This page includes a discussion of the now-obsolete Kodak Kodachrome colour reversal film stock, which makes up a large part of my Super 8 collection, and the way this emulsion renders colour that has become a byword for a nostalgic representation of the past (Hill, 2021).
Super 8’s predecessor, Standard 8, required a level of skill and dexterity to load a roll of film successfully. 16mm cameras often required greater technical know-how to load and operate and the cameras were more expensive, larger and the film stock was more expensive. Super 8 was designed to remove these complicated procedures that created hurdles for the novice filmmaker.
Early Super 8 cameras were typically battery-driven with basic controls; the user had only to insert a cartridge, turn on the camera, aim, press the trigger and repeat until the cartridge was used up. As the format became popular, manufacturers produced more sophisticated cameras which afforded greater control and quality for an enthusiast owner. The upshot of these innovations was that I could achieve pleasing results with little experience and no mentoring in using a film camera. Sarah Turner describes how the accessibility of the format and the spontaneity it engendered influenced her early filmmaking at art college:
I was working on 16mm, and we were taught its full properties, including emulsion, light meters, stocks, ASAs and so on, whereas Super 8 is primarily a domestic format with automatic exposure. Super 8 was largely regarded as a ‘sketchbook’ medium and that made it popular when I was at the Slade. (Turner, 2014, p.83)
She goes on to explain how using Super 8 offers an “alchemy of mistakes” giving rise to results that could be disastrous but could be magical because of “happy accidents” (Ibid., p.84).
My interest in still photography influenced how I engaged initially with celluloid filmmaking in the 1980s, with images taking precedence over audio. I had been involved with video production for several years, where sound was almost always recorded to videotape, along with pictures. As I continued to shoot Super 8, I bought a Canon 814, whose film chamber would only accept silent cartridges, which had the bonus of being less expensive than the sound-striped emulsions. Purchasing a ‘silent’ camera dictated that the collection grew without sync sound.
Super 8’s successor for home movies – camcorders recording to a variety of video formats – would all capture sound alongside moving images to play back on domestic television sets, either by connecting the camcorder with cables or by playing the tape back in the videocassette recorders that were becoming commonplace in the home in the 1980s (Mulvey, 2005, pp.22, 101).
As discussed below, most Super 8 users were reluctant to edit their movies, but those that recorded audio faced an extra challenge. It is telling that Super 8 sound film cartridges were some of the first to be discontinued as home video technology, with its longer running times and much cheaper media, superseded film as a more convenient way to record family life, while silent Super 8 film stocks remain in production.
I had known no ‘analogue’ filmmakers, either professional or home moviemakers, and my only exposure to film apparatus were some 16mm educational film shows in school, where the schoolmasters – they were all male – who fiddled with the projector at the rear of the room never broached the subject of film reels and lacing much less the processes that created the films. I had watched films in cinemas, but the mechanics – hidden away in the projection boxes – had remained a mystery. Also, the tiny 50ft filmstrip of Super 8 images seemed a world away from the ‘proper’ 35mm cinema, whose feature films came in huge flight cases dropped off by couriers, a few floors below the video workshop where I worked in Plymouth Arts Centre.
I was unaware of the disdain a large section of the filmmaking world held for the newly accessible video technology with its blurry low-resolution imagery that degraded with each copy. This copying was inherent in analogue tape-to-tape editing, so what little technical quality was present in the first-generation rushes diminished on the second generation edit master and again on third generation screening copies. Celluloid had associations with cinema and high-end television and music video production, but my efforts seemed remote from such considerations. Any desire to experience the films in their best ‘natural’ state through projection was absent beyond ‘seeing what was there’ when the film came back from the processor. The reels in my collection were viewed, then returned to storage with no thoughts of physically editing them or having public projection events. Now, years later the question is raised – if the 50ft film roll has remained uncut for decades, is it not by default a ‘finished film’?