Archive of super 8 films courtesy d/lux/media/arts.
Showing posts with label super8. Show all posts
Showing posts with label super8. Show all posts
2 January 2007
1 June 1990
The Super '80s: Australian Super 8 Films of the 1980s
San Francisco Cinematheque, 31 May 1990
Curated and presented by Michael Hutak
Program notes:
This program charts particular moves within a peculiar film scene: Australian Super-8mm film in the '80s. Historically, the emergence of a renewed local Super-8 film culture around the turn of the decade sprang from a perceived winding down of 16mm activity in the late '70s. Super-8 was championed by practitioners as almost a democratic medium offering direct and easy access to the contemporary image maker. After the success of the first Annual Sydney Super-8 Film Festival in 1980 a new scene was quickly defined and promoted as the "Super-8 Phenomenon."
Local art journals such as On The Beach and Tension were in the forefront of promoting the scene as straddling both independent film and the visual arts, with many artists, writers, and mixed-media artists trying their hands in both theory and practice. The scene reached a peak of activity around 1984-85 with the festivals of those years giving birth to a notorious "theatre of cruelty." Here any film which exhibited a sincere or self-important posture was greeted with howls of derisive laughter from the rowdy audience. The festival was replaced with a mixed-media event — The Sydney Film & Video Event — in 1988 and Super-8 as a popular phenomenon has been on the decline ever since.
The works which sprang from this milieu had at least one thing in common: absolute diversity. Therefore this program makes no claim to represent any wider field of practice but rather displays some of the more engaging films by artists who produced a body of work during the period.
One significant feature which the artists here do share is an absence of a self-conscious foregrounding of national identity: Australia is more a state of mind than a birthright, and while not easily denied, can certainly be ignored. Made by citizens of the worid, these films celebrate the decade when the world went global!
— Michael Hutak, 1990
Carumba! (1986), by Nick Meyers; Super-8mm, color, sound, 4 minutes.
Hoard (1981), by Stephen Harrop; Super-8mm, 9 minutes.
Twisted Legend (1985), by Richard De Souza & Rhondda Kelly; Super-8mm, 6 minutes.
Untitled (1984), by Merilyn Fairskye; Super-8mm, 3 minutes.
Suspect Filmmaker (1984), by Rowan Woods; Super-8mm, 10 minutes.
S.S.S. (1986), by Andrew Frost; Super-8mm, 6 minutes.
Shock Corridor (1985), by Mark Titmarsh; Super-8mm, 4 minutes.
Westworld Story (1984-5), by Catherine Lowing; Super-Smm, 6 minutes.
Ropo's Movie Night (1986), by The Marine Biologists; Super-8mm, 15 minutes.
Macbeth's Greatest Hits (1987), by Michael Hutak; super-8mm, 22 minutes.
---
Curated and presented by Michael Hutak
Program notes:
This program charts particular moves within a peculiar film scene: Australian Super-8mm film in the '80s. Historically, the emergence of a renewed local Super-8 film culture around the turn of the decade sprang from a perceived winding down of 16mm activity in the late '70s. Super-8 was championed by practitioners as almost a democratic medium offering direct and easy access to the contemporary image maker. After the success of the first Annual Sydney Super-8 Film Festival in 1980 a new scene was quickly defined and promoted as the "Super-8 Phenomenon."
Local art journals such as On The Beach and Tension were in the forefront of promoting the scene as straddling both independent film and the visual arts, with many artists, writers, and mixed-media artists trying their hands in both theory and practice. The scene reached a peak of activity around 1984-85 with the festivals of those years giving birth to a notorious "theatre of cruelty." Here any film which exhibited a sincere or self-important posture was greeted with howls of derisive laughter from the rowdy audience. The festival was replaced with a mixed-media event — The Sydney Film & Video Event — in 1988 and Super-8 as a popular phenomenon has been on the decline ever since.
The works which sprang from this milieu had at least one thing in common: absolute diversity. Therefore this program makes no claim to represent any wider field of practice but rather displays some of the more engaging films by artists who produced a body of work during the period.
One significant feature which the artists here do share is an absence of a self-conscious foregrounding of national identity: Australia is more a state of mind than a birthright, and while not easily denied, can certainly be ignored. Made by citizens of the worid, these films celebrate the decade when the world went global!
— Michael Hutak, 1990
Carumba! (1986), by Nick Meyers; Super-8mm, color, sound, 4 minutes.
Hoard (1981), by Stephen Harrop; Super-8mm, 9 minutes.
Twisted Legend (1985), by Richard De Souza & Rhondda Kelly; Super-8mm, 6 minutes.
Untitled (1984), by Merilyn Fairskye; Super-8mm, 3 minutes.
Suspect Filmmaker (1984), by Rowan Woods; Super-8mm, 10 minutes.
S.S.S. (1986), by Andrew Frost; Super-8mm, 6 minutes.
Shock Corridor (1985), by Mark Titmarsh; Super-8mm, 4 minutes.
Westworld Story (1984-5), by Catherine Lowing; Super-Smm, 6 minutes.
Ropo's Movie Night (1986), by The Marine Biologists; Super-8mm, 15 minutes.
Macbeth's Greatest Hits (1987), by Michael Hutak; super-8mm, 22 minutes.
---
Tags:
film,
filmmaking,
super8
1 March 1990
Filmnews: Blown Up - life after burnout
Michael Hutak doesn't mourn the Super 8 transition...
Filmnews has always been one of the sites where that archetypical eighties idiom - Australian Super 8 film discourse-has played out its moves. I will therefore be assuming that my readers will be familiar with some of the terrain we are covering here. This is a true story of before and after, of the past and the future. Of progress without guilt - a sign of the advent of a new, post-industrial, modernism.
Filmnews has always been one of the sites where that archetypical eighties idiom - Australian Super 8 film discourse-has played out its moves. I will therefore be assuming that my readers will be familiar with some of the terrain we are covering here. This is a true story of before and after, of the past and the future. Of progress without guilt - a sign of the advent of a new, post-industrial, modernism.
Remember the summer of 87/88, when the Super 8 phenomenon finally turned uneventful? After a good five or six solid years of hype, films, parties, more hype, writing, more parties and finally burnout, Super 8 wound down into a parody of itself - a fitting end to a scene which had always lovingly embraced a fatal strategy: its implosion became inevitable, it had built itself on the notion of planned obsolescence.
But its participants didn't die, or move to New Zealand, or open hot dog stands, or even give up working with Super 8. Indeed what took place became known as the afterlife.
5 November 1986
All My Life (1986)
Super 8, Colour, Sound 7 mins, 1986. Concept, editing, sound: Michael Hutak. First screened 6th Sydney Super 8 Film Festival, Australian Film Institute, Chauvel Cinema, Sydney.
All My Life (1986) from Michael Hutak on Vimeo.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)