As Mark Twain once said, so might have Gutenberg: ‘The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated’. Hardly a day goes by but a new letterpress workshop opens somewhere in the world. And, surprise, surprise, they are usually run by young people, from all sorts of backgrounds and for all sorts of reasons: poetry lovers and aspiring fine press publishers, technological dropouts, art students who have discovered that there is life after the Mac, hot-metal and type geeks, typographers suffering from digital fatigue, and people who just love the smell of ink and the sound of machinery.

Less common are full-length feature films about young people in thrall for the first time to the sirens of letterpress and old technology. But thanks to a crowdfunding project, Endless letterpress, now tells just such a story. Set in the suburbs of Buenes Aires (Argentina), the film (in Spanish, subtitleld in English) tells the tale of a group of young peoples’ encounter with a dying trade and a technique with endless potential.

After four years of preparation and shooting, the two first-time film-makers are now organising their own distribution in the hope that it will be shown in printing museums, collective workshops and anywhere else that people are thinking at the same time of the past and the future.

The film was made by Los Ultimos, aka Pablo Pivetta, graphic designer, photographer, short documentary maker and type collector, and Nicolas Rodriguez Fuchs, who studied graphic design and film at the Universidad de Buenos Aires (FADU-UBA) before working on post-production and animation for TV series and commercials.

You can see the trailer by clicking on the 'External Link' below.

The film has been submitted to various festivals who require the exclusivity until the decision of the jury, so it won’t actually be available for screening before 2018. But if you want to keep in touch you can follow the Los Ultimos project on Facebook.

The short film, From a Sheet of Paper to the Sky, grew out of research that conducted for an essay of the same title, written for the catalogue accompanying the Paul Nash exhibition at Tate Britain (October 2016 to March 2017). In that essay, Fraser argued against the traditional art historical tendency to review an artist’s work in different media separately, and instead proposed that a consideration of Paul Nash’s painting alongside his three-dimensional and textile designs, his printmaking, and photography, resulted in a fuller understanding of both the conceptual underpinnings and the recurring visual motifs in Nash’s work.

Also see related article, Inga Fraser, "“From a Sheet of Paper to the Sky”", British Art Studies, Issue 7, https://doi.org/10.17658/issn.2058-5462/issue-07/ifraser

View the video using the 'External Link' below.