A box of films, sat under a desk, gathering dust. Most are single rolls of Super 8, some still in their mailer envelopes – yellow for Kodak, white for Agfa. Where were they shot? Who is in there?
My introduction to Super 8 filmmaking began when I borrowed a silent Sankyo camera in 1987, from Plymouth Film and Video Workshop (PFVW), a Government-funded community video project where I worked. The camera had been gifted to the workshop by the widow of a cine hobbyist. Its portability appealed to me – in contrast to the heavy U-matic and VHS portapaks with separate video cameras of the time. The resulting reel of film in 1987 was exposed in Plymouth and Chelsea and transferred to U-Matic at the video workshop by filming a Bolex back projector.
The project had portable video gear – the camera and portable recorders of the time were both bulky and expensive – which were not suitable for my purposes a trip to stay with friends in west London, travelling the 240 miles each way on a motorbike. I had never used a ciné camera, but the Sankyo seemed quite manageable: on/off switch, shutter release, zoom lever and a lens that could be focussed. A cartridge of Super 8 film was purchased in a local Jessops photographic store and slotted into the camera’s film chamber. Details of the camera’s journey along the A38, M5 and M4 from Plymouth to Chelsea are lost in the mists of time; maybe it was in fact along the A303 past Stonehenge, but the camera and motorcyclist both arrived intact. Decades later, the memory of those days spent in London with friends are similarly hazy, except for the moments committed to film.
This roll of film was sent off to Agfa in its mailer envelope and some weeks later was returned in the post, the boxy cartridge transformed to a small reel of film with a white leader. PFVW’s benefactor had also donated a Bolex projector, which resembled a small television set, a black box with a back-projection screen. The whirring projector swallowed the white film leader and momentarily spat it out into the take-up spool, then Finborough Road, Chelsea SW10, appeared on screen, filmed from a friend’s flat several floors above in what had once been servants’ attic quarters of the grand house. The initial viewing of the footage was a revelation – vibrant colour, the surprise of seeing what had been filmed for the first time and a little relief that everything had worked. American film essayist Jenni Olson describes how she preserves her memories “in the amber of celluloid” in her filmic memoir The Royal Road (2015). In the same way, the activities in Chelsea all those years ago are retained in the 8mm-wide strip of analogue film which can be viewed, touched and experienced. The film was present in Finborough Road at the time of filming and is still with me – a physical memento, like the miniature Eiffel Tower I brought back from Paris on my first motorcycle trip abroad with those same friends.
My interest in photochemical film had been sparked by black and white 35mm still photography and darkroom work, which was taught as part of an undergraduate science course to facilitate the documentation of practical experiments. I became more interested in photography than biology and began to teach myself the former’s craft discipline. I carried on using Super 8 as a strand separate from the rest of my filmmaking and television career, which spanned documentary camera assisting on 16mm film and broadcast video, underwater camerawork, sound recording, 360 filmmaking and video editing. As my skills increased, I began running evening classes in photography and darkroom skills at Plymouth Art Centre, joining the community video project mentioned above, then lecturing at art colleges and universities. Alongside these varied professional ‘gigs’ the rolls of Super 8 film accumulated.
In October 2008 I enrolled on Plymouth University’s MA in Contemporary Film Practice for a full-time year of study. One module – Aesthetics and Technology – required the creation of a short film. I made a home-telecine of some Super 8 material that I had filmed in 2006 and presented the unedited footage to my peers and tutors in a presentation that was a requirement at the project’s planning stage. This was the first time I had considered any of my archive in an academic context. The resulting film Sea Front was submitted for the module and went on to success in various film festivals.
The success of Sea Front encouraged me to reappraise my collection of Super 8 and in 2011, a successful research grant application to Plymouth Marjon University, where I worked as a senior lecturer, funded ‘Freeing the Archive’. The project included the transfer to video of my entire Super 8 collection at a commercial facility in Soho, London. The title came from the idea that digitisation would allow me to work much more easily with the film material. Narrow gauge film is prone to damage, difficult to work with and risky to view since projectors vary greatly in quality and even the best are now decades old. Although even today it is possible work in a physical way with film, to cut and splice Super 8, have prints made and even have a sound stripe added, many practitioners use their exposed and processed film as raw material for digital postproduction.
My digitised film collection was now easily accessible to view and edit on a computer, the ‘archive’ had been freed in a sense. In the following months and years, the material was used as the source for digitally edited short films and viewed with an ease which was in stark contrast to the rigmarole of projecting the physical material. The physical archive remained in place, unaffected by its digital doppelgänger.
