super-8

His eyesight was possessed by the colours of trauma, cracking and bubbling like an old Super Eight film to remind him of his near-death drowning some two months ago in that very moment when he needed to act.

You should find something better to do with your time,_ Mandy told him. __ spend my time shooting people, and then I take them to darkrooms and blow them up.___Come again?_ Alecto questioned with a tone of alarm in his voice. __ take photographs and develop them myself, I__e got my own darkroom_ it was a joke,_ Mandy laughed. __ love photography and I__ gonna be a photojournalist someday.___eally?_ Alecto asked. For the first time since she__ met him, he sounded slightly enthusiastic. __I take photographs and I film my own home movies, I have a darkroom as well_ but I can__ be a photojournalist like you_ I can__ be anything_ still, at least I can take photographs, it__ fun.

Hey Alecto, film this!_ she called out. With the slide being as tall as a two-storey house, it felt slightly risky being up there. __n second thought, why don__ you come up here? It__ a blast being up here.___ don__ really like to be in high places,_ said Alecto as he filmed her, the camera lens reflecting the entire playground, which was partially secluded by tall trees that cast otherworldly shadows dancing across the ground.__f you don__ like being in high places, then why__ you take so many drugs in the seventies?_ Mandy questioned jokingly. __o you want me to go up there and push you off the top of that slide?_ Alecto threatened coldly.__ou__ never do that, we__e best friends!_ Mandy pointed out. She reached over and picked a bright red maple flower from one of the long branches of the trees, tossing it down to him. __ven in this failing 21st century, where people are cell phone addicts and crude humor and violence is the norm, even when society falls apart and drowns in its own mistakes, we__l still be best friends!_ She looked incredibly eccentric, never mind the fact that she was an adult woman wearing a trippy rainbow Pucci dress from the 1970__, standing on top of a slide at a children__ playground. Alecto didn__ seem to mind, he just continued to film her with his camera like she__ asked him to.

There was a super-8 steel town somewhere, where all the forgotten things in the cruel world ended up eventually, Mandy was sure of it_ this place, she decided, was called Smog City.

I guess if there__ one thing I can say about the 21st century, it__ that the 21st century is all flash and no substance_ everything is digital, nothing but files of invisible electronic data on computers and mindless zombies on their cellular phones_ it__ sad how because of the digital age, society is ultimately doomed. Nothing in the digital age is real anymore, and you know, they say celluloid film and ray tube televisions and maybe even paper might become obsolete in this century? _What__ most annoying is that nobody cares, they__e just learned to accept the digital age and get addicted to it_ none of them are ever going to step up and say to the world, __ou__e all a bunch of sheep!_ and even if they did say anything, I doubt anyone would listen_ they__e all too obsessed and attached to their cellular phones and overly big televisions and whatever other moronic things they__e got these days_ it almost makes me want an apocalypse to happen, to erase digital technology and force the world to start over again.

I grew up in an era that was a golden age of the blockbuster, when something we might call a family film could have universal appeal. That's something I want to see again. In terms of the tone of the film, it looks at where we are as a people and has a universality about human experience.

To be honest, I__e always made films and I never really stopped, starting with little stop-motion experiments using my dad__ Super 8 camera. In my mind, it__ all one big continuum of filmmaking and I__e never changed.

Oftentimes she wondered what had happened to super 8. Sure, it made perfect sense that nobody wanted the hassle of spending money on a three-minute cartridge of film and threading it through a projector, but though digital cameras were convenient and cheap, Mandy didn__ care. Super 8 had integrity, it wasn__ just nostalgia, it was art, it was history, it was a little recording medium that somehow possessed the power to evoke lost memories, to turn back time, and there was something dazzling about waiting excitedly for a reel of film to come back in its yellow and red Kodak envelope, eating buttered popcorn while the projector paraded life__ best moments, and capturing something beautiful in only three minutes.

We make, see, and love films, not digitals. To convert all of our movies, home videos, theaters, photographs and television to digital would be like telling a painter to throw away his brushes and canvas for an I-Pad. Celluloid isn't just nostalgic, it's an art form and, like it or not, it's superior to digital. It lasts much longer, it provides grain and brighter colors, and it takes more effort so that it produces something wonderful. With the inferior binary codes, pixels and untested shelf-life of digital files, plus the fact that these days anyone with a digital camera, even a two-year-old, can make a video and pollute the world with self-photography and cat pictures, film has a lot more integrity and worth than digital.

Alecto isn't a person! He's just something that society made and then threw away, a memory that refuses to die.

photographs are very interesting, and you can look into them a million times and still find a new meaning in them, something in the past that was caught in the film itself_

_Maybe I__l be watching super-8 home videos,_ Alecto told her, smiling bleakly. __ love my super-8 camera, it__ an Eastman Kodak one_ Kodak stopped manufacturing them, the world went digital and now Kodak has stopped making Kodachrome film and all kinds of traditional film products_ it__ sad._ __ell, uh_ well, have fun watching your home movies then,_ Mandy finished, but she didn__ have the slightest idea what he was talking about.

How promising today's generation is. They can whip out their cellular phones like sheep, instantly take a million digital photos of their cat and then just delete them. But I'd like to see these kids try to artfully use a traditional film camera or make a super 8 home movie. Traditional film takes integrity, nostalgia, effort, patience and imagination - things that the 21st century has very little of. Everything these days, even a superior medium like film photography with an extensively vivid history and an iconic meaning, is becoming disposable in this age.

People say that a time machine can__ be invented, but they__e already invented a device that can stop time, cameras are the world__ first time machines.

More pathetic than the digital age is the people who love it. They buy right into the "newer is always better" ideology and they can't seem to grasp that the fun of VHS tapes, super 8 film, darkroom photography and vinyl records is far more worthwhile and human than the cold, high-tech atmosphere of everything being digitized. As the 21st century progresses, yeah, we'll have our Netflix and our cellular phones and our artificial intelligence and our implanted microchips - and future generations will have lost something valuable. Sadly, they won't even know what they've lost because we're taking it all away from them.

Alecto_ what do you think would happen if people found out about you? Your abilities, your life, Mearth__ super 8 films, those powers of yours_ how would they react?___ don__ know,_ said Alecto, __ut ordinary people like a show, especially when it__ a disturbing one. They enjoy seeing misery_ probably because it allows them to pretend that they themselves are not so miserable, too. Also, they would probably find out about you, how you know about Personifications, how you saw the films_ they would put us in cages and throw peanuts at us, I guess.___ll joking aside, Alecto.___ho is joking, Mandy Valems?

Yeah, you__e right about having entire rooms full of film and photos_ in that Sydney Mines house I have a darkroom, I have boxes of film and home movie footage_ I have a few projectors, I have piles of Kodachrome slides_ I like photographs. The world is always running away from society and the only way to keep the stuff that__ happened in the past is by taking photographs, I can keep memories of things alive with photographs,_ Alecto responded. __eople say that a time machine can__ be invented, but they__e already invented a device that can stop time, cameras are the world__ first time machines_ The steel mill, the coal mines, the train tracks, the smog in the sky, I__e been able to rescue it on super-8 and Kodachrome, and no one can remediate those photographs, I can keep them as long as I want to.

Super 8 film is the language of silence.