A new generation discovers making movies with Super 8

By Liz Kim

Inside the dim cluttered basement offices of Pac Lab in lower Manhattan, the digital revolution has yet to arrive. Bryan Brown, a gray-haired technician, sorts through stacks of Super 8 film cartridges sent from as far away as Japan. Pac Lab is one of a dwindling number of labs that still develops the 41-year-old film format.

Brown rubs his finger across a worn label on the side of the giant steel contraption that develops the film. “This company went out of business 15 years ago,” he said. “Nobody makes these machines anymore.”

Such is the common refrain in the world of Super 8 filmmaking. People say it all the time, whether they are talking about the cameras, the film stock or the projectors. Yet in the face of an inexorable decline brought on by the rise of inexpensive, high-quality digital video, Super 8 - with its signature vivid colors and grainy texture - continues to win new fans.

Super 8 film festivals have sprung up across the country. Web sites allow filmmakers to show off and share their work. The vintage stock still pops up in music and wedding videos, experimental short films and even Hollywood films. Last year, "Lords of Dogtown," a movie about the birth of skateboarding culture, used Super 8 to capture the kinetic beauty of the sport. Today, skateboarders who like the retro look shoot their latest stunts in Super 8.

“It’s the only way to shoot movies in a small, intimate way,” said filmmaker David Teague. He runs the New York chapter of Flicker, an organization that regularly screens Super 8 and 16mm films. “Many of the submissions come from first-time filmmakers,” Teague said.

The response from amateurs is exactly what Kodak had in mind when it introduced Super 8 in 1965. Unlike Kodak’s standard 8-millimeter format, the new Super 8 featured a frame that was 50 percent larger and came in cartridges that eliminated the need for threading the film by hand. Loaded onto small handheld cameras, each cartridge can record about 3 1/2 minutes of action.

The format quickly took off. An entire generation of parents filmed the adorable antics of their kids. Sometimes, the kids themselves got hold of the cameras and let their imaginations run wild, as was the case with Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Oliver Stone and many other well-known filmmakers who made their very first movies on Super 8.

Purists insist that the format is the best medium for teaching the principles of filmmaking. At Brooklyn College, students are still introduced to moviemaking by learning to shoot and cut film in Super 8. “It’s an affordable enough film format that we can ask Intro to Film students to use it,” said Matthew Moore, the film department’s program coordinator.

But the transition to digital photography continues to undermine Super 8. Last year, Kodak, which has been struggling with heavy losses as sales of film decline, announced that it would stop producing Super 8 Kodachrome, which was considered the format’s most iconic film stock, loved for its intense colors. Despite a petition drive, Kodak refused to reverse its decision.

Several other types of Super 8 film are still being produced, but fans began hoarding Kodachrome. Then in September, the other shoe dropped. Kodak shut down its last Kodachrome processing facility in Lausanne, Switzerland. Today, the only place in the Western Hemisphere to develop Kodachrome is a plant in Kansas.

For some, working in Super 8 became impractical years ago. The University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, one of the country’s leading film schools, abandoned Super 8 for video in 1999. Students now learn the basics on digital video before moving to 16mm film in their second semester.

“Do I love Super 8?” said Judy Irola, the school’s head of cinematography. “Yes. But I can’t be old-fashioned.”

Students typically need their film processed in a day or two so they can edit it, Irola said. However, many of the local labs had gone out of business. Super 8 also has artistic limitations, the foremost being that, unlike video, most Super 8 cameras do not record sound.

“There’s no narrative performance,” Irola said. “The beauty is in the color, but it couldn’t sustain a 90-minute feature.”

But even as digital technology is threatening to snuff out the world of Super 8, it has also helped facilitate its recent revival. Advances in so-called telecine, the process by which film is transferred to digital, has made it easy for Super 8 filmmakers to edit their movies on computers. The finished films are usually burned onto a DVD or uploaded to the Internet.

Once a niche market in the movie industry, the telecine industry has expanded to serve middle- and low-budget filmmakers. There are now even websites that offer do-it-yourself advice. Gerald McKinney, owner of Home Movie Depot in Missouri, estimated that 40 percent of his business comes from digitizing 8mm film - generally old home movies from the 1960s and 1970s that have been collecting dust in attics.

The telecine technology has led to a boom in a radically different kind of wedding video. Jessica Lysons shoots weddings in silent black and white Super 8. The texture of the footage - flickering, scratched-up frames that jump around - is exactly what makes the format feel more like a memory to her. Capturing only “the best moments,” the movies average 15 minutes in length, practically fleeting compared with traditional wedding videos. “Like expresso,” she said recently, with a wry smile, “small, but more intense.”

With wedding videos, the once-ubiquitous Super 8 has come full circle: It is once again being used to document personal moments for posterity. Whereas digital memories can be accidentally erased, those caught on Super 8 can last for nearly a century. “These are things that will survive every move, every housecleaning,” Lysons said. “Film feels more like a treasure.”

E-mail: ek291@columbia.edu

This article first appeared on the Columbia News Service, part of The Journalism School, Columbia University, and is reproduced with kind permission and thanks to the author.