribe Video Center's new home in West Philadelphia. There is everything to see at Scribe Video Center's new home in West Philadelphia.

As Philadelphia's famed 22-year-old nonprofit film center, dedicated to community outreach and workshopping of all cinematic sort, Scribe is Independent Film Philly Central. It has offered a home to this city's finest African-American, female, gay and student filmmakers, as well as introduced visionaries from other cities while offering members now-historic programs like its Producers' Forum lecture series, Community Visions, and Documentary History Project for Youth.

The outside of the new building at 4212 Chestnut is nondescript: a kabob shop across the street, a Pep Boys nearby — an animated corner to be certain. But nothing as animated, sometimes literally, as what goes on within the 3,500 square feet of Scribe's third-floor space. This former rug warehouse — with its peaked-roof ceiling (topping out at 20 feet), exposed beams and brick, and separate wide rooms for video editing, workshop classrooms, 16 mm editing, video screening, equipment rental and videotape/DVD library — has a large lofty feel so far apart from the old Scribe.

"We had, and have, a lot of affection for the old building," says program director Gretjen Clausing of the center's famed 1342 Cypress St. carriage house. "It was like a garage that served as a classroom for the technology of film- and video-making."

With no cubicles and everything happening in one space, whether that thing involved 10 people or dozens, the old Scribe happily forced its family of filmmakers to huddle when learning from inspirations such as Philly videographer Peter Rose or Scribe exec director/documentarian Louis Massiah (whose W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices is essential viewing).

"I just thought we'd be walking around the space, not down memory lane," joked Clausing, walking thorough the new SVC. "We wanted to actually become the center that our name ascribes to, a place where people could gather. You couldn't get more than a dozen people in the old place — comfortably being the operative word."

Step off the elevator at SVC and you find yourself nearly one foot into the media manager's offices and the equipment room, a museum of vid/film technology with old Ampex reel-to-reel machines, woolly mammoth computers with floppy discs and 16 mm film splicers next to Digi-Packs. "You never know how long digital files will last," says Clausing of the antiquities. "We feel like a real media center, double Dutch doors and all."

Plus, they don't use the old film school idea of "the cage," where equipment is handed back and forth as if it's mealtime in a stockade a la The Shawshank Redemption. SVC is much more accessible.

Look closely. With the way the rooms and space is arranged, SVC looks like a pretzel.

Corkboards for competitions, grants and events — political, cinematic — line the walls heading toward Scribe's largest room, a high-ceilinged screening/meeting space that acts as Scribe Central, with rooms within serving as editing suites. Along its side are bookshelves packed with the hundreds of videos that make up the library. This includes Scribe-made films like The Bombing of Osage Avenue and work by Scribe affiliates Mike Dennis, Robert Mugge and Termite TV.

"We don't have a lot of furniture, as you can see," says Clausing, pointing to the sparse conference room/classroom available for upcoming events like the Super 8 filmmaking and hand-processing workshop (offered by Manhattan-based experimental filmmakers Stephanie Gray and Kelly Spivey Jan. 29-30). "You'll learn to shoot a three-minute, in-camera edited film and then hand-process [it] on one day; then develop it and project it the next day," says Clausing. And soon after, in conjunction with the Fabric Workshop and Museum's Experiments with Truth exhibit, British filmmaker Isaac Julien will teach a master class on the film expression of "queer subjectivity and blackness" (Wed., Feb. 9, at 7 p.m.) and screen his film Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (Tue., Feb 8 at 7 p.m. at International House).

"We're all about new technology and new media," said Clausing, standing next to a poster of the acclaimed Odessa steps scene from Sergei Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin. "But we definitely keep our hands in the old techniques. I can't wait to break out the old Steinbeck flatbed editor while watching the G5 Mac loaded up with Final Cut Pro go."

Scribe Video Center, 4212 Chestnut St., 215-222-4201.