Old tricks for new dogs, or how I fell in love (with Super 8) all over again
On February 15th, the Deutsche Oper in Berlin staged one of the most electric film spectacles since Asian Dub Foundation re-dubbed The Battle of Algiers at the Brighton Dome. Guy Maddin’s latest lucid somnia, Brand Upon The Brain!, was given a live soundtrack by the Volkswagen orchestra, a castrato, foley artists and the regal tone of Isabella Rossellini. A highlight, I am told, was the moment where one of the foleys crunched a stick of celery to accompany the on-screen puncture of a young neck.
And whilst all this is happening I am sat 30,000ft above the edgy metropolis that is about to change my life. I eventually see the film with its recorded sountrack at the Delphi Filmpalast, but the Deutsche Oper screening is all anybody is talking about in the last few days of the Berlinale. That and leaving their wives and children, getting a haircut like Nick Cave and moving to Kreuzberg for good. It can have that effect on you, Berlin.
In the film, a young Guy Maddin and his older sibling, Sis, suffer an isolated existence in a lighthouse they share with a contingent of orphans. Their tyrannical mother spies on them day and night from the top of the lighthouse, while their elusive father, a scientist, spends all his time in the laboratory. When mysterious wounds are discovered on the necks of the orphans, young detectives Wendy and Chance Hale are sent to investigate. Their presence on the island creates a hormonal quagmire, and it isn’t long before lusty passions and the island’s sinister secrets bubble up to the surface.
At a time when filmmaking conjures up whizz-kiddery and the Church of post-production, I am utterly charmed by a director who shoots on Super 8, one arm locked tightly around the waist of a man he calls his human lamp.
Recurringly, Maddin’s work is described as dream-like. But more than giving us films that are dream-like, the Super 8 treatment of Maddin’s self-made mythologies tears dream away from its status of abstraction to recreate its rhythm and feel. Maddin lowers our wakefulness to better intoxicate us and then leads us to a state of moral and perceptual twilight. What Maddin and Super 8 recreate for us is the vertiginous impotence of dream -a tingling anaesthetic.
As I emerged, tingling and inspired, from the screening of Brand Upon The Brain!, I saw two boys with a Bauer Super 8 camera filming on Wienerstrasse. I took it as a call to arms.
For all the inspiring Super 8 work of Guy Maddin, Derek Jarman and Andrew Kotting, DV remains the norm in emerging filmmaking. To the point where we forget that medium is also the first formal and therefore, artistic, choice. Making a film on Super 8 is a rigourous exercise and a learning curve in cinematography: you have fewer chances to get it right and less opportunity to correct. Paradoxically, this is incredibly freeing. Discipline can be a terrific motor for imagination and when you get three shots at a scene, you try and think about it in a way that is exhaustive. Super 8 filmmaking is involved and direct in a way that DV, which can wear its DV treatment on its sleeve, can never be. And the rewards are addictive. From the very physical wait for the purring rushes (or development if you’re feeling brave) right through to the splicing and editing.
Primitivism, memory, an impoverished, arcane and grainy look, the silent era, the oneiric… Super 8, apparently, looks like all these things all the time. But don’t be fooled. Despite the connotations that stick to the format, the scope it offers is vast. While Guy Maddin’s films belong to a fantastic reality that flaunts its puppet strings, the landscapes of Andrew Kotting’s shorts are shot through with a stark –if slightly berserk- reality. Like with any medium, it is all to be invented and the medium’s connotations only exist to be undone. And the best news is that cine film is relatively cheap, and there are plenty of cameras knocking about in lofts, on German ebay and at racetrack car boots. And as long as people keep using it, the film stock will keep on gracing the shelves.
Some people believe there is only one sound more enchanting than the thud of a love letter falling through your letterbox: the sound of a yellow Kodachrome envelope falling through your letterbox, returning revealed and timelapsed, like a forgotten letter to yourself. (For some of us, nor is the latter the rarer occurrence). Of course, even Super 8 is prone to technological advance and we are now in the age of Ektachrome 64T. But not to worry, I know a guy in Brooklyn whose freezer is full of the old stuff.
Berlinale or not, Super 8 or DV, Berlin is a most cinematic of cities. From the concrete underground and high risers of Uli Edel’s Christiane F. to the microcosmic wastelands of Wenders’ Wings of Desire, Berlin is a city to be captured, in whatever way you can. In People on Sunday, by Robert Siodmak and Edgar G Ulmer, four young Berliners spend a typical Sunday falling in love and exploring desire under the spell of a fortuitous sun. Full of grace and heavenly immoral, it shows a vision of happiness that is laced with melancholy. For at the end of the perfect Sunday must be the return to reality. The morning after Brand Upon The Brain!, I made my own Sunday morning excursion into the city. In the Mauerpark fleamarket, I found old photo albums, chock full of the lives and dust of others. There were some reels of Super 8 too and I wondered what tales of East and West, Sundays in the park and guerrilla filmmaking they had to tell.
In the end, my Sunday was anything but typical and not moral in the slightest, and had I filmed it, I would have done so on Super 8. If you do outbid me on the Braun Nizo Professional that is causing meltdown on ebay these days, I hope you take it to Berlin. I will be there this Autumn making Super 8 films, so do drop in. And if you too are worried about recreating the sound of your heart when it breaks upon leaving that most glorious of cities, in true foley artistry, just find yourself some celery and a guy with a good set of teeth.
by Sarah Francoise
(republished with kind permission and thanks - first appeared on The Broadsheet)
And whilst all this is happening I am sat 30,000ft above the edgy metropolis that is about to change my life. I eventually see the film with its recorded sountrack at the Delphi Filmpalast, but the Deutsche Oper screening is all anybody is talking about in the last few days of the Berlinale. That and leaving their wives and children, getting a haircut like Nick Cave and moving to Kreuzberg for good. It can have that effect on you, Berlin.
In the film, a young Guy Maddin and his older sibling, Sis, suffer an isolated existence in a lighthouse they share with a contingent of orphans. Their tyrannical mother spies on them day and night from the top of the lighthouse, while their elusive father, a scientist, spends all his time in the laboratory. When mysterious wounds are discovered on the necks of the orphans, young detectives Wendy and Chance Hale are sent to investigate. Their presence on the island creates a hormonal quagmire, and it isn’t long before lusty passions and the island’s sinister secrets bubble up to the surface.
At a time when filmmaking conjures up whizz-kiddery and the Church of post-production, I am utterly charmed by a director who shoots on Super 8, one arm locked tightly around the waist of a man he calls his human lamp.
Recurringly, Maddin’s work is described as dream-like. But more than giving us films that are dream-like, the Super 8 treatment of Maddin’s self-made mythologies tears dream away from its status of abstraction to recreate its rhythm and feel. Maddin lowers our wakefulness to better intoxicate us and then leads us to a state of moral and perceptual twilight. What Maddin and Super 8 recreate for us is the vertiginous impotence of dream -a tingling anaesthetic.
As I emerged, tingling and inspired, from the screening of Brand Upon The Brain!, I saw two boys with a Bauer Super 8 camera filming on Wienerstrasse. I took it as a call to arms.
For all the inspiring Super 8 work of Guy Maddin, Derek Jarman and Andrew Kotting, DV remains the norm in emerging filmmaking. To the point where we forget that medium is also the first formal and therefore, artistic, choice. Making a film on Super 8 is a rigourous exercise and a learning curve in cinematography: you have fewer chances to get it right and less opportunity to correct. Paradoxically, this is incredibly freeing. Discipline can be a terrific motor for imagination and when you get three shots at a scene, you try and think about it in a way that is exhaustive. Super 8 filmmaking is involved and direct in a way that DV, which can wear its DV treatment on its sleeve, can never be. And the rewards are addictive. From the very physical wait for the purring rushes (or development if you’re feeling brave) right through to the splicing and editing.
Primitivism, memory, an impoverished, arcane and grainy look, the silent era, the oneiric… Super 8, apparently, looks like all these things all the time. But don’t be fooled. Despite the connotations that stick to the format, the scope it offers is vast. While Guy Maddin’s films belong to a fantastic reality that flaunts its puppet strings, the landscapes of Andrew Kotting’s shorts are shot through with a stark –if slightly berserk- reality. Like with any medium, it is all to be invented and the medium’s connotations only exist to be undone. And the best news is that cine film is relatively cheap, and there are plenty of cameras knocking about in lofts, on German ebay and at racetrack car boots. And as long as people keep using it, the film stock will keep on gracing the shelves.
Some people believe there is only one sound more enchanting than the thud of a love letter falling through your letterbox: the sound of a yellow Kodachrome envelope falling through your letterbox, returning revealed and timelapsed, like a forgotten letter to yourself. (For some of us, nor is the latter the rarer occurrence). Of course, even Super 8 is prone to technological advance and we are now in the age of Ektachrome 64T. But not to worry, I know a guy in Brooklyn whose freezer is full of the old stuff.
Berlinale or not, Super 8 or DV, Berlin is a most cinematic of cities. From the concrete underground and high risers of Uli Edel’s Christiane F. to the microcosmic wastelands of Wenders’ Wings of Desire, Berlin is a city to be captured, in whatever way you can. In People on Sunday, by Robert Siodmak and Edgar G Ulmer, four young Berliners spend a typical Sunday falling in love and exploring desire under the spell of a fortuitous sun. Full of grace and heavenly immoral, it shows a vision of happiness that is laced with melancholy. For at the end of the perfect Sunday must be the return to reality. The morning after Brand Upon The Brain!, I made my own Sunday morning excursion into the city. In the Mauerpark fleamarket, I found old photo albums, chock full of the lives and dust of others. There were some reels of Super 8 too and I wondered what tales of East and West, Sundays in the park and guerrilla filmmaking they had to tell.
In the end, my Sunday was anything but typical and not moral in the slightest, and had I filmed it, I would have done so on Super 8. If you do outbid me on the Braun Nizo Professional that is causing meltdown on ebay these days, I hope you take it to Berlin. I will be there this Autumn making Super 8 films, so do drop in. And if you too are worried about recreating the sound of your heart when it breaks upon leaving that most glorious of cities, in true foley artistry, just find yourself some celery and a guy with a good set of teeth.
by Sarah Francoise
(republished with kind permission and thanks - first appeared on The Broadsheet)
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