IMPRESSION X
by Bill Mousoulis (August 3, 2022)
Impression, or definition? Lo-fi, or high-res? The Super 8 image, with its “softness” as they say, has always been associated with the states of memory and dream, and rightly so. Never pushed into professional usage like 16mm. (apart from for a distinct effect within more higher definition films), Super 8 has always been true to its initial domestic purposes, as a recorder of “ordinary life” – home life, family celebrations, special events, holidays. In other words, the genres of home movies and travelogues. And in the hands of bona fide filmmakers? Yes, in the 1980s we had the transgressive Super 8 films from America, or the post-modern Super 8 films from Australia. But, even back then, a lot of the filmmakers stuck true to using the medium as a recorder of their own lives and travels, and indeed presented them as “films”.
Does Super 8, with its soft patina and fragile image, innately have what we could label an “eye of innocence”? In the hands of amateur filmmakers, or indeed of just young filmmakers who go on to mega careers (Steven Spielberg), or those more radical experimentalists interested in the textures of the images thrown up by the world, in all these people’s hands, doesn’t the camera itself seem to will them on, to move that camera around, to simultaneously search for and discover things (the ultimate things – the world)? The long take especially (letting the camera roll) is like this, like the eye of a baby, scanning the world, trying to make sense of it at the same time as being bombarded by it. It’s the birth of an “impression”, and this is the complete antithesis to the film-manual philosophy of knowing your idea first and then going out and realising it. (And in the most “high-definition” way you can do it, thanks!)
And that’s Roy Rezaäli’s compendium film Impression X in a nutshell. Yes, by the way, these are grown filmmakers, and, yes, what they are doing is intentional. And what a beautiful film is created in the end! A lot of travelogue material, yes! And some home movie footage, and recording of performances by people, yes! And if anyone thinks that the modern presentation of these Super 8 images with music accompanying them is somehow “impure”, well, a lot of Super 8 screenings that happened in Australia in the ‘80s and ‘90s clearly had a boom-box set up next to the projector, with many films having musical soundtracks on cassette.
And, yes, we all know that Super 8 “died” sometime in the late ‘90s, that digital cinema started taking over for indie filmmakers worldwide. But, it refused to die. One thing should be noted about all the Super 8 movements (and self-processing film labs) worldwide that have existed since around 2005 – they are composed of young filmmakers, filmmakers who did not experience that initial Super 8 wave in the mid-to-late 20th century. What has attracted them to the medium? Exactly what I outlined above – the dream, the emotion, the “feel” of the medium. Sometimes, crystal clear high-def or 4K imagery is not what it’s cracked up to be! It doesn’t “swing” as they say, it’s got no “soul”.
Look at Impression X, and discover the world with it (literally too, with the filmmakers in all kinds of places in the world). Yes, it’s like the innocence of silent cinema, with musical accompaniment, but not from “naive” filmmakers, it’s professional filmmakers letting themselves “be naive”, and that’s the daring and beautiful thing about the film. And let yourself be seduced by the music also, which is eclectic and compelling: dub, electronica, jazz, folk, indigenous. Overall, a very refreshing film.
Bill Mousoulis is an Australian film director, with approximately 100 films to his name.
He is also the founder of the online film journal Senses of Cinema in 1999, and the founder of the film co-operative Melbourne Super 8 Film Group in 1985.