Super Super 8

No, not some advanced fan blah for the forthcoming JJ Abrams film. I wanted to briefly write about Super 8mm. When I was a teenager, there used to be a big shop on London's Oxford Street that sold 8mm films and projectors. 8mm was developed as an affordable alternative to the more expensive 16mm market. It was a mid 70s version of 'Blockbuster' I suppose, except there was no rental facility. You could buy 200' versions (about 5-6 minutes long), 400' versions (about 12 -15 minutes long) or the full film on about 6 or 8 reels. The projection process was exactly like the one used in the cinemas - thread the reel of film through a projector onto a take up spool, close the curtains and watch (although unless you had two projectors there would be an intermission every ten minutes or so while spools were changed). Projection problems were the same too - film escaping the ratchets, hairs in the gate, sticking and burning.

 
The really interesting thing was the choices distributors made in which bits of a film should be included to summarise the whole film. If you had to condense APOCALYPSE NOW into six minutes, where would you start? Often companies took a short cut and just cut in five continuous minutes from one section of a film. Sometimes meticulous care was taken, to the point where scenes would flicker by in a Burroughsian cut up style, leaving you baffled - the fact that unless you were quite well off you'd be buying a silent version of the film to show on your silent projector added to the problems in understanding what you were seeing. My guess is that subtitles were either expensive to add or had copyright problems, because you would be lucky if you got more than a handful per film. Anyway, why am I mentioning all this? Well for my birthday today I was given an 8mm 200' film of PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (see pic). I have no means of showing it, but the package itself is a thing of flawed beauty and it looks like it (as well as the contents) was beamed down from another time. So now all I can do is put it on a shelf and look at it. Perhaps in this way it has finally become art.