Splices of genius in 16mm

It began scrawled on dirty napkins at Little Rock's late gastropub The House in 2011. Or maybe the idea came before that, in the late '90s, on the bare arm of 14-year-old JT Tarpley as he watched 8 ½ for the first time in the back room at Vino's, and later as he permanently inked the film's gibberish phrase "Asa Nisi Masa" on his bicep.

Some might say the stage was set decades ago, among Arkansas' emerging film fans in the '70s, in the haze of marijuana smoke rumored to float through MacArthur Park during Arkansas Arts Center's repertory film series.

Experimental microcinema was incubating in Little Rock long before a Facebook page popped up in March introducing Splice Microcinema, a series of alternative and cult films screened on "living, breathing, super-rare 16mm film."

After a three-month soft opening, Splice Microcinema will hold a grand opening and screening of Ingmar Bergman's Persona on Wednesday.

Earlier this spring, Tarpley, now 29, returned to his home state from a stint in New York and called Little Rock filmmaker Mark Thiedeman that same week. Let's get this thing going, Tarpley said.

"Little Rock is on a big upswing right now," Thiedeman says. "And it's a great place to pioneer things and have new ideas and do things that others haven't done."

Tarpley had found four prints from French-Swiss director Jean-Luc Godard: Breathless (1960), Band of Outsiders (1964), Alphaville (1965), and Masculin Feminin (1966), the kind of films non-nerds sleep through in dim lecture halls to complete their liberal arts degrees.

The two launched a month-long experiment in April: projecting the Godard classics in the original 16mm formats -- the crackly, low-budget, pre-widescreen aspect ratio. Add beer, pizza and young people interested in thinking. Leave out highbrow hauteur. "NO STUFFY B.S.: NO SNOBBERY : EVERYONE IS INVITED," reads the footer on the Facebook photo.

"These films are aggressive, idea-based movies; there's nothing like it coming out, at least in America, these days," Thiedeman says. "Our aim is to take these movies out of the classroom and put them back in the communal setting where they belong."

One month became three. Vino's wasn't packed every Wednesday, but people kept coming. Regulars surfaced. Splice polled audiences, jumped genres for Throne of Blood (1957), a sort of Japanese Macbeth, and took a break to show a pair of Arkansas-themed B-movies on VHS (it kind of flopped; Tarpley may be the only person alive who appreciates the VHS grain).

They found out what audiences wanted almost immediately.

People didn't really show up for the films. They came for the crackle, the scratches on the picture and soft vignettes circling the frame. They returned for the hum of the projector and the startling experience of actually needing an intermission to replace the reel.

"I think there's something romantic, in the age of digital screening and digitized film, being in the room with a print that is a chemical descendant of actual film print that was there on set with the people making the movie," Tarpley says.

Cinema is an event, not a thing, the co-founders assert. So film rests wholly on the environment in which it is viewed. For a while that was Vino's, but Splice needed the 16mm experience to marinate in a space that doesn't shut down at 11 p.m.

"These are films when you walk away, you feel nourished," Tarpley says, "and I find myself craving these movies after about a week away. I find myself craving the conversations that come after it."

Enter Few, an Arkansas design agency lofted above Lulav and EJ's in downtown Little Rock. It's open, airy, and smells like synergy. Wednesday's grand opening will be Splice's first event at Few.

"We never close," says David Hudson, chief executive officer of Few. ("We have beer," and "it doesn't get more intimate than this," are other ways Hudson describes the compatibility of the new partnership).

Few headquarters was designed as a hub for creative people to support and build on one another's ideas, from the communal table dominating the front room to the drawing of a hippo wearing a bikini Hudson bought from one of Splice's board members.

"We're doing everything we can to bring creative, artistic people to the space," Hudson says. "We've got a lot of talent in central Arkansas, but it's distributed. It's hard to find a lot of talent in the same place, but we have to get them together."

For the next six months, Splice's biweekly schedule includes thrillers, documentaries, comedies, screwball and noir, from Germany to Japan, as well as an "essential" Western the co-founders couldn't overlook: John Ford's Stagecoach (1939).

They are coy about Splice's future. They hint about negotiations with a handful of large preservation collections and "a lot of really neat champions nationally," who "kind of have our backs." Splice board member and multifaceted artist Phillip Rex Huddleston plans a series of T-shirts for each film, hopefully commissioned by local artists.

The goal isn't the next New York Film Forum. It's to make Splice the best it can be, and give people a place to talk about unfamiliar ideas and aesthetics, Tarpley says.

"Hopefully if there are some 14-year-old kids who come in here and see a movie, they may get a tattoo from it four years later."

Style on 07/15/2014