Super 8mm continues to die a slow death.

Posted Sep 29th 2006 5:02PM by Kevin Kelly
Filed under: Tech Stuff, DIY/Filmmaking

Coming nearly a year after Kodak announced it would stop producing supplies of Super 8 Kodachrome film, the last film lab in Europe able to process the format is closing on Saturday reports The Guardian. Another sign that the digital revolution takes no prisoners and is merciless. Kodak's Super 8 Kodachrome and Ektachrome film has long been a staple of indie filmmaking, and is sadly a dying format. Today's digital video cameras don't come close to matching the rich depth and color that Kodachrome can produce relatively inexpensively, nor can they reproduce the look and feel of the mechanical film process.

"Regular film doesn't come with scratches and tramlines," says Jake Astbury, a film-maker who has shot videos for the Corrs, murder scenes for BBC dramas and much of Nicolas Cage's movie 8mm on Super 8. "You can deteriorate video but it looks fake. Only Super 8 has that romantic, worn quality. It has a roughness that no other medium has."

European auteurs will have to send their film to a processing factory in the States, until remaining supplies of the film are gone. Then, they might finally have to grit their teeth and go digital.

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