Trigg describes the experience of ruins:
“The tension, surrounded by an aura of hauntings and spectrality, instils a threshold in the viewer: as much we attempt to commune with this immediate environment, so there is a sense in being watched by the environment.”
I wonder whether the experience of the Super 8 archives has parallels here:
“This reversible duality gathers a resonance thanks to the collision of worlds, spatial and temporal, with each diametrically opposed to the other. The reality of the traumatic event is not reinforced in this encounter, but instead trembles as an incommensurable void is given a voice between the viewer and the place.”
Visiting an architectural ruin may evoke the past traumas which took place there but the passage of time resists and distances, perhaps film can reanimate the past. The temporal bridge is perhaps stronger for the filmmaker who is both with the physical film in the present but also was present at the films’ creation/inscription. Super 8 film also bears the marks of its intervening traumatic life, a further indicator of temporality.
Seeing/finding myself at Womad in 1985 in Cornwall projected from Super 8 is a spectral experience, both in the sense of a ghostly apparition – visible but intangible – and through the spectrum of light filtered through the Agfachrome dyes. One can touch the film, mark the film, cast shadows by interrupting the projecting light, but the ghost of who and where I was 31 years ago is untouchable.