“Super 8” is a film format, launched by Kodak in 1965. It was the main format of amateur cinema, since its launch, until the democratization of amateur video cameras in the early 1990s. It was relatively inexpensive and very practical: a square plastic cartridge, which contained the film, which was simply inserted into the camera, in daylight. This cartridge was sold with an envelope with Kodak’s address. You put it in any mailbox, writing your address on it, and a good week later, you would receive the developed film at home. Each cartridge contained fifteen meters of film, which made a duration of 3’30s at the speed of 18 images per second, or 2’40s at the speed of 24 images per second. At the beginning Super 8 was silent, then it became sound from 1974 (with a magnetic track on the edge of the film). It was a reversible film, like slides: no negative and no print, the film itself that was shot that was projected. Thus, it could quickly be damaged, scratched in the projector, and there was only one original.
The technical fragility, due to the small size of the film and the fact that it was a reversible, allowed its low price, and positioned it as “amateur”, in front of the 16mm and 35mm professionals formats. Super 8 films were banned from “professional” film festivals, for example. This hierarchy by money has always outraged me. Since 1988, in the screenings of short films that I organized at the University of the Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris 3), I had in heart to mix, on the same screen, Super 8 films, 16mm, 35mm, video, slideshows... in order to give a value to the work, whatever its support. I made a certain number of short films in Super 8 from 1981 to 1991, and I shot in 1991 (and finalized in 1994) a feature film shot in Super 8 (and transferred to 16mm for exploitation) : Head in the water.
Today, the “cachet” of the Super 8 image makes it on the contrary a format prized by professionals, for music videos for example. Since 2010 or so, the professional uses of Super 8 have developed. It has become very expensive, because it is a small niche.
On this photograph, Pip Chodorov, one of the great Super 8 filmmakers and supporter of experimental cinema, founder of Re:voir video, loading a Super 8 projector at the Forum des images (Paris) in 2013.
Photographs, paintings, drawings, assemblies and texts by Benoît Labourdette (unless otherwise stated).