Meshes was absolutely assembled with a glue splicer. However, Jonathan's frame grab does not show a conventional lap splice as would have been made by a normal Maier-Hancock splicer used in conforming A/B roll.
The "weird" thing is how the stub of the out-frame (which means, for non-editors, not that last frame included, but the first frame "out") leaves the top of the CU visible completely obscuring the top of the MS of the chair. In a normal glue splice, the slicer cuts the tail of the first shot below the frameline, leaving an area to overlap the next piece of celluloid, and the in-frame of shot #2 is cut on the frame line. Then the editor then scrapes the emulsion and binder off that lap area extending from shot one, getting down to the base, so as to be able to glue it onto the base side of the next piece of film. So there'd be no top of Maya's CU head obscuring the top of the MS. Instead, a normal glue splice looks like what we see toward the bottom of the last CU frame -- a very visible line at the end of the overlap, and various degradations of the image created by unevenness of the glue, dust captured in the weld, etc. But this would be seen at the top of the shot #2 in-frame. Not having handled photochemical moving picture film in 40 years, wondering if I'd forgotten something important, I pulled my old copy of Independent Filmmaking off the shelf... In the editing chapter Lipton describes a splicing technique I'd never encountered, one primarily used for assembling reversal original, called a "positive splice". Instead of creating an overlap entirely on the tail of shot #1 extending well down into the in-frame of shot #2, it splits the difference: so half the overlap is at the bottom of the last frame in #1, and half is at the top of the #2 in frame. OK, never having done this, I'm trying to imagine how, or just if, that would result in that visible extension of the first shot, not just the splice, into the second. I'm thinking that overlap from #1 would still have to have the emulsion and binder scraped off in order for the cement to weld it to the base of #2. If anything, wouldn't the intrusion of the image be in the other direction? The emulsion side of #1 still has to be glued to the base side of #2, so wouldn't the editor have to scrape of the bottom of that last frame of Maya's hand over her mouth? The overlap of #1 into #2 also looks pretty big, and the cut not exactly straight... I've got COVID at the moment, limiting further my now-geriatric ability to puzzle this out, but I'm wondering if explanations might involve 1) some sort of edit-point revisions, adding or deleting frames on one side or another, which is obviously difficult with glue-spliced original, or 2) some shot being mirrored from the pro-filmic event, flipped on the Y axis, necessitating some sort of base-to-base splice? ___ Fwiw, I always found the visible splices in Meshes kind of odd, given Sasha Hammid's great tech wizardry. Was the one-black-frame "invisible" splice unknown in the 40s? If there's any intent there, or just some expediency we can't quite reconstruct, I 'm not sure it should matter -- though interpretations of experimental films are often freighted with extratextual information. The splices say (intentional or not) "this was made by hand" which adds to the resonance of these two people working out the most personal of issues in this now-canonical work of art.
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