Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

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This article proposes a series of reflections based on an important formal procedure in Bolivian cinema. The integral sequence shot was developed mainly in La nación clandestina (Jorge Sanjinés and Grupo Ukamau, 1989). It was conceived by the filmmakers and read by the critics as a translation between different conceptual systems: Andean cosmovision and film language. Through this device, Andean experience of time was meant to be translated in the best possible way to the cinematographic form. The integral sequence shot was conceived assuming that the conception of time in the Andes is radically opposed to the conception of time in the West. The opposition of cyclic Andean time and linear Western time, together with the location of the past in front and the future behind in Aymara language, would prove the need for an audiovisual translation. This text seeks to question the existence of absolute and opposite conceptions of time, and looks at spatial metaphors used to refer to time in Aymara. In this way, an authenticity built upon a cosmovision seen as fundamentally different is questioned.

This article explores the debates, uses and political practices connected to the Super 8 film activities that took place during the seventies in Spain. It covers a period that started with the last years of Franco’s dictatorship, followed by the expectations generated by the change of regime, and it concludes with the implementation of a constitutional framework and the establishment of a parliamentary monarchy. We begin by analyzing the presence of Super 8 films in three of the main underground film distributors (El Volti, Colectivo de Cine de Madrid and Central del Curt). We explore whether the Super 8 format played a secondary role in these experiences. In order to do so, several sources have been identified, including practitioners, films, events and publications. The investigation links these initiatives with the political uses and debates related to Super 8’s format. The final result is a presentation of various Super 8 practices developed in different parts of Spain, especially in Catalonia, dealing with subcultures, emerging social movements and struggles of persecuted and marginalized identities that vindicate a new regime of visibility. Due to its lightweight, shoestring, and intimate nature, this format was used as well to film peripheral spaces with larger stories and alternative cinematographic representations. Thus, the aim of this article is to expand the imaginary of this important period of contemporary Spanish history thanks to the capacity of Super 8 to build a historical approach from below.

This article offers an introduction to some of the themes and concepts that dominated the discourse on Super 8 cinema in Argentina during the 1970s, paying special attention to the Unión de Cineístas de Paso Reducido (Union of Small-Gauge Filmmakers, a.k.a. UNCIPAR), which was based in Buenos Aires. This study focuses on three main thematic areas: narratives of origin and emergence, particularly in relation to other models of cooperation and organization such as the film club; the complex relationship between the ideals and self-characterizations (often involving notions of autonomy) of this subdivision of independent film culture and the demands and limitations imposed by various material, economic and ideological factors, including during the military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983; and finally, portability and paths of circulation, a neglected topic within the historiography of Super 8 in the seventies.

En plena Guerra Fría, los años sesenta constituyen uno de los momentos de mayor expansión colonial, también en términos culturales, de los EE.UU. En 1965 la casa estadounidense Eastman Kodak lanzó al mercado su «revolucionario sistema de cine en súper 8». Se trató de un arsenal tecnológico compuesto, entre otros aparatos, por tres modelos de cámara, seis de proyectores y los innovadores cartuchos Kodapak. Desde un principio, aunque los desarrolladores del súper 8 tuvieran en mente los beneficios del nuevo formato en el sector educativo, se impuso su explotación en el marco del cine casero (home-made cinema) y la producción de imágenes amateur, que hasta entonces estuvo dominada por la fotografía en 35mm. El plan de Kodak funcionó sin apenas interferencias durante los primeros años, gracias, en parte, a que desde el primer momento, otras compañías fuera de EE.UU. como Fuji, Bell & Howell, Beaulieu, Afga, Pathé o Eumig, contribuyeron a la expansión del formato por los hogares de las clases medias globales. No obstante, el modelo del súper 8 como aparato para la producción de películas familiares, turísticas y de ocio por parte de las clases medias urbanas globales quedó muy pronto desbordado, propiciando nuevas tendencias de uso.    

This paper explores the ways in which Super 8 entered the discussion on Third Cinema at a global level, whether through individual or collective experiences of production, theoretical interventions in print media, training workshops or transnational federative organizations. Based on diverse documentary and hemerographic sources, as well as archives and personal interviews, I argue that, between the key years of 1968 and 1989, Super 8 played an integral role in the history of these counter-hegemonic political cinemas that allows us to understand the shift from the revolutionary impulse of the 1970s to the humanitarianism of the 1980s. To this end, I will first situate the discussion on Third Cinema and minor technologies, looking at the ways in which Super 8 brought into play the differences between professional and amateur practices. I then proceed to trace some possible routes for a global cartography of Third Cinema in Super 8, based on the agents, films and projects that participated in the Third World Super 8 Cinema Encounters, a series of roundtables and screenings held under the auspices of the International Federation of Super 8 Cinema.

The Balázs Béla Studio uniquely defined filmic experimentation in 1970s socialist Hungary, allowing it to thrive mainly on 35mm and 16mm. By the 1980s, younger generations turned away from these formats towards Super 8. This paper explores the socio-cultural and institutional contexts of the late socialist period within which this change occurred. It does this by focusing on two diverging filmmaking milieus that used Super 8 in the early 1980s: a film competition by the Indigo Group, a collective of artists inspired by the leading neo-avant-garde figure Miklós Erdély, and a group of rebellious, marginalized young filmmakers active within the K?bánya Amateur Film Studio. While these alternative film experiments differed widely in both artistic interests and filmmaking styles, considering them together allows us to understand the varied role Super 8 played in carving out degrees of independence in (film) cultural milieus during socialism's final decade.

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 expansion 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.