The Third
Cambridge International Super 8 Festival got off to a strong start on Wednesday evening with the first competition showing, introducing the jury to the audience before the 90 plus films they have to sit in judgement on. The second sitting offered a complete change of style, with local enthusiast and retired art teacher Ted Coney operating a genuine Victorian "Phantasmagoria" magic lantern show, using heavy wood and glass slides from the 1880s with ingenious mechanisms and levers to create the first moving image effects, accompanied by a tape of period fairground organ music. This device was the forerunner of projected cinema: the Lumiere brothers may have developed the principle of intermittent real motion, but the magic lantern aesthetic continued through George Melies and still influences film to this day: what else is Bladerunner or Tron?
Day two opened with an innovation for this year's festival: a genuine hands-on workshop in making and developing Super8 led by the renowned Berlin artist Dagie Brundert. All ten places were taken and the principle of "wabi-sabi" (embrace the imperfections!) and the theme of "Ten Coloured Toes" explained, before the issuing of striped socks and the handling and careful testing of cameras. The workshop continues Friday with a mass development session using sinks, buckets and a Lomo spiral tank full of E6 chemistry. Each participant will come away with a unique Ektachrome masterpiece, much wisdom, and no doubt slightly stinky fingers...
The evening showings resumed with a second competition programme, followed by another breakthrough - our first feature-length movie in Super 8, the UK premiere of Love Suicides by New York-based director David Teague. This highly-stylised 73 minute film was shot over two years on Kodak monochrome stocks, using found and improvised locations in Brooklyn to create medieval Japan, and came in at $20,000 (raised in donations of fifty dollars for an executive producer credit), "most of it on food" commented the director, and consumed 110 cartridges of film. A lively Q&A session followed with David, accompanied by two of the crew, which resumed until closing time at the nearby bar. And still only halfway through...
And so to Friday, the third day. The workshop participants, having been out with an array of cameras, had shot their footage - one cartridge apiece - and the brewing of photographic soup took over. Skeins of developed Ektachrome 64T began to spider their way across the workshop ceiling, revealing the magic and mystery of film: sharp colours and potent images alternating with random blobs of stuck-together emulsion from the hit-and-miss elements inherent in using a simple spiral tank. The chemistry was mixed in recycled milk bottles and bobbed in a bucket of warm water topped up from a kettle, a process about as far as could be imagined from the chilly logic of computer uploading. This is where film comes from and where all of it goes...
Back at the USC, the third of four programmes of competition entries was shown to an appreciative audience and an extensive Q&A session afterwards quizzed six directors. The jury then relaxed for Panorama 2, a showing of films mostly excluded from competition by the 20 minute rule for entries but showing that documentary is a strong and growing branch of the Super8 tendency, and offering an intimate style quite apart from formula TV work shot on video.
Saturday was a long and busy day. It started with the Industry Panel, a speakeasy for the Super 8 fraternity to let loose on topics of interest, the theme this year being "Super 8: another paintbrush for filmmakers?" Dagie Brundert gave a keynote address (gamely admitting that she didn't know what a "keynote" was), after which a thorough discussion was had about what film offers to the artist and what the trade still offers to the film community to create artistic effects. Dagie and Brighton animator Ian Helliwell stood up for the strongly tactile element of chemical film, Dick Knapman of Soho FilmLabs admitted that labs have to play it straight because that's what everyone else demands of them (but they will do bleach bypass and push processing if that's what you require: professionals are paid to know everything after all), and Will & George did their droll double act explaining what film can be made to do as an installation and gallery medium.
A new departure formed the afternoon's first screening. Cambridge Memories marks the Cambridge Group's first foray into archive showings, a local project intended to collect and show home movies shot on 8mm formats as part of the constantly vanishing past recorded by families and enthusiasts. We hope to develop this further, but our initial showing was a great success, and revealed that the central Cambridge of 1957 is scarcely distinguishable from today apart from the buses and the hairstyles. Hopefully the many changes in the area will come to light with more footage, cementing the elusiveness of memory with the hard glare of the lens.
A final showing of competition entries allowed the jury to complete their demanding duties in assessing the 56 films selected from over 200 submitted. And then our showcase artist, the inimitable Dagie Brundert, had her hour of glory with 26 films covering a 20 year career (she's actually made over 60) followed by a revealing Q&A session. All our sessions were covered by a volunteer video crew from Anglia Ruskin University (Cambridge's "other" establishment, and a key source of willing volunteers this year) and will imminently be viewable from our website. For the first time we actually deployed a real Super 8 projector to show the first 9 films, and thanks are due to Antosz's calm professionalism in operating the kit and in quickly splicing the one film break that occurred - the only technical mishap of the whole festival.
And still it went on... the evening's home stretch began with six non-competition films and a director Q&A, including Doll Chao who had taken 18 hour flights to attend from Taiwan, probably our furthest attendee yet. The prizes were duly announced, and the only disappointment was that no prizewinner was present to collect the handmade trophies by a local artist, and the well-merited applause. Rob Wickings, where were you? You were there on Friday... As in previous years, documentaries made a strong showing including the audience prize (see elsewhere for the full list), and the breakthrough of the year was the high proportion of monochrome that took awards including the new cinematography prize. Kodachrome is (almost) gone, but long live Tri-X...
Finally, the Hungarian visitors from Szeged, now our firm conspirators in matters Super 8, took to the stage for their much-rehearsed performance, in which a baroque duchess (aka local internet radio reporter Emma Miller) paraded imperiously through the crowd to have her portrait drawn by a group of artists while DVD and film images washed over her and the screen to a musical soundtrack. With this triumphant assertion of the creative power of analogue thought, the third festival came to a close and yet more drink was taken until the small hours by a crowd reluctant to part from the occasion of so much goodwill and concentrated imagemaking.
Next year... well, we're working on it. It'll be ambitious, it'll be as international as we can make it, it'll be open to all and it'll be as big as we can afford. There are spinoff plans and collaborations to follow through as well. Mark April 2010 in your diaries and watch for a call for entries around September. We'd like the time off, but priorities never sleep...
by Tony Clarke
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