This text provides a materialistic approach to the technology of Super 8 in the context of fossil modernity, developed in two parts. First, it focuses on the Super 8 as a tool that operates at three different levels of cultural and economic significance: the uneven relationship that arises between its production and distribution processes and the environment, its growth in the wake of the ex-pansion of the plastic economy around the world, and its genealogical connection with the device of identity and memorialist self-construction imagined by Kodak at the end of the nineteenth century. In the second part of the article, all these analytical frameworks and the reflections they contain inform the concrete experience of the Association pour le jeune cinéma québécois, its practice and its ideas about the possibilities of Super 8 in developing a truly democratic and popular cultural practice while enabling Quebec’s identity development in the context of the post-energy crisis of the Seventies.
Access the text here.
