I had chosen to visit a place, to put myself in its physical setting, the filming activities placed the location into the archive, and ‘revisiting’ the place in the archive allows it to be to be experienced. The ‘scale’ of Super 8: human, intimate, close, held, grounded. The opposite of the detached, weaponised gaze of the drone.
The scrap of film in the image above has the marks of its physical existence – dust, creases and a brutal rip – but still faithfully carries its image sequence.
Early on in this PhD, I coined the phrase the ‘dead eye of digital’ where a stationary digital video camera shot of a still scene is no different to a single digital still played back for the same amount of time. The tiny frame size of small gauge film like Super 8 emphasises the grain dancing on screen and any imperfections from its manufacture, processing and projection. The format revels in its poor frame registration in front of the camera gate giving rise to weave and instability.
A digital sensor, being a palimpsest, can contribute nothing more interesting than a dead or hot pixel on every frame, and unmoving specks of dust that have landed on its surface. The forlorn piece of Super 8 has kept its image for decades. When I was looking for the sensor dust image above the computer warned that the new 8TB drive was unreadable and I should try to recover its data before reformatting it. Thankfully it seems to be OK.