Adrian Martin, “What is this thing called ‘The Super-8 Phenomenon’?”  from Filmnews, July 1982 In Melbourne recently, there have been four opportunities for a general public to view the work of local Super-8 filmmakers - a special session at the Melbourne Film Festival, a regular series of screenings arranged by Chris Knowles at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, the NFTA season The Super-8 Phenomenon, and the film component (continuously projected) of the Popism exhibition at the National Gallery. This hardly constitutes the debut of such work before an audience. The NFTA publicity declaring "home movies leave home" is not only laughably inaccurate, but also insulting to the film-makers involved — there have been numerous Super-8 screenings and forums at the Clifton Hill Community Centre, the Sydney Biennale, the Sydney Film-makers Co-op, and on various campuses. There have also been articles (in Filmnews and Art & Text), posters, discussions. What's going on? Why the sudden interest in and patronage of Super-8 work?[1] From whence comes the familiar process of labelling and mythologising - "punk cinema", "raw, unpolished experimentation", "a new generation of filmmaking", "a more personal perspective"? While grateful for the opportunities to present and promote their work, members of the Super-8 scene (writers, theorists, performers as well as film-makers) are somewhat sceptical towards a film culture which claims to have discovered, if not created, a "Super-8 phenomenon". Right now, Super-8 work may well be in that sorry historical position where, having been noticed by a film culture which couldn't have cared less about it six months ago, it is on its way to a quiet death - placed and named as a strictly "specialist" interest, a curious and possibly valuable activity which should (of course!) be encouraged, a bit of "local colour" going off like fireworks in the margins of cinema production and cinema theory. As for those who have the power to set the agenda of our film culture, they will, now duly informed of this thing called Super-8, continue to direct their students or readers to the latest Wollen/Mulvey film and its coverage in Screen or Framework, they will rebook for their courses or film society screenings the same films they have always booked, and they will go on dreaming their dreams of one day making the spectacular leap frum "theory" to "practice" by getting a grant to make an insidiously subversive 16mm feature. Good luck to tlhem! In the meantime, here and now, Super-8 film-makers are already hard at work on their theories and practices, texts and contexts, methods and ideas. Super-8 is absolutely not a new medium, a new style, a new language or a new wave. Its filmmakers (with some exceptions) don't want to claim anything specific or unique for the tools with which they work. It's not a question here of conjuring yet another avant garde mythology (like Brakhage in the ‘50s or Thorns in the '60s) of a cinema which is raw, wild, spontaneous, a cinema with a certain "look" or grain or tone. Of course, Super-8 does have a history of associations and uses - as the traditional "first step” in the institutional learning of filmmaking technique, for instance, or as the domestic, socialising ritual of the home movie. These associations are often mobilised within current Super-8 films (by lan Cox in Anxiety Plays, and Jane Stevenson in Lives In The Days Of . . .) but always in a contrived, critical, overtly "fictional" kind of way. There is certainly a "Super-8 effect" (or rather, effects) - but there is no Super-8 essence. I would define this Super-8 work as opportunistic in every sense. Most obviously it is opportunistic in economic, practical terms - cheap, fast, relatively easy to manage at the editing and sound dubbing stages. The finished product can be as contrivedly slick or rough as the filmmaker desires. It can be incorporated efficiently into a performance context with other media (the work of the Even Orchestra, or Industry And Leisure by David Chesworth). But opportunistic, more importantly, in a theoretical sense: Super-8 presents itself as a site from which all kinds of cultural forms and histories can be rewritten, re-presented, where a process of displacement and criticism can occur. Super-8 is "new" only in the way that it resembles and overlaps with the practises of so-called "new music" (many Super-8 filmmakers ~ Philip Brophy, Maria Kozic, Paul Fletcher, Kim Beissel, Ralph Traviato - are also involved in musical production). The new music of groups like Tch Tch Tch or Essendon Airport presents itself as a forcible and militant appropriation of music history and the tidy ways it names and compart¬mentalises itself. Different styles, gestures, cliches, values and stances are yoked together to produce a textual object both exact (clean, structured, considered) and extremely unstable and shifting, a troubled and troubling passage of audience res¬ponses and identifications. These Super-8 films have the same kind of strangeness about them - a function of their play with surfaces and layers, effects and meanings. Cultural forms and their traditional modes of address are replayed for us crazily - the wild narrative condensation and corny codes of symbolic representation in Paul Fletcher's films (Space Mutants, A Monster Film, Dolls, Mr Suzuki Comes To Australia); a comic strip "brought to life" with a pictorial realism it cannot bear (Romantic Story by Tch, Tch, Tch); a love story, predictable in every detail, alluded to with enormous intensity but never actually shown or given (Maria Kozic's Manless). It is as if, in these films, a convention¬ally untroubled flow — from an effect to its desired response, from a style to its intended audience, from a theory into its practice - goes horribly and hysterically wrong. Little wonder that the film culture which now invites Super-8 in and puts it on show also regards the product as some¬what flippant and delinquent, as in the case of Rolando Caputo's Warhol's Thirteen Most Beautiful Women Unseen, a minor cause celebre among Melbourne feminists for the way it returns to them their own ridiculous theories of fetishism, voyeurism and sexual difference. Or the case of No Dance by Tch, Tch, Tch, countering one kind of presumed sophis¬tication on the part of its NFTA audience (a knowledge of "radical film practice") with a whole other area of culture and personal experience marked by ignorance, prejudice and lack of critical reflection: music, dance, fashion. Super-8 work entertains a sly and subversive relation to the various thou-shalt-nots that rule current avant garde practice in film. Ignoring all the strident warnings of the "danger" of a realist aesthetic, these films deliberately go to the extreme of a cool documentation of everyday events, or an emphasis on the personal, the biographical, the individual - in an attempt both to touch the real without shame, and then to show it as par excellence the place of fictions, signs, stereotypes. Jane Stevenson's Beautiful Italian Boys works like this, as do About Each Other by Adrian Martin and Ruth Williams and Domestic: A Long Film by Kim Beissel. In another direction, but with a similar philosophy, some Super-8 work adopts the tone of the most severely conceptualised and driest structuralist work - "decadent formalist exercises" as one Melbourne Film Festival viewer was heard to mutter - in order to assert, for those beyond the textbook obsession with signification, the particular emotional  intensity which attaches itself to irony, indirection, deception, play (lan Cox's films, Ralph Traviato's Military Spirit, David Chesworth's Lost In Space). The so-called "Super-8 phenomenon", a fiction created by a hopelessly parochial Australian film culture for the purposes of self-promotion ("what a diversified, liberal film scene we have    there are even artist and musicians off somewhere playing with their Super-8 cameras!'') is not likely to last very long. I and others. will be glad when the fad passes. For the current celebration of Super-8 as something new, novel and cute is surelv the quickest way of building for it a ghetto, a safely romanticiscd place in the sun. As for the Super-8 filmmakers them¬selves, they will be attempting to surface in other contexts and situations, engaging with audiences in more acutely proble¬matic and challenging ways they will remain strategic opportunists; militant dilettantes, Catch them if you can. Adrian Martin (Thanks to Philip Brophy, Robert Goodge. Rolando Caputo.) © Adrian Martin 1982. Reprinted with permission.