My latest One Take Super8 film will be screening at
8FEST in Toronto
January 27-29 at Trash Palace
Notes from Nowhere: Super Winnipeg Super 8
Curated by Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan
-exert from the program-
Winnipeg is an impoverished city, famous for its frigid winters and its artists. Sustained by cheap studio rent and fantastic thrift-store finds, the creative class thrives in the geographic centre of North America. There is very little cool factor to living in the middle of nowhere, so most of us just keep out heads down, get our work done, and try to keep the tips of our ears from freezing. Very little changes in Winnipeg.
Perhaps that is what makes the archaic technology of Super 8 neither outré nor hip. It simply is: a vehicle for ideas, images and experimentation. Friends come together to make something. It doesn’t cost very much. Like Ed Ackerman, you can even develop your own footage in the kitchen sink. Whether the subject matter is, like Deco Dawson’s, seemingly hundred-year-old gestural studies or, like Jaimz & Karen Asmundson’s, an unselfconsciously goofy celebration of place, the particulars of the form continue to enamour. Super 8 looks like memory and is similarly malleable. Winnipeg filmmakers continue to use it to create works that seem to exist outside of time, that reference an earlier time or that simply mark time with chemical collisions and light. Films by Robert Pasternak, Mike Maryniuk, Jaimz & Karen Asmundson, Noam Gonick, Deco Dawson, Heidi Phillips and Ed Ackerman.
Stills from Robert Pasternak's Super8 film RGB
