Those were the days: when to make a movie, all you had to do was buy a camera and some film, shoot footage with no idea of what you were getting (changing the reel every few minutes), send the film off to a developer, laboriously edit it together by hand, buy a projector, then enjoy the results in the comfort of your own home. Why did Super 8 ever fall out of favour, you wonder?
But for media nostalgics, purists and masochists, the good news is that Super 8 is back from the brink of extinction. This week, at Las Vegas’s industry showcase Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Kodak unveiled a smart, new, prototype Super 8 camera – its first in 30 years. It says it is part of an initiative “aimed at putting Super 8 cameras into the hands of a new generation of film-makers” – presumably those who find digital aesthetically unpalatable or have not yet found the camera function on their smartphones.
To support the cause, Kodak has marshalled an old generation of film-makers to sing Super 8’s praises, including Steve McQueen, Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino and JJ Abrams – all of whom cut their teeth on the format. Abrams, whose first job in the movies was cleaning up Spielberg’s childhood Super 8 movies, describes the format’s revival as “a dream come true” – so brace yourselves, Star Wars fans.
Super 8 really was a revolution back in the day. It wasn’t the first home-movie format, but it was the one that took off with the public, thanks to its superiority over “standard” 8mm film (easier loading, better quality, automatic exposure, more affordable), and the support of heavyweight Kodak, which launched it in 1965 at the New York World’s Fair. No suburban barbecue or drunken wedding dance would ever go undocumented again. More importantly, Super 8 gave ordinary people a power that was previously available only to media professionals. As well as nurturing current mainstream directors, it enabled independent and artw cinema before being superseded first by video, then digital. In today’s commercial cinema, it is really only used as a retro special effect, for a flashback or a gritty reportage scene, say.
Nobody would enjoy a Super 8 revival more than Kodak. Once one of the US’s mightiest corporations, it filed for bankruptcy in 2012, brought low by the rise of digital photography. Kodak was practically the Apple of its day, with a near-monopoly over the supply of Super 8 stock, the development process and the machinery with which to use it. Tellingly, Eastman Kodak’s current CEO, Jeff Clarke, describes Super 8 as “an ecosystem for film”.
The analogue revival is more than a marketing stunt. Just as film-makers such as Abrams, Tarantino and Nolan still prefer to shoot on “real” analogue film, so demand for the audio-visual old-school is rebounding. Alongside Kodak’s new cameras at CES this year, Sony is exhibiting a new record player (a machine for playing vinyl audio discs, younger readers) and Polaroid is exhibiting a new range of instant cameras. Amazon, too, reports that its top-selling camera and audio products this Christmas were a turntable and instant-camera film. All of these products combine analogue “warmth” with digital functionality, which suggests that either the near future won’t be as virtual as some algorithm predicted it would be, or that we’re sick and tired of having new formats continually foisted on us. Just think: what are the chances in 50 years’ time of finding a machine that will play a DVD or a cassette tape? They’ll only be able to read this in the future thanks to the surprise CD-Rom revival.
