Between Super and Deluxe
Mark Titmarsh interviewed by Bob Percival, 1 August 2006
Mark, could we start with your memories of the formation of the Sydney Super 8 Film Group?
My earliest involvement with Super 8 in Sydney was contributing two films to the 2nd Sydney Super 8 Film Festival held at the Sydney Filmmakers Co-op in Darlinghurst in 1981. It was organised by Kate Richards and Kurt Brereton. I was a student at Alexander Mackie College which later became the College of Fine Arts. Stephen Harrop and I were in the same film classes and we both submitted work. I enjoyed the work in the festival very much and wanted to get involved in future activities. Some time later Kate Richards put the message out that they were going overseas and wanted someone to pick up the torch. Ross Gibson and I met her at Mamma Maria Cafe in Kings Cross where she gave us all the information of how they ran the festival so far and we picked it up from there. That first group we formed involved Ross Gibson, Lindy Lee, Deirdre Beck, Janet Burchill and myself and we called ourselves the Super 8 Collective.
We went for funding straight off. We must have felt like something was happening here and that we would need a bigger venue, a catalogue and some promotion to get more works in. We advertised for contributions and printed a poster. Janet Burchill designed the poster , we got it screen-printed and stuck it up all around town. The Australian Film Institute offered us the use of their office, so I got on the phone for a couple of days and called people interstate, in Brisbane, Adelaide and Melbourne. I called Philip Brophy of Tch, Tch, Tch and other names I had got to know from screenings and writings. We were trying to make a big inclusive event, that would run over four or five nights, with two or three hours of film each night. It was held at the Chauvel Cinema in Paddington, with a capacity of 300 hundred seats and was full every night. And so it went for every annual festival throughout the eighties.
It was a scene there that grew in sophistication as long as the technology was viable. In that first year, the 3rd Super 8 Festival of 1982, we published a notice in the festival catalogue asking people to come to a meeting to discuss the viability of an organisation, a bit like a filmmakers coop for Super 8, aimed at everything from production and distribution to exhibition and publications. We held the meeting one night during the festival and quite a few people came. We arranged to meet another time a few weeks later at Alphaville, one of those big warehouse buildings on King Street in Newtown. It was still a run down industrial building that was being used for artist studios, very different to the new kind of gentrified Newtown.
At that meeing we changed the name of the group from the Super 8 Collective to the Super 8 Film Group and began to plan towards an annual festival as well as production and distribution facilities.
When we got funding from the Australian Film Commission to buy production gear, we set up in the back of Gary Warner’s house, in Burton Street in Surry Hills. It was basically his laundry that we converted into a small production suite where we had editors, viewers, film bins, splicers, cameras, microphones and projectors. Eventually we got more funding to set up an office in William Street in Darlinghurst.
From that time a new core of people began to develop with Gary Warner, Virginia Hilyard, Michael Hutak, Catherine Loweing and Andrew Frost and myself. Those seven people stayed together throughout the 1980s, maintaining the organisition, running a booking system, selecting and staging the film fests, touring work interstate and overseas. We also did a whole series of Film Readers as well as the Festival catalogues and posters, all of which demonstrated a post-do-it-yourself-new-wave aesthetic.
4th Sydney Super 8 Film Festival Poster, 1983
Consequently the film festivals all shared a very similar structure throughout the 1980s. We used to get hundreds of films and all of us would spend weeks watching hour after hour of films and voting in some kind of crazed artificially stimulated way.
How did you make your program choices?
It was usually a gut response. I don’t think there were many sophisticated debates around the selection process. We were a test audience, a colosseum forum that voted thumbs up or down.
It was an amazing experience every year, that was reflected in the arrival of perfect warm weather and long balmy nights. Summer always came in that first week of November, and the festival with it, and both were a kind of flowering, a brilliant display of what had been hibernating and incubating during the winter.
I did lots of work on packaging together bundles of films after the festivals and distributing them to places like the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane, the Cartoon Café in Newcastle, the Media Resource Centre in Adelaide, the Glasshouse Cinema in Melbourne and to ANZART in Hobart. I also took curated packages of films overseas.
The first trip was in 1983/4 when I went to international Super 8 film festivals in Brussels and Berlin , and gallery screenings in Florence, Paris, Vienna, the London Filmmakers Coop. I toured those films called, “Independent Super 8 Film from Australia” around Europe for about three months. While I was in Paris I set up an interview with Jean Baudrillard which was published in On the Beach magazine a few months later, coinciding with the Futur*Fall conference at Sydney University.
Was Follow The Sun one of those events?
That was in 1986 when I went to the States. There were screenings at UCLA in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City Ann Arbour International Super 8 Film Festival and the Montreal International Festival of Young Cinema. Ann Arbour was an interesting festival in that it had a strong experimental emphasis. I met Nick Zedd there and saw the films of Richard Kern for the first time. Nick Zedd was a very sweet guy, totally different to the post punk neo goth bad boy image portrayed by him as the major protagonist of the Cinema of Transgression.
What was Berlin like on your first trip in 1983?
Berlin was fantastic! I remember arriving by train, having travelled through the East German corridor of the Soviet Block, to get there just in time to catch a screening at the Arsenal Cinema. It was the opening night of Film Statt Berlin an international Super 8 Film Festival. I saw some great films by Christoph Doering, and others now compiled on the DVD and Booklet called Berlin Super 80. West Berlin was a really interesting and exciting city at the time, lots of warehouse venues for exhibitions, film screenings, nightclubs and a hardcore-post-punk-new-wave-everybody-is-doing-Super-8 lifestyle.
Can we go through some of the people in the Sydney Super 8 Film group and where you thought they their films were coming from?
Andrew Frost, Michael Hutak, Gary Warner, Stephen Harrop and myself all eventually formed a group called Metaphysical TV. We all made films about our relationship with the television screen. We used the Super 8 camera to shoot directly off the TV screen, reconstructing the material into some personal or perverse work. It all fell into current discussions of post-modern quotation and appropriation, and total immersion in the media particularly popular cinema and late night television. Catherine Lowing was working in a similar sensibility but without the direct relation to television, she was in to subcultures, Rockabilly, video clip sensibilities and dance cultures. Virginia Hilyard was more into a poetics of cinema, she did experiments with expanded live performances, her work was close to neo-expressionist painting of the time. Her films were very visceral, physical, and quite abstract in their construction.
It might be good to think about your films and go through them and describe what were your influences. Your films did change a lot. God Bless America is very different from your earlier films?
I’ve being thinking about that more since the last time we spoke , I think there are three periods of work there.
The first body of work was stuff I started doing at St Martin’s School of Art in London in 1979 and 1980. Malcolm LeGrice was my film teacher there. He was a major figure in Structural-materialist filmmaking in the UK. What Le Grice did was really conceptual art for filmmakers. It was very formative for me, so the first two films I made there were in a structuralist vein. Both those films, History Lessons (1980) and the Left Handed Woman (1980) were shown in that second Sydney Super 8 Film Festival soon after I came back to Australia in 1981. I constructed them almost mathematically in parts and sections, with titles that describe what you are about to see and inter-titles that analyse what you’ve just seen. I was thinking about narrative deconstruction at the time and was also charmed by the way Godard had used intertitles in Vivre Sa Vie (1962)
Vivre Sa Vie, Jean Luc Godard, (1962)
Back in Sydney I started going to art school at the College of Fine Arts, known as Alexander Mackie College then. I remember I made a pseudo-documentary called How Yukong Moved the Mountains (1981) partially based on a Joris Ivens film of the same name which I had never seen. I had come back to Australia by way of Hong Kong and made a rare trip to China from there. I became obsessed with the Cultural Revolution which had only just finished a few years earlier with the death of Mao and the routing of the Gang of Four in 1976. I had no real access to materials so I had to generate all my material by shooting stuff off TV or out of books. I just did voiceovers or got people to pretend to be historical figures. The film was a shocker but it began a tradition of cinematic make-do that I continued from then on. I threw it in the bin except for one scene where I interviewed Lindy Lee who was acting as an ex Red Guard who had escaped from China. It ended up in a scene in Imitation of Life (1984) where there were more Cultural Revolution references. I remember thinking of postmodernism then as a cultural revolution of sorts.
So the second group of films begins from about Undercurrent (1982), all closely relating to Hollywood cinema. They were parodies or homages of classic cinema, as well as being critiques of linear progression and narrative resolution.
Undercurrent (1982)
I was studying film theory and philosophy, COFA full time and Uni of Sydney part time. I wanted to make theoretical films that were also poetic. A lot of it involved looking at Hollywood cinema, deconstructing it, ripping it to pieces, finding hidden subtexts and codes that could be intensified and exaggerated. I saw most of the classic years of Hollywood cinema by watching late night reruns on television, where I came to love directors like Jacques Torneur, Delmer Daves , and Vincente Minnelli. So I made a string of films then, two a year usually, with a 15 minute film being something like a feature film commitment for me. Each film mimicked a different genre of cinema. So Imitation of Life (1984) was a melodrama, Night of the Living Dead (1983), a horror film, Undercurrent, a film noir, Forbidden Planet (1981), a sci-fi, Legion (1985) was a sword & sandal epic and so on.
Legion was very popular, in the top ten picks of the 1986 Melbourne Super 8 magazine?
I think it must have been its high production values! It was the only film in which I sought funding. I built sets and hired costumes and had a troupe of actors playing consistent roles. It was a mixture of Godard, Kluge and hollywood parody. Other filmmakers like Stephen Harrop played Christ and Michael Hutak was John the Baptist, Catherine Lowing was Mary Magdalene. I remember using a fantastic growl by Merecedes McCambridge on the soundtrack. She was demonstrating to Bill Collins how she did the devil’s gutteral groanings in Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973).
What do you think you were doing in Legion?
From about that time the concerns of the films crossed over, back and forth with what I was doing in painting. Painting the sets for Legion got me back into painting after stopping for a couple of years. The paintings I did from that time were made by sourcing material from other media, mostly print reproductions of historical paintings and photopraphs of faces. I painted the images in an edited, montaged way much like yo would expect from a filmmaker.
In all those films I was basically following my fascination of the moment. I seemed to have a six month cycle, I’d be obsessed by something and use it to generate a film. I made notes and sketches all the time, then shoot some material based on it using friends pretending to be actors, shoots lots from the television screen, not really knowing where it would end up. It tended to come into shape in the editing process. The soundtrack was as big a job as the image track. We all used TEAC 4 tracks in those days building up layers of sound and effects over the live sound on the magnetic stripe on the film.
So with Legion I was absolutely fascinated with philosophical questions and their poetic perverson through the bible and Hollywood. You know, the big questions; what is this thing called life, something I would now call an existential analytic. I was hunting down extracts from a real mixture of films that dealt with popular spiritual questions by reconstructing the life of Christ as in The Robe (1953) or by looking at demonic possession like in The Exorcist. I built a mini sound stage in Syd’s building in Darlinghust, painted backdrops for scenes borrowed from Arnold Böcklin's painting "The Isle of the Dead" (1880).
Arnold Böcklin, "The Isle of the Dead" (1880), oil on canvas
I made a connection with the Actor’s Studio which was just around the corner in the old Pie Factory Building. A dozen student actors agreed to be in the film, mainly to create a crowd scene for the temptation of Christ. I was able to be elaborate in this way because of a small grant from the AFC.
The No Frills Fund?
Yes, it was an initiative of the AFC that Gary Warner had launched in his new job there. It existed mainly to service the Super 8 Phenomenon. The grant paid for the rental of the studio, some rolling end credits, some time in the sound library at Film Australia. It was a princely sum of $1100 but I got an enormous value out of it.
And the period after that?
The 3rd and final period began to focus on diaristic self-portraiture, sometimes called trance film by P Adams Sitney. The idea of self portraiture first appears in History Lessons and later Shock Corridor (1985), where I walk down the corridor of my home, flanked by small temples to lost television stars like Rin Tin Tin and Mr T.
Shock Corridor (1985)
At the end of he corridor is a television set that plays Jezus of Nazareth (1977) and Poltergeist (1982). The image of the self reflexive wanderer who experiences an inner voice channelled through words and thoughts coming from other films gathers momentum in God Bless America,(1986) which was also a documentation of the Follow the Sun tour of the United States in 1986.
Robert Powell in Jesus of Nazareth (1977) Copyright: ITV plc (Granada International)
With God Bless America were there any other influences?
I had thought about the trance films of Stan Brakhage and the way he documented events in his life, the birth of children, death of family pets. He would cut that in with other material that was abstract, lyrical and metaphysical, aiming to suggest pure vision, thinking and living. So I wanted to make a film that was subjectively introspective and that also took advantage of a really interesting event that I could document to some extent, namely my first visit to America and the home of many cultural fascinations. So I filmed myself at Disneyland riding on Space Mountain and talking to Richard Kern holding up a nazi swastika flag saying “we believe”. Of course I shot lots of stuff off the TV screen, absurd moments from lost cult movies and outrageous moments of consumerism and advertising. I filmed myself being interviewed at a small Public Cable TV Station and edited in an appropriate sound bite from the then current movie, The Stuff (1985). Everything that happened, public, private, emotional, real or imaginary was ploughed back into the film. It started out as a documentary and ended up as a poetic construction of simply wandering through the cultural possibilities of America, with America standing for a moment in global time, or even postmoderrn time. A kind of ecstatic time somewhere between the past and the future, between the dancefloor and solitary confinement, between ecstasy and the grave.
Did you make films after God Bless America?
35 Summers was the next film I made in 1988, another self-portrait or psychodrama film. It is a portrait filled with lies and exaggeration but gets very close to the truth. I remember it just as much for the soundtrack, characters from Rumblefish (1983) saying, “He looks older. No he looks really old, like 25 or something”. The title also comes from Rumblefish, from a little eulogy Tom Waits delivers on the fleeting summers of youth, and the finite numbers of summers that remain once you work out you are on the home stretch to oblivion.
35 Summers (1988)
Another work I did after that was Viva (1989), similar in spirit, partially shot in Super 8 and partially constructed from television fragments and finished onto one-inch for a programme that Susan Charlton curated called Attitude. At the end of this period of films I took the idea into painting and started doing a whole series of “I am” paintings all through the 1990s.
So you changed from using Super 8 to video. Was that a natural change with the progression of technologies?
The changeover from Super 8 to video seemed to happen almost overnight, as if it was a New Year’s prank to usher in 1990. The transition took place at a mass consumer level and an artistic level. Basically Super 8 as a domestic medium was instantly replaced by a new generation of portable video. Super 8 still lives to this very day but it has become a specialist rather than a generalist medium.
With the advent of domestic video technology came a whole wave of video events like, Susan Charlton’s Attitude and the annual Australian Video Festival which only lasted midway into the nineties.
Was there a difference between the media for you?
I couldn’t manipulate video as much. Super 8 was still really a hands on medium, all that spaghetti trailing through your fingers. I’d always been painting or making film. So in that material kind of way Super 8 is the most manual of the screen media because you have to put your hands right into the middle of it, there are no interfaces or icons. You reached in and touched it like you would pencils or paint. Video at first seemed more mediated and deferred. I did Viva at an online studio where Stephen Harrop was working, so I spoke my requests to Stephen or workshopped ideas rather than doing it with my own hands.
Viva was the last analogue work I did until Sean O’Brien’s Super 80s show at the MCA in 1998. I did three Super 8 loops for him of material I shot of the pyramids and the sphinx in Cairo and at Nietzsche’s summer house in Sils Maria in Switzerland. This late experiment in expanded cinema coincided with a drive in my paintings to move off the wall and begin to occupy space and become installational or environmental.
After that I made some experimental websites, one that the ABC that is still hosting called I am (Index) (1997) . Its been there since I did a master class in web authoring at Metro in 1997! Check it out at http://arts.abc.net.au/metro/mark/server/imindex.html, the oldest website in the world! It is constructed exactly as I would make a Super 8 film, with episodes and chapters, and lots of sound bytes from movies and television, and even inter-titles that interact and poeticise what is being seen.
I am (Index) (1997), website,
I did another website for the Space Invaders show at Artspace in 1998.
I am (that), 1998, website
I have also done some video content for mobile phones in the last couple of years, shown at dart 05 and Bellas Milani Gallery this year.
“Wet Paint in Run Time” 2006, video still from mobile phone content
I know that there are still super 8 film festivals in Melbourne and super 8 is still being picked up by new generations of filmmakers. There is a new Sydney Super 8 film group who have regular screenings, Lucas Ihlein is involved with that. Super 8 continues to reappear in video clips and Hollywood movies as a device for symbolically representing the past. There was even that Nicholas Cage film, 8 Millimeter (1999) that played strongly on the idea of Super 8 being a storehouse of graphic domestic events in this case brutal and abusive ones. So you have to say Super 8 never really went away, it just changed its context and its symbolic presence.
In the 80s you were seen as a great proponent of super 8 and the concept of the ‘Super 8 phenomenon’ and ‘the Super 8 effect’.
From very early on there was a feeling that Super 8 was special, that there was more to it than just a cheap mass produced production medium. It was more than film, it was a way of life, involving an act of subcultural revelation. Looking back on it, it was really a kind of formalist analysis of the medium, that asked what was it about Super 8 that was different from 16mm, 35mm and video. And at the same time what was it about Super 8 that was similar to drawing, painting, thinking, being with people and so on. In 1982 I wrote Super 8; the Unconscious of Film and argued that Super 8 was invisible to practitioners of other gauges, that a certain repressed consciousness was able to return to the surface through the radical incompetence of untrained but otherwise creative Super 8 filmmakers. The technology of Super 8, lean, available, cheap, capable, expressed itself in the works being made. There were heated debates and differences of opinion about that. As a critical response Edward Colless put it really well, that “Super 8” really defined nothing. To call an evening of films simply “Super 8” was as crazy as calling an exhibition of paintings, “Oil Paint”. So he was saying to simply name the medium did not say enough about how you were using it.
So the Super 8 effect really identified the formal aspects of the medium that came through in the work, like the quality of the image, the colour stock, the nature of the loading device, its unusual sound technology through the servo-drive mechanism and so on. Primarily is was its availability, cheap and instantly ready to go, offering very little resistance between the vision of what you could shoot and what you would eventually show at a screening later the following week. The production path was so rapid it was like producing a painting in your studio one day and showing it in an exhibiton the next week. As you know that kind of process is impossible in the larger gauges, and only just developed in desktop video.
It had legal ramifications as well. You could move across international borders with a super 8 camera and the customs officer didn’t care. If you had a 16mm camera you had to have a special permit. Super 8 cameras could go anywhere both physically and conceptually, regardless of political boundaries or training certificates.
There were all these things that were specific to super 8 that enabled this really unusual mix of production realities and aesthetic ideals, that could be realised very quickly. Ultimately certain choices had to be made, to choose an audience, to curate films of a certain kind, to aim at the art gallery or film industry audience and so on. And this is what happened with a major split between those on their way to the film industry and those going deeper into art practice. Eventually I tried to write a dictionary of genres in Super 8, called “In the House of Super 8”. Most of the genre classifications related back to avant garde genres based on Sitney and others terms current in visual art discourse.
It’s interesting, because looking back on post-modernism in the late 60s, some people mark Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box as the beginning of it all. Duchamp might have said that you can use any material but I don’t think he was saying anyone can make art. In a way what you were saying about the super 8 camera, and by extension the digital movie camera, is a perfect example of accessibility, that anyone can make art with anything. How did Edward Colless’ reaction fit in all this?
I believe he was saying, ‘you are doing something quite specific, ok it is Super 8, but there are all these ways of doing super 8 that have been specifically chosen, some ways rejected and some yet to be articulated.
I like to have it both ways and say yes there is a Super 8 effect, it is liberating and empowered by radical incompetence. But also, because of the particular place in time, Sydney and the city scene, fuelled by art schools and fringe dwelling film specialists, and the nature of super 8 cameras and instant technology something happened that is still to be fully articulated.
Where did Adrian Martin sit, in all of this, with his articles?
There was a very productive tension between Melbourne and Sydney in the 1980s, unlike the mutual love affair that goes on now. Adrian was writing about the works of Tch, Tch, Tch, Paul Fletcher, Rolando Caputo, Jane Stevenson, Maria Kozic and others. They defined a particular way of making super 8 films that was specific to Melbourne.
It was closely related to Paul Taylor, the discourse of Art and Text, and the Popism exhbition that Taylor curated at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1982 that included Super 8 films by many of those artists. There was a nascent language of postmodern practice being developed both in the films and the writings of that group. Adrian was very articulate and surprised everyone with his level of polemical expertise. He very accurately pinpointed how at a certain moment in the early 1980s Super 8 was being picked up by mainstream film culture as a shopping experience in the mall of filmic diversity. He also showed that Super 8 was radically different form the current form of 16mm avant garde practice that was at the time conforming to prescribed textual strategies derived from feminist and Marxist critiques of the spectacle. Super 8 absorbed all this but and then went a little bit further in a kind of perverse pluralist rush that didn’t seem politically correct at the time. Adrian’s overview was much broader than most in that he was concerned with “Cinema” not just a pocket of local invention in an avant garde scene. I think his activities since then have emphasised this difference through his role as cinema critic and several books on the way about Terence Malick and others.
Bill Mousoulis somehow rides all over this. What were your feelings towards his films?
Bill figures large in a tension that developed between at least two different types of filmmakers. There were those that were committed to historical art filmmaking, drawing on a tradition from Francis Picabia, Duchamp and Dada through to Brakhage and Warhol. Then there was another body of filmmakers who were really thinking about the film industry and narrative filmmaking as their goal and were passing through super 8 to that other place. There was a real convergence between the two groups because the artist filmmakers were looking toward Hollywood because of film theory and ‘wannabe’ filmmakers were looking at Hollywood because that was where they were headed. So I would put Bill in that second group who really wanted to make narrative cinema, and super 8 was the perfect tool at that particular time.
Who else was in that group?
Well retrospectively you could say Rowan Woods and Catherine Lowing. Rowan is now a very successful feature filmmaker, he won Best Director at the AFI awards for The Boys (1998) and is currently in production in Los Angeles. Catherine went on to making TV productions for SBS like the hilarious Cooking with Frank (2000) and is now in Rome working at CineCitta Studios. Even Michael Hutak, who had studied a Communication degree at UTS went on from super 8 filmmaking, to become a professional journalist, and made an AFC funded documentary, Moral Fiction (1994) that featured appearances by Helen Demidenko and Don Watson, Keating‘s speech writer. Sean O’Brien became a professional documentary maker and also has a busy life as a freelance producer for radio, he makes docos for ABC radio and has his own arts programme on Eastside Radio every Tuesday morning.
But this is not meant to separate the artists from the industry hacks. Everyone had to get a job somewhere, Harrop works for SBS, I work for UTS. All of those people carried with them the Super 8 years so that if they worked in the industry they brought an experimental attitude to their work. People who have stayed in the art world have gone from super 8 to video, painting and new technologies.
When were you aware of this debate, artists versus the film industry - people making comments about where you were going – how did you perceive and react that?
I wasn’t particularly concerned about the difference between groups of filmmakers who were in the art world and others aiming toward the film industry because it was all working together quite well. However that tension reached a head around Bill Mousoulis’ work. Whenever his films were shown at super 8 film festivals in Sydney they would be howled down. They were really interesting subtle works, but they got the thumbs down from the ‘theatre of cruelty’ at the Chauvel Cinema screenings. If the audience disliked a film there would be loud comments and mocking laughter. It really showed up the bias of the audience for ironic films.
Finally, post-modernism, what did it mean for super 8 ?
I remember the event that crystallised the understanding of post-modernism in relationship to many aspects of visual art practice including Super 8 was the Futur*Fall conference at Sydney University in 1984. Baudrillard was the keynote speaker, his first visit to Australia and lots of people identified post-modern concerns in literature, film theory, fine arts, architecture, economics and so on.
For most of the Super 8 filmmakers what appeared as postmodern in their work had come about quite spontaneously, like iron filings following a magnetic field. We were obsessed with mainstream cinema, film and television – absolutely loved parts of it, and ignored the rest. Instead of taking up the previous generation’s tendency to critque entertainment culture and reject it out of hand we savoured it for aesthetic and expressive effect, touched it up in a certain way, rebuilt it to make it even more perfect. To even make it articulate it where it had been dumb and thoughtful where it had been ignorant.
Was your publication of On the Beach part of your response to that?
Yes, On the Beach came together a little bit like the Super 8 Film Group. A group of friends forming around a particular bundle of cultural interests. There were five of us; Lindy Lee, Ross Gibson and myself were also in the first Super 8 Collective. The other two Mark Thirkell and Salvatore Mele were studying philosophy and literature at Sydney University. So the magazine covered film, visual art, literature and philosophy. We self funded the first couple of issues. got a good response from readers and other magazines and eventually got funding so that the magazine ran for 3 or 4 years. It was the magazine version of the Super 8 festival!
Where did you see On the Beach in relation to Art & Text?
It was part of the Melbourne and Sydney matrix again. We were very much in conflictual union with Art & Text, supportive and competitive at the same time. We published a Paul Taylor piece in the very first issue, The Art of White Aborigines, on Imants Tillers work. We were all trying to say something about what was going on in contemporary art and to define the strong sense of a new mood, a shift from structuralism to post-structuralism and post-modernism. Trying to get a read on culture in general, from Hollywood cinema to studio painting,
On the Beach went for thirteen issues. It started off with five of us then whittled down to just Lindy and I did the last two issues. We had another years funding left, se we put the word out that we were looking for someone to pick up the torch of producing the magazine. Catherine Lumby and David Messer put their hands up and they did three more issues. And that was the end. By handing over to them we returned the favour that Kate Richards had done for us several years earlier.
That is all a large body of work. There was also a whole series of Super 8 Readers done through the Super 8 Film Group?
There were quite a few, I did the first one which was a compilation of all the writings about Super 8 and the Super 8 effect. Virginia Hilyard did the next one on Super 8 scripts, it was a really good insight into how filmmakers developed and expressed their plans for films schematically. Michael Hutak did one that was high quality film stills from a selection of films, like a festival of frame grabs.
So the result is that the Super 8 phenomenon of the 1980s is really well documented and sits there as a resource waiting to be activated at any time. David Cranswick and d/Lux/MediaArts are doing that right now with the launch of their web archive that is a repository of every work shown since the 1980s through the 90s and up to recent D’art events. The archive includes Quicktime versions of work, lists of all the screenings and works, all the writings and artists details from the last 25 years. Amnesia is no longer a disease to trouble the experimental screen community!
