Workshop Super 8

Super 8. Instructions for use #2
curated by Karianne Fiorini and Gianmarco Torri

The more the Super 8 moves toward the centre, becoming ‘vintage,’ incorporated in commercials, celebrated in festivals of experimental film that are less and less interested in and keen on its telluric vocation for (human and) social transformation, the more we need to defend its history, its belonging to marginal and extra-industrial film forms, to a minority of filmmakers and artists who, out of necessity, have made it their specific tool for the representation of their lives, their existences, and their worldviews.
An inexpensive and democratic tool (as it still is, if we include the do-it-yourself approach of artists’ workshops worldwide – www.filmlabs.org – as we will in Pesaro), and equally handy and for everyday use, with which the technical skill can be minimized to embrace the most personal elements – such as gaze, pace, point-of-view, gesture… – as well as infinite forms by simply just pushing a button.
This is one of the reasons, among others, why this year we decided to invite Dutch filmmaker Jaap Pieters (“The Eye of Amsterdam") to conduct a workshop on the practice of shooting in Super 8. During his long artistic career, devoted exclusively to the smallest film gauge, with his empathic gaze on and attitude to listening to the tiny movements of reality, Pieters has managed better that anyone else to depict the actual fringes of a society and a world that are accustomed to looking away from anything that is not productive.
In over 500 films shot from the eighties onwards – that have now resurfaced and are being assessed owing to a project curated by the present authors in collaboration with the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam – and in thousands of photographs, Jaap Pieters has unceasingly documented his life, the lives of his friends, of the people who were around him, as well as the fringes of society, its invisible corners, and the homeless – untiringly observed from his window or in the streets all over the world. His shots include the small movements of objects and light at the margins of each frame, that become abstract moving pictures and refer to an existential offscreen, an ever-present and implied sideways gaze.
A different school (and ethics) of the gaze that places the stance of whoever is shooting at the centre, both as a point-of-view from (and onto) the centre of a given social group, both as a capacity to capture – without ever trying, ever wanting to make a film a priori – in whatever moves around him that which touches him, in which he recognizes himself or his own being other from the world.
Thus, experimental film is once again not only processing of form, construction/exploration of an ‘other,’ alternative expressive and perceptual world, but also vindicating an ‘other’ belonging, choosing a (political and existential) battlefield, and opting for an involvement with what moves at the margins of society. Keeping track of and understanding in depth the latter is essential because it might be the only way out of (social, economic, cultural) blind alley into which the current model of thinking and development has led us.
Precisely for all this, or possibly only for this – because Pieters’ filmmaking is indissolubly entwined with radical life choices and equally radical political stances – we hope it remains irreducible to whatever show and whatever commerce.
The workshop focuses on the basic concepts of shooting and film processing as well as on the creative potential of filming in Super 8; it also foresees making a collective film directed by the participants with the guidance of Jaap Pieters.
The workshop includes processing the resulting footage manually with the help of Livio Colombo – also a Super 8 filmmaker and craftsman – who will also make a presentation of the principles and tools for film processing.
On the last workshop day, the resulting works will be projected on film for the festival’s audience, along with some of Jaap Pieters’s and Livio Colombo’s own Super 8 works.

Killing the hunter inside us (or, Seeing vs. Watching)

curated by Jaap Pieters

To me, the essence of film (OR filming) is SEEING in the passive sense & the opposite of WATCHING. Or like Maurice Merleau-Ponty explained: how the painting (or any object) “comes to you,” in “wanting to be seen” & thus I am being “touched or moved by.” In that sense, “the hunter is to be killed (in us)" & the gatherer or collector (Walter Benjamin) activated.

My approach is to be “passive” or “neutral” & SEE what comes to me & be alert on what moves me & only on this intuitive level should I decide: “to film or not to film” (to live or not to live with the exclusion of Reason or Logic (& shut down completely that part of the brain) on this level of “making sense” or “give meaning” or “have purpose,” or all those elements that run this (capitalist) society. The determination of “useful or useless”, according to this materialistic society should be stopped first!

THERE IS NO CONCEPT! Whether length (one reel) or edit or light: there's only the given tools (camera - cassette - 15-meter film: b/w or colour & the amount of light & the light sensitivity of the filmstrip) though the Awareness of Time is essential in the sense of: Movement = Time or Time = Movement (of the Light) – the earth “moves” around the sun (= Light) & rotates on its Axis & we will try to capture our fragments of that!