Koda-Crime!
A eulogy to Super 8 Kodachrome
BY Terence Dick
Recently, my wife was phoning shops from Vancouver to Nova Scotia trying to make a score, but everyone gave her the same reply, “Sorry, we’re sold out.” She was both sad and furious and I, like a good husband, was doing my best to sympathize. Relax, I’d tell her, you can still get Super 8 film; they’re only getting rid of one particular kind of stock.
“No,” she’d moan. “It’s Kodachrome! It’s irreplaceable!”
Now, despite my hatred of television and complete disinterest in playing video games, I’m no Luddite. I’m quite appreciative of developments in technology and more than willing to replace obsolete toys with the newest thing. As soon as I could afford one, I bought a CD player, happy to be free of the inescapable pops and hisses of vinyl. I never felt like I missed anything with the faultless sound of a compact disc, but when I listen to my old records, I hear the less than perfect sound as evidence of a certain age. Those records I remember buying and playing into the ground have become touchstones to a lonely adolescence spent hovering by the warmth of the stereo speakers and they sound better on vinyl. They sound like I remember them. That quality can’t be recreated, so I rarely buy records anymore, but I still lug them around, box by box, every time I move.
Maybe something similar was up with my wife’s beloved Kodachrome. She fell in love with filmmaking much like I fell in love with music. She’s made a bunch of wonderful shorts, she started up Toronto’s Super 8 film festival, Splice This!, and regularly forces our daughter and me to walk, spin and wave in the park as she squints at us from behind her camera. But it’s only because of this three-way relationship—me with her, her with Super 8—that I was even aware of the great crime recently perpetrated by the Kodak Corporation.
The sole supplier for Super 8 film on this planet, Kodak, keeps selling it due to the consistent demand of experimental filmmakers, music video directors and hobbyists. Back in the day, every Tom, Dick and Mary documented family functions with this miniature movie stock and even though we now have digital camcorders, QuickTime cameras and cell phone movies, Kodak continues to make and develop the small stuff. So no one’s going to stop making home(made) movies anytime soon, they just —according to my wife and a legion of squinters from LA to Paris—won’t look as good. Why? Because this past May 9, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Super 8 film, Kodak announced they were discontinuing sales of their S8 Kodachrome 40 Movie Film.
Processed exclusively by a lab in Lausanne, Switzerland, Kodachrome starts out as black and white film and, over some 36 stages, is slowly dyed the richest colours imaginable. Andrea Dorfman, director of Parsley Days and Love That Boy, is adamant there’s nothing like it: “The colours on Kodachrome are so true, the primary colours are so bright and accurate. It’s gorgeous.” Filmmaker John Price calls the colour classic. “Creamy skin tones, ultra blue sky, eye-popping reds,” he gushes. According to a slew of like-minded Super 8 cinephiles testifying on the internet, Kodachrome is not only exceptionally rich and vibrant, it is the colour palette of our collective memories. All those tiny reels pulled out of our parents’ drawers, fed through the school’s projector and screened against a sheet on the living room wall, they recreate our past gestures—silent, frantic, goofy, awkward—in lush colours that, unlike our memories, resist fading with time. It’s a vision captured in Kodachrome that inspired and sometimes still haunts filmmakers from the last half of the 20th century.
The lab in Lausanne will process Kodachrome for but a year more. When its closure was announced, a group of French filmmakers petitioned their government for a grant to fund a new lab. Their leader, Pip Chodorov, wrangled a meeting with the head of motion picture imaging at Kodak who told him the land under the lab in Switzerland had already been sold, the building would be torn down and the film processor could not be moved. Processing Kodachrome was too complicated and no longer economically feasible.
To support Chodorov’s campaign, the faithful can e-pencil their names on a web petition. Special screenings devoted solely to Kodachrome and the ongoing chatroom banter continue to sound the alarm, but the accepted sentiment seems to be one of defeat. Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin applauds my meagre attempt to draw attention to this crisis, but he figures it’s inevitable and—despite Kodak’s claims to the contrary—a sign of the eventual disappearance of Super 8 entirely. Though he works in black and white, Maddin has managed to make feature films with this small format but acknowledges his reliance on the manufacturer. “I might be able to process the film myself, but I won’t be able to make the stock from scratch.”
My wife and I have half a dozen cartridges of Kodachrome hidden away at home and time is running out. We have to identify the most important memories of the upcoming year, shoot them and pray our little package makes it to and from Switzerland in one piece. Film is such a fragile medium, one that reveals its secrets only after it is too late to repeat them. But it is also hardy. Just try to watch your birthday from 1982 on VHS. Now look at the filmstrip from 1942 we found in Grandma’s attic. Recording technology is invaluable when it endures. It’s magic because it both reminds us and helps us forget we’re mortal. That’s why Paul Simon sings about it, Pip Chodorov fights for it and my wife mourns its passing.
