Frame from EPH 4/21/16, Ephraim Horowitz on camera in the movie's final scene.
1936-2012
Male
various
by Dan Erdman Ephraim Horowitz, who died in fall 2012 at age 96, was a Flushing-based amateur filmmaker responsible for dozens of completed films. Many of them drew their material from his own life; some of his favorite genres were travelogues, autobiographical reminiscences, even essay films based on his own observations from Queens. By his own admission, he never seriously considered a narrative film, saying "I abandoned the idea of a plot film early on...To produce a viable plot movie requires an enormous amount of talent and ability, and I didn't feel I could turn out a believable story movie." Interested in film and photography from a young age, he shot reams of his own documentary footage, including some of the only color film of the 1939 World's Fair (which has been featured in various PBS programs). Aside from a sojourn in southern California after World War II, where he worked briefly for Technicolor, he lived in the New York City area for his entire life, and documented the way in which it changed over the course of his nearly century-long life in his movies, most prominently in his autobiographical EPH 4/21/16. He was also something of of a tireless organizer and joiner, collecting memberships in amateur filmmaking societies in the same way he collected coins and newspapers; in his own words, "I was president of all the New York clubs at one time or another, and program chairman, which was the most important job in the clubs, in all the three clubs of New York..." He was an early member of the Society of Amateur Cinematographers, which later became known as the Amateur Movie Makers Association, and also was active in a groups such as Long Island Movie Makers (which one other member has suggested he "almost single-handedly carried...with his personal movie programs as well as other programs he was able to obtain from his well-established connections all over the globe.") and the New York 8mm Club, and also held absentee membership in the Los Angeles Cinema Club and the Society of Canadian Cine Amateurs. He won the Best Film / Video by a Member a record five times from the Amateur Movie Makers Association, a distinction he regarded as "a bit of an accomplishment." Many of the filmmaking clubs he participated in no longer exist (an unfortunately broad trend - the general decline of once-burgeoning film clubs was a common lament among the people consulted by me for these notes); with these have disappeared any records of what Horowitz might have produced or shown under the auspices of any of any one organization. Furthermore, many of the people who may have been loyal members throughout the decades have either dropped out of the filmmaking scene or died; in any case, no central organization exists any longer that holds its contact information. The result of this is that historians [others?] are still in the process of compiling Horowitz's likely massive filmography. Many of the titles that are definitively known are fairly recent, and are documented through entries into festivals and awards garnered. These include awards from AMMA (1999's Nothing Is Forever, 2000's Movies I Never Made, 2001's The Deceptive Nines (which can be found on YouTube)) as well as the Los Angeles Cinema Club (2003's Florida Snail Boxes, Broadway Beat, and Eye on Broadway). It is ironic that the legacy of a man who, by all accounts, gave so much of himself to the amateur filmmaking community and produced so many films is in some danger of obscurity due to the sudden and steep dwindling of that community. It is hoped that the work being done here to recover both the films and something of the context of their production will be able to prevent this from occurring, and ideally claim a space in moving image culture for the history of amateur works. -- Dan Erdman NOTES ON THE FILM EPH 4/21/16 Year: 1979 Source: 16mm, color / b&w, sound Running Time: 26:28 Creator: Ephraim Horowitz Location: New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA Language: English Ephraim Horowitz was, by his own admission, an unrepentant collector and scavenger. World's Fair memorabilia, coins, old newspapers and magazines and filmmaking equipment were just a few of the items he felt compelled to accumulate. No morbid hoarder, he was actively engaged with the material of his obsessions, each class of item evoking some strain of nostalgia. An interview conducted right before his recent death teased some of this out of him. "I love the old magazines...I like to read the magazines, like, The Old Judge, which was a supposed comic magazine. And they always had anti-Semitic jokes in it which were de rigueur in those days, they were things that were accepted, and I loved to read this stuff; it's fascinating what the world was and what it's become now." This attitude is very much evident in EPH 4/21/16, both in its conscious sympathies as well as its artistic approach. A reminiscence on the first six decades of his life, the film habitually points out the gulf between the past and the present, generally deciding in favor of the former in a manner generally free of both sentimentality and curmudgeonliness. Rather than bitterness, Horowitz reacts to the passage of time with something like awe. He illustrates this in ways that are no less effective for being simple: black-and-white footage of an elevated train suddenly intercut with contemporary footage of the same line in the 1970s, or the constant alternation of still photos of the young Ephraim -- smiling, posed -- with the late-middle aged man from the then-present day, moving around a considerably more decrepit environment decked out in unfortunate 1970s colors. EPH 4/21/16 embodies his collector's impulse by building the past out of bits of old newspapers, close-ups of coins (Horowitz, a rare coin dealer, used this motif in some of his other work as well), still photographs and excerpts from his other productions. These tend to come in staccato bursts of successive shots lasting 15 or 20 seconds before lingering on one particularly evocative image, sometimes slowly panning or zooming in order to highlight one particular section of the frame. The average shot length of EPH 4/21/16 works out to 3.5 seconds; this is very fast for the average amateur production, and one can only admire the tenacity required to cut all of that together on consumer-grade equipment. Still, "accumulation of images" is part of the point of the film. The sense of wonder with which Horowitz registers the changes in his life is given depth by his explicitly commented-upon need to record as much of that life as he can in his films. There is a moment early on where Horowitz recounts a 1930s trip through Europe that he took with a friend; this is a rare section of the film which is almost entirely narrated rather than illustrated, and he ends the sequence with a static shot of a small trophy that he won in a tennis tournament on the ship during the voyage over, which he claims is the only memento he has of that time. This moment is paid off later on in the film during a long scene which chronicles his later extensive travels throughout the world with his wife Shirley, accompanied by several excerpts of film shot on these trips, as if to make up for his lack of documentation of his earlier travels. He ends the film with a summary of this attitude, insisting on the importance of "looking backwards" as a compliment to the relentless forward motion of life. The attempt to preserve the world as it was - by collecting its ephemera, or filming it as it whisks by - may be ultimately futile, but it as far as Horowitz was concerned, it was probably the best we could do. In the interview mentioned earlier, he was asked what attracted him to filmmaking. "The thing about an amateur movie is-- it's probably one of the greatest thrills in art that is possible, because what you are trying to do is reproduce life in one form or another."
Gilmore, Walt. “Memories of Ephraim Horowitz.” www.ampsvideo.com/ephraim-horowitz2.htm. Retrieved May 1, 2013. Levy, Mark. “Ephraim Horowitz, 1916-2012.” www.ampsvideo.com/ephraim-horowitz.htm. Retrieved May 1, 2013. (URL defunct as of 2016.) The Amateur Movie Makes Association folded in 2010 and published its final newsletter in 2009. The blog Home and Amateur documents some of the AMMA history. Last updated April 30, 2010. https://amateurism.wordpress.com/2010/04/30/the-amateur-movie-makers-association.
Amateur Cinema