Films, by nature, are a product of time: shutter speed and the race of the film strip, or the longer hours of planning, editing and creation. Some projects inevitably take longer than others to reach completion.

Your Television Traveler, a film by Binghamton University Cinema Department co-founder Larry Gottheim, took 32 years.

Thanks to a National Film Preservation Foundation Avant-Garde Masters Grant, the film has finally achieved Gottheim’s artistic vision, and will be screened Jan. 27 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Associate Professor of Cinema Tomonari Nishikawa worked with Michelle Gardner, senior supervising director of Foundation Relations and Campaign Gift Strategies, to apply for the grant. The preservation work was performed by Bill Brand of BB Optics; Brand is also a filmmaker, and his own preserved film will be shown in the same MoMA program.

Gottheim was teaching literature at Harpur College in the late 1960s when he first developed an interest in filmmaking. Ultimately, his newfound interest and self-taught skills inspired him to push for the creation of a Cinema program, among the first academic departments dedicated to the discipline in the U.S.

As a filmmaker, his early efforts included “Our Harpur Film” in 1968, which featured students of that day. “Allá” followed, featuring the Afro-Latin Alliance, the precursor to today’s Black Student Alliance. Gottheim then dove into experimental filmmaking, connecting with Ken Jacobs, who joined the department as a faculty member and helped shape its development. Gottheim himself spent 30 years at Binghamton and served as the department chair for much of that time before leaving in 1998.

“I don’t know where it came from, but I always had this urge to work on film. At the time, I didn’t know the difference between 8 mm and 16 mm; eventually, I bought a used 16 mm camera with an instruction booklet,” he remembered. “As soon as I got that camera, my life changed; I knew this is what I really wanted to do.”

Your Television Traveler is composed of multiple layers of images and sounds, in three parts. The first focuses on a NASA rocket falling away from the spacecraft, revealing the Earth, paired with an interview that Gottheim conducted with a Cuban woman in Havana. The second part repeats the first, but also superimposes a religious ceremony in Havana and sound from an early vinyl record about space travel, featuring astronauts identifying with the stereotyped fictional character José Jiménez. The third part contains all these elements, but then overlays sounds and images from a television show — the project’s namesake — about St. Petersburg, Fla.

Restoring ‘Your Television Traveler’

“I realized that I could make a film using these different wellsprings of material,” Gottheim said.

Each element of the film has its own origin story. At the time of the film’s creation, the Cinema Department was located next to audio-visual services, which gave academic departments a hand when they wanted to show films in class. Gottheim would occasionally see what films were stored there and came across the NASA footage. The circularity of the NASA image struck him; one of Gottheim’s very first films, Blues, was also built around a circular image of a bowl of blueberries and milk.

At some point, a friend came across reels discarded by a Florida television station and gave them to Gottheim; the latter provided them to his students for class projects but kept the St. Petersburg travelogue for his own use. Gottheim created the Havana footage — the interview and the religious celebration — while visiting Cuba for a film festival. He picked up the last component — the recording of astronauts talking space travel — in an antique shop, back in the days when compact discs were swiftly replacing vinyl.

“That was amazingly important to me because I learned that actual astronauts on this voyage had become fascinated with a ludicrous comic figure who was a reluctant astronaut with a very strong Spanish accent,” he said of the record. “At the time, astronauts were this ideal of white, clean-cut American youth, but the astronauts themselves identified with this character.”

The diverse imagery — combining images of space and astronauts with Cuban culture — is reminiscent of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. After all, the U.S. space program was in competition with the Soviet Union and its related satellite states, he said.

A perfect storm of problems, however, kept Your Television Traveler from reaching completion. The processing lab Gottheim worked with had difficulties processing the third section of the film, and some images were barely visible. Then, the original materials were lost before Gottheim could remake it.

“I felt that there would never be a real version of the film as I really wanted it,” he admitted.

When Nishikawa contacted him about the film preservation opportunity, he immediately thought of Your Television Traveler. Brand, who was familiar with Gottheim’s work, was able to reassemble the film from scraps of material archived at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.

Overall, the film preservation process involves duplicating a film onto a contemporary, stable film stock, storing it in a climate-controlled archive, and making it available for study and exhibition, while restoration consists of reconstructing a film from multiple sources such as the original camera negatives, editing workprints or other audio and visual elements, Brand explained.

Locating the source elements for Your Television Traveler took more than six months. In spots where the source film couldn’t be located, they digitally extracted the layers of missing imagery from the misprinted 1991 internegatives.

For Gottheim, the wait was worth it: He was finally able to see his original vision made manifest, he said.

“On the one hand, you could say the preservation took 32 years, since the film had not previously been properly obtained. But the most recent effort took only two years,” Brand said.