The Passage of Time
There are complications, or at least considerations, regarding frame rates of filming and projection or transfer by telecine of Super 8 footage. Super 8 cameras typically run at 18 frames per second (fps) for silent filming and 24 fps for synchronised sound or to conform to the professional motion picture standard. Silent frame rates have survived from the early days of cinema when 16 or 18 fps sufficed to create a naturalistic rendition of motion while using the minimum of film stock for acquisition, editing and, most importantly, distribution and projection. The frame rate was standardised upwards to 24 fps for ‘talkies’ in the 1930s to reproduce the soundtrack with greater fidelity. 24 fps remains the benchmark for narrative filmmaking and projection to the present day, despite the production process typically being completely digital.
The Super 8 filmmaker wanting to reproduce naturalistic motion has a choice of setting the camera either to 18 or 24 fps. Either filming speed gives a satisfactory experience for the viewer. Consequently, I ran most of the footage in my archive through the camera at the slower – and more frugal – frame rate, allowing for an extra 50 seconds of filming on each roll.
Home Transfer
The method I often used to transfer film to video was to project the film on to a white wall and re-film it on video in a darkened room, a common ‘cut price’ approach to telecine. The results were often technically flawed but rendered the footage in a style quite different to the sterility of video. My interest in still photography predates my work as a filmmaker. Perhaps this is why the first viewing of the slowed-down footage of Derek Jarman’s Gerald’s Film (Jarman, 1976) resonated so strongly. Its dreamlike quality shimmered in a space between still and moving image, the unstoppable present of cinema subverted by the photographic readability of successive frames. Jarman’s early Super 8 work is a personal cinema – a documenting of his life – where this technique of filming at 6 fps then projecting at 3 fps to manipulate time both distances the viewer from a naturalistic rendition of the profilmic space, but paradoxically offers a closer, more personal and human experience.
Professional Telecine
In 2011, the Super 8 rushes that constitute my digital archive were professionally transferred to DigiBeta on a telecine machine at Deluxe Soho in London at 25 fps. This ‘projection’ rate has the benefit of matching each frame of film to a frame of video but accelerates movement to a degree – slight for 24 fps material but noticeable for footage filmed at 18 fps. In 1987, the prospect of having my Super 8 footage telecined in Soho over 20 years later – and consequently setting the camera at 24 fps to pre-empt the issues from filming at 18 fps – would have seemed fanciful. These considerations have been rendered less important by advances in non-linear editing, which allow footage to be slowed down to match its ‘natural’ cadence on the timeline. Advancing technology has allowed digitisation at much higher quality on cheaper machines and thereby be given ‘new life’, in contrast to contemporary productions shot on video whose quality was fixed in standard definition.
Material Particulars
Reversal film, such as Kodachrome 40, is exposed in the camera before being processed to produce a strip of positive pictures. In the technical sense, these are not negative images where light areas of the scene are rendered as dark areas in the film emulsion and colours are reversed. Essentially, a long strip is produced of what are commonly described as ‘colour slides’ or ‘colour transparencies’ in the world of stills photography. Each frame on the 50-foot reel of Super 8 film is a tiny photographic image of approximately 4mm by 5.8mm – small but readable by the naked eye, particularly if the images are of high contrast, such as trees against the sky. To get a better view of individual frames, a photographic loupe is required and some form of film transport, such as an editor/viewer or projector, if the film is to be experienced with the illusion of movement.
Celluloid photography and filmmaking have enjoyed a modest, artisanal renaissance in recent years. For some, its appeal might be as a craft practice with pleasure derived from choosing and buying film material, loading the camera in a semi-darkness, deploying vintage exposure meters and other arcana. A cynic might view this ‘return to film’ as nostalgia, the re-enactment of an imagined analogue past. Others, such as the American filmmaker, Robert Schaller, have a long-standing commitment to analogue practice.
He also designs and builds 16mm cameras, creates his own emulsion and produces projection prints. Unlike Schaller, most ‘analogue filmmakers’ use digital editing, although a few die-hards still cut their negs and have a projection print struck with optical sound embedded or a mag stripe coated on. The Super 8 reversal material in my archive was processed commercially. Kodachrome required a highly complex development by the laboratory, even the Agfa and Ektachrome stocks’ E6 processing was a complicated procedure.
The photographic rendition of the Kodachrome emulsion is commonly held to connote ‘the past’ and has a widespread cultural resonance. Paul Simon sings in ‘Kodachrome’ (1973):
Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So mama don’t take my Kodachrome away
For generations of people around the world, their lives were documented on Kodachrome, both as colour slides and Super 8 ciné. Eastman Kodak ceased manufacturing Kodachrome 40 in 2006 (Kodak, 2022). In the 30-minute documentary, The End of an Era, a National Geographic film crew follows the photographer Steve McCurry as he shoots “the very last roll of Kodachrome to come off the assembly line” and processes the film at Dwayne’s Photo – McCurry had worked extensively for National Geographic as a freelancer and has “over 800 thousand” Kodachrome transparencies in his archive (Russo and Weise, 2013). In the 2017 feature film Kodachrome (Raso, 2017), an A&R music executive accompanies his estranged and dying father, a well-known photojournalist, on a road trip from New York to Parsons, Kansas, to process his last four rolls of Kodachrome film before the sole remaining film processing facility, Dwayne’s Photo, closes. The film navigates a world changing from analogue to digital as the protagonists try to put the past behind them. People associate the ‘look’ of Kodachrome stock – its aesthetic – with the past and their memories of holidays, everyday activities, and family occasions. We see the association of Kodachrome with the past in Wim Wenders’ Paris Texas (Wenders, 1984) in which the protagonist – Travis Henderson, played by Harry Dean Stanton – is reintroduced to his past by the projection of Kodachrome home movies. My Super 8 footage had these material connotations of being of the past when it was first viewed, more now that it has aged.
The 50 feet (15m) Super 8 cartridge will film for 3 minutes 20 seconds at 18 fps but only 2 minutes 30 seconds at 24 fps.
I shot the footage used in Sea Front (Moore, 2010) at 24 fps – unusual for my Super 8 work. Initially, the transfer was at the matching 24 fps, but everything seemed to move too quickly on screen. The second transfer to digital was at around 16 2/3 fps, achieved by setting the projector at 18 fps and using its speed adjuster to lower the frame rate. The slower, more relaxed interpretation seemed to be more natural, more fitting, closer to the lived experience.