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   CLUB SANDWICH 75

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The GRATEFUL DEAD A PHOTOFILM

As surprising as it is good, and as original as it is watchable, Paul McCartney has devised and directed a film about the Grateful Dead. Mark Lewisohn went into the viewing theatre for Club Sandwich Club Sandwich 75

            With Paul McCartney one comes to expect the unexpected. Suddenly, there he is, shielding his eyes from the bright Soho sunshine, stepping out of a darkened edit suite with a film can tucked underneath his arm. It has been a labour-of-love production and, for two years, a secret one. Now it's ready to hit the screen: Grateful Dead - A Photofilm.
            But why is Paul making a film about the Grateful Dead, you might ask. Well, why not? Paul and Linda have long been Dead-heads (journalists thought Paul was joking when he was asked if the Rolling Stones had inspired him to go back on the road in 1989 and he replied "No, it was the Grateful Dead") and the film is definitely a husband and wife affair: her photographs, his muse.
            Grateful Dead - A Photofilm
is a short art-film, running 9 minutes 17 seconds, but it's the result of painstaking effort. Indeed, only one thing about it is simple, and that's the premise: Linda's 1960s photographs of the band, some taken in Central Park, New York, the others in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco, have been turned into moving images. In other words, it's an action film made from stills. Very effectively.
            It's been done so well, in fact, that one is left with the impression that one is watching a moving film that has been freeze-framed.
            Further advancing Paul's long-held interest in cinematographic art, Grateful Dead - A Photofilm took life during the New World Tour in 1993. With time to spare, Paul hit upon the idea while scanning through some of Linda's pictures. "When I was a kid, recovering from an illness," he recalls, "I had a strange experience when, by concentrating on a photograph in a newspaper, I seemed to be able to make it move. Looking at Linda's pictures of the Grateful Dead I got that feeling again, that maybe I could make them into a film. Especially as they capture a time when not much footage exists of the band." Still on tour, Paul asked for certain experimental processes to be implemented onto film which he then looked at and (no pun intended) began to develop.
            In all, Linda had shot four 36-exposure 35mm black-and-white rolls, meaning that there were 144 images of the Dead available for what Paul began to call a Photofilm. All 144 were used as he assembled the 5x4-inch prints into a sequence that pleased him and then set about the job of storyboarding them - compiling what he came to call "a grocery list" of progressive ideas. Using a variety of styles, speeds and angles, the photographs were then shot by a Rostrum camera, creating many hours of raw uncut moving film.
            Paul then chose the music tracks, exercising his familiarity with the Dead's work to select excerpts from three numbers - 'That's It For The Other One', 'New Potato Caboose' and 'Alligator' - that perfectly align with the images. Because everything about Grateful Dead - A Photofilm is authentic, even the applause heard as accompaniment to the Central Park concert stills has been taken from one of the band's concerts at that time. "Truly," says Robby Montgomery, Paul and Linda's co-producer on the Photofilm, "the attention to detail throughout the whole film has been painstaking. It's a total act of love, not something done for commercial purposes or with a specific release date in mind."
            Robby has worked with Paul and Linda for many years, principally as Linda's photography agent, and he is quick to remind us of her role. "For a start," he says, "Linda has always been smart enough to keep her negatives, and to look after them. A lot of photographers in the 1960s didn't do so. The negatives are 30 years old, but when they're blown up they're still remarkably clear and you can see incredible things which just weren't thought about at the time. Take, for example, the Central Park concert. Primarily, Linda was photographing the band, but now one can see so much else going on, and the faces in the crowd come alive. The stills really capture the inter-reaction between the band and the audience, picking up on the atmosphere."
            Linda's technique as a photographer also merits Robby's praise.

            The film's titles were handwritten by Paul on the back of an envelope and then computerised. "I'm sure there'll be people out there trying to find the typeface," muses Robby Montgomery