In Memento Mori: The Fathomless Shadows, Tina Mori steals a wind-up Super 8 film camera from a professor of Russian language and literature. This is the camera she uses to make all of her early films. But it’s not a cursed camera or anything like that. It’s a little weird maybe, but it’s certainly not supernatural.
The Soviet Union manufactured hundreds of thousands of these and other motion picture cameras. The first I ever owned was the 16mm Krasnogrosk K-3 motion picture kit, and the Super 8 Zenit 1x8C-2 and its kin are like younger siblings. Now I have four or five of them. Yes, I have a problem.
Since the end of the Soviet Union, these cameras have flooded secondary markets like eBay, where you can routinely find them for sale at bargain prices. These are quite often barely used if at all, especially if they are being sold from the Ukraine or Belarus. I imagine gigantic warehouses of 30-year-old camera kits just waiting to find homes with nostalgic hobbyists.
But I think nostalgia isn’t quite right, either. Kodak still manufactures Super 8 film (it is even bringing back a limited selection of discontinued film stocks, though not Kodachrome as yet), and they are famously attempting to reintroduce a hybrid Super 8/digital motion picture camera for today’s consumers.
There are also companies like Pro8mm, who not only sell Super 8 film and processing (including conversion to digital files for editing and output), but they also refurbish cameras into like new or better condition. There are also still film labs that process these smaller gauge formats, though certainly far, far fewer than in decades past.
While Kodak’s new camera is a hybrid of digital and analog technology, the Zenit Super 8 camera is almost entirely, doggedly, brutally analog (it does have a battery-powered internal light meter). While most of the Super 8 cameras that people bought in the U.S. and Western Europe and elsewhere had battery-powered motors and were made mostly of plastic, the Zenit is a lot of die cast metal and heavy composites. It’s weighty. To give you a better sense of it, here’s a short YouTube review of the 1x8S-2 (which is the version of the camera that was sold outside the USSR under the market name Kinoflex). The reviewer is German.
Aside from always delicate lenses, these cameras are virtually impossible to break during normal use. That’s certainly not the case with a lot of old Super 8 camera that you might have bought at the local department store or camera shop. And they can do everything except synchronized sound.
All of this tends to inspire romantic people like me (who wrote Memento Mori on a manual typewriter–no Delete key!). Why not make a movie with one of these? Many, many aspiring filmmakers still find their way to Super 8 as a filmmaking format either out of a retro sensibility, or an appreciation of film’s discipline over digital, or a sincere love of the small gauge film visual aesthetic. Of course, since each cartridge is only about three minutes of footage at normal speed, most of these films are short. In fact, there is an annual global competition called Straight8 that challenges filmmakers to make a short film in Super8 with all in-camera editing (go the page, check out some classic samples, ZOMG). That is, you don’t get to edit anything after the fact. You shoot each shot in order, send off the cartridge, and hope it all worked out! Here is Edgar Wright’s amazing Straight8, Forced Hilarity, which Wright introduces.
But others have been even more ambitious, if not more successful. Here is John Hand on trying to shoot in feature film on Super 8 in the 21st Century. Another guerrilla project, Buster, managed to do the Super 8 feature thing, as well.
All of these things, along with the decades-long history of home and amateur film enthusiasts that I have read about extensively, my own experiences growing up watching the Hauser family home movies on 8mm film (and inheriting many of them recently), and my more recent interest and research in the underground film scene contributed to the creation of Tina Mori’s obsession.
Next time, I’ll introduce you to that underground film world. But until then, do you have any memories of watching celluloid home movies? How is that experience, or your memories of that experience, different from the cellphone video that we see everywhere all the time now? I want to hear what you think.