Juvenilia
Tuesday, March 24, 2026 at 7pm
Light Industry, 361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn

Presented by James N. Kienitz Wilkins

Video Bunt (At the New Wal-Mart Across the Street from the Old Wal-Mart), James N. Kienitz Wilkins, 2006, VHS-to-digital, 13 mins (looped before screening)

Rip Van Winkle, Paul Terry Toons Productions, 1934, 16mm, 6 mins
Springtime, James N. Kienitz Wilkins, 2006, 16mm-to-digital, 5 mins
Auto-autumnals, James N. Kienitz Wilkins, 2008, 16mm-to-digital, 3 mins
Nature Mature, James N. Kienitz Wilkins, 2007, 16mm, 18 mins
History Minor, Ryan Garrett, 2010, 16mm-to-digital, 19 mins
Occupations, James N. Kienitz Wilkins, 2015, 16mm-to-digital, 11 mins
We Never Sleep, RKO-Pathé Screenliner, 1956, 16mm, 8 mins

Sometimes a guy wakes up and is like, “What happened?” Over twenty years ago, I was in art school. I should have been making paintings and applying for an MFA at Yale. Instead, I was making “moving image” and grinding away on a thesis concept about “homocentrism through the seasons,” which is not as gay as it sounds—at least that’s what I told myself then. I’d purchased a beloved Canon Scoopic (a compact 16mm camera intended for quick field journalism and a precursor to electronic news-gathering [ENG] video cameras) to shoot a motorcycle movie starring a high school classmate who is now an MMA fighter. I was lucky to have some footage of this escapade ready when my professor at the time, the filmmaker Jacob Burckhardt, invited the guitarist Marc Ribot to class. Working atop a rat’s nest of guitar cables, Ribot jammed an improvisatory score to what became Springtime. I owe him $400 if it ever makes any money.

A few months later, the late filmmaker Ross McLaren sold me his cumbersome and practically medieval Frezzolini 16mm camera, which possessed an oscillating crystal sound-sync mechanism I lusted after for my thesis endeavor, Nature Mature (obstinately pronounced “Natter Matter”). I bought a stack of discounted and long expired film stock on eBay, overconfident in my analysis of Harris Savides’s cinematography for Gus Van Sant’s Last Days (which I had caught by chance at the now defunct Sunshine Cinema on Houston Street), reasoning that the natural fog of aged emulsion could be part of the look. I wanted it to be a pure film film, so I went so far as to construct a dust-free eco-tent in my rented bedroom in the artist Matthew Lutz-Kinoy’s parents’ house to cut straight negative, baby—huffing acetate cement as I toiled on even more gear wisely tossed by McLaren during his fire sale: a four-gang synchronizer, A/B rewinds, and a film splicer. It was a total disaster. DuArt called me up and said, “Kid, something’s wrong here.” The glue was bad and my edits had fallen apart in the printer. They didn’t charge me, and I taped up the damage and had to accept that the gooey, murky mess of a movie was mine. Per usual, I’d pushed too hard in too many directions, and the film had morphed into something probably best viewed as a document of its making, battered and torn before it was born.

Time passed. I graduated right at the start of a multinational financial crisis and sold the Frezzi and then the Scoopic on eBay to help pay for production of my feature Public Hearing. A user named ItsRainingBen69 (or something like that) bought it in a flash. I was elated and sad. He sent his attractive girlfriend to pick it up. We had coffee as I gave her the scoop on my filmmaking travails. Then she schlepped it to London and Ben Rivers shot something that ended up in the Tate (if memory serves). I felt that was an OK outcome. Blessedly, a Dutch cinematographer friend (the manliest man I’ve ever known) gifted me his old Aaton LTR to shoot Public Hearing on super 16mm (which was a great outcome), and it’s a camera I own to this day.

The problem with all this early 16mm work is that it made no real sense. Except for Nature Mature (and you’ll see how that turned out), up until 2010 or so, it was all destined to be transferred to and edited from the low-resolution archival prison of MiniDV, which is perhaps the truest medium of my Millennial filmmaking cohort, we wretched souls who entered artistic consciousness right at the decline of mainstream 16mm production, but years before the sexy revolution of high-bandwidth, low-cost HD. The most emblematic camera of that post-9/11 age was the Panasonic AG-DVX100, which promised to replicate the look of film on MiniDV through its 24p frame rate. (You can still find message board posts on DVInfo.net from an upstart named Barry Jenkins waxing poetic about his “old Panny” in the moonlight.)

Today, shooting real film is strangely, ironically more accessible than ever: film stock is chemically better; it scans better on high-resolution devices; it syncs better with digital monitoring; and simply looks cleaner and better, all at a lower emotional cost than ever. Now there’s a lot less detective work involved—less time and energy spent sourcing and searching, the brutal back-alley pursuits for the next new camera that promises to solve the deficiencies of the past. Sometimes I wonder what my early movies would have turned into under more forgiving conditions. Less camera, less men. But maybe the problem was me—the overzealous young man of a fading era.

This selection of subprime juvenilia is presented for your one-time amusement. Though it is transparently naive and both materially and narratively opaque, I believe it holds some charm, if only as a warning to others. The last time Nature Mature was projected on 16mm was at the New York and Chicago Underground Film Festivals in 2007.

- JNKW

Followed by a conversation with Wilkins.

Wilkins’s latest feature, The Misconceived, recently premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.

Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served, except for members subscribed at $8/month or more, who may reserve a seat by emailing information@lightindustry.org at least two hours prior to showtime. Box office opens at 6:30pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.

Light Industry is supported by our members and, in part, by the Mellon Foundation through the Coalition of Small Arts New York. Public assistance is provided by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.