We like Super 8 because it has the colour and texture of memory. As in memories, the colours of Super 8 are simultaneously more vivid and more washed out than life, with all the graininess and low resolution of something descried dimly, through mists of time, as against the dazzling brilliance of the sun.
Places seem more distant for being further away from us in time, their details half-lost in the obscure grain. The reddest roses you have ever seen in your life, in Beaufort, seem redder still recorded on Super 8, while the lime trees of Woodend will never be less green.
We like Super 8 because it’s a silent film format. Sydney’s roar is muted, Ballarat’s bustle is hushed: as in memory, we see but do not hear what we have seen before and may never see again—the mute reverie of a flux of dreamlike images.
Sky, clouds, trees and flowers—all things, all accidents, all miracles of nature acquire a fragility and dearness—a preciousness—on Super 8. The unrepeatability of reality acquires a pricelessness when the priciness of three and a half minutes of film are spent on the mundane miracles of the ephemeral.
We re-member these images through montage, mounting sounds unheard at the time against the silence of Super 8. In its faded vividness, the way it passes the magic wand over the visible, the camera’s mechanical eye seeing in hallucinogenic chemicals an image of the world which is not our vision of it, but which will, in time, become the very image of our memories, Super 8 allows us to re-member the world, and the fleeting shadow of our ephemeral presence in it, in a creative treatment of actuality.
credits
released February 20, 2022
Michelangelo Antonioni: Sound of wind in trees from the movie “Blowup” (1966)
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