ROARING 40s, FURIOUS 50s AND SCREAMING 60s, with Super8, slide and Instax film!!!

ROARING 40s, FURIOUS 50s AND SCREAMING 60s, which I filmed in Super8 and photographed with Polaroid-type instant film Fujifilm Instax!

In my navigation from New Zealand to the South Magnetic Pole, I discovered that the terrible winds have names: from 40 degrees of latitude they are known as "the roaring forties", from 50º they are "the furious fifty" and from 60 degrees south "the screaming sixty". I have never experienced something so terrifying in my life, nor do I think I will ever experience it again: a combination of relentless wind that blew mercilessly without any land to hinder its force around the planet, blowing from all points of the compass!

Between the 48º and 61º South, these winds drive the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC). This is the greatest current in the world, with a flow equal to more than a hundred times that of all the world's rivers put together, wich extends to depths of 2000-4000 meters, and can be as wide as 2000 km.

Apart from Kodak Super 8 film and Kodak and Fujifilm slide film, I also carried Fujifilm Instax instant photographic film to use with my Mint camera. My initial Instax material consisted of only 80 photographs, but, as I found these types of cartridges in a store in Invercargill, I used up all the local stock!!!, taking 10 packages of 20 photographs each, knowing that I was not going to have any more have to go through any major X-ray inspection.

It is possibly the first one someone had photographed with this type of material in Antarctica!  I have a good part of this Instax photographs displayed on the cork here in my office, and, like everyone who comes, it catches their attention, I´m designing an exhibition that combines Instax photographs, Kodak Ektachrome slides that would work in continuous projection and motion picture film loops as well,  together with the cameras used and other material, in what would be a didactic experience to complement non-theatrical projections of "Perfect Antarctic Madness " in 16 mm with the projector in situ, between the audience.

There has never been a project like this in Antarctica, entirely photochemical, combining Super-8 manually recharged in Single-8 chassis, film slides and instant film. And it was carried out not from London or Los Angeles, but from the antipodes of New Zealand, in this end of the world that is Galicia. What do you think, friends?

ANTARCTICA AND ITS TERRORIFIC PLACE NAMES.

During the month and a half that I was filming on the continent of desolation the full lengh film feature "Perfect Antarctic Madness" many place names caught my attention, devastating to the spirit, such as Deception Island, Danger Islets, Cape Disillusionment, Bay of Exasperation, but, above all , Mount Terror and Mount Erebus, the southernmost active volcano on the planet.

"Terror" and "Erebus", in Latin, were named in honor of the two ships with which James Clark Ross made the famous expedition in which one of the objectives was to find the south magnetic pole.

Erebus, in Latin, comes from Greek, and in Spanish it translates as "érebo", "erebo" or "érebos": it is synonymous with hell, very appropriate for the sensations felt there, at -35 degrees Celsius and an inclement wind.

This feat is narrated at greater length in the feature-length documentary filmed in Super-8!, for the first time in these forgotten lands of the hands of God.