WHEN CINEMA FIT IN A CARDBOARD BOX.

In Spain, the commercial distribution of Super-8 films, mainly in the form of abridged versions, or digests, came to an end during the 1982–1983 school year, just before Kodak introduced its fade-resistant LPP technology. A historical irony: precisely when the medium was about to become virtually eternal, the domestic market had already been condemned.

Lady Di's wedding, by Walton Films, which I had bought in England when I was a student, on the occasion of a trip with my sister Susana

This past weekend, taking advantage of this new stage in life, I separated those small films from that period (late 60´s and 70´s), acquired with so much effort and enthusiasm when I was a student, from later editions with complete feature films, positives struck in British, American or German laboratories, which I keep in another storage room. It was an almost liturgical gesture, like arranging memories by stages of life, a kind of sentimental Super-8 memoir of my childhood and of the years when we were happy with a seven minutes digest.

n my hands, a digest of Joe 90, by Gerry Anderson: my interests haven't changed since I was a child

While the bulk of my film archive in 16 mm and 35 mm is kept in the Studio (not by whim, but by sheer physical logic: a single 35 mm feature easily weighs over twenty kilos), Super-8 can live at home. Here, my very first digests purchased in childhood coexist with the last complete anamorphic features released by Derann Films, such as Master and Commander.

 

WHEN VIDEO DID NOT EXIST.

Decades before anyone could even dream of the Internet, DVD or Blu-Ray, when home video did not yet exist, photographic shops sold films in the form of digests: fragments lasting from three to twenty minutes that allowed people to own a film at home.

My favourite distributor was the American company Castle Films. I was about twelve years old when the Three Wise Men, during those magical Christmases of the early seventies, brought me a single, wonderful toy: a Cine Max projector, which I still keep in its original box. My mother bought it in the now-vanished Moya shop, opposite the Cine París, in La Coruña (Galicia, NW of Spain), for 1,500 pesetas of the time.

The Cine Max is still with me, after more than half a century, in its original box.

For months—winter after winter, before 1975—I watched again and again the few family films shot by my parents with an AGFA Double-8 camera they had bought in the early sixties from Machirant, a good Catalan friend who had decided to upgrade to a more advanced model. In those long winters, with no video and no alternatives, the only way to revisit cinema was through those silent digests, with subtitles, lasting between three and ten minutes.

Years later came sound digests—twenty, forty, sixty minutes long—and even complete feature films. But that is another story.

CASTLE FILMS.

Castle Films was one of the most important digest distributors in the world. Founded in 1918 by Eugene W. Castle, it began as a production company, but with the advent of 16 mm and later 8 mm it became the largest distributor of non-theatrical home cinema on the planet, in all its vast and boundless scope.

In 1945 it signed an agreement with Universal—a studio that would eventually acquire Castle Films in April 1977, renaming it Universal 8—which enabled the release of countless classics of horror, sci-fi, adventure, cartoons and documentary cinema.

When I was twelve or thirteen, around 1973, a ten-minute silent Super-8 digest cost just over six hundred pesetas. The first one I bought was The House of Frankenstein. The second, more modest but equally fascinating, was a three-minute black-and-white documentary titled African Animal Hunt, which cost 213 pesetas. I still display both titles in a glass cabinet in the studio, because with them began a vocation that—with its ups and downs—has allowed me to earn my living for decades… and to enjoy my job.

THANK YOU, ANTONIO DOCAMPO.

At this point I cannot fail to mention Antonio Docampo, one of the fathers of Galician cinema, unjustly sidelined by the miserable institutional chiringuito (López Chaves dixit) that governs the audiovisual destiny of the region. In his shop on Rúa Nova in La Coruña—where he always had even Kodak Pageant 16 mm projectors in stock—far from dismissing me for being a child, Antonio had the generosity to let me begin building a solid collection of Castle Films titles in their cheapest Standard-8 versions.

I did not care in the slightest: my Cine Max could project both Super-8 and Standard-8, and after all, the content and those wonderful boxes were identical.

Spanish magazine for Super-8 collectors, published nowdays

The best part was that Antonio sold me those 8 mm films for just 300 pesetas, payable in monthly payments of 50 pesetas. Thanks to him I was able to collect a remarkable collection of Castle Films classics, with those irresistibly designed boxes that I still enjoy contemplating today.

One of my favourite digests was Tarantula, by Jack Arnold, featuring a very young and then unknown Clint Eastwood in his first Hollywood role, as one of the pilots. Decades later, I had the good fortune to acquire the complete film in professional 16 mm, with magnetic Spanish soundtrack and optical English track.

Abridged version of "Star Wars" in 7 minutes in black and white, silent with subtitles and pan & scan

THE ORIGIN OF EVERYTHING.

The seed of the archive I now preserve—today comprising thousands of reels, mainly in 16 mm and 35 mm, at the Studio—was those modest 8mm Castle Films digests and the generosity of Antonio Docampo, who sold me genuine treasures at cost price and, on top of that, with payment facilities.

Shortly after the release of Star Wars, which I saw on the immense screen of the Cine Riazor projected in 70 mm with multichannel magnetic sound, Antonio Docampo  sold me a curiosity that today seems almost inconceivable: a seven- or eight-minute digest of Star Wars, black and white, silent with subtitles, and in pan & scan, meaning that only half of each anamorphic frame was projected in the academic ratio.

Esteve Riambau, when he was director of the Filmoteca de la Generalitat de Catalunya, described my studio as a "temple of cinema".

Today, when any film is just a tap away on a mobile phone, all this may seem absurd. But in 70´s we were happy with those lilliputian Super-8 reels.  Before video, before digital, before everything was instantaneous, when I was a child, these digests, often silent and imperfect, sold in photo shops, by allowing you to touch the frames and hold them up to the light, transmitted, from Super-8, the magic of real cinema (and instilled in many children a passion for film).

The latest Disney releases in Spain came from France

Perhaps because that small, incomplete, and technically imperfect cinema had something that has been lost today: the desire, the anticipation, the imagination that filled in what was missing.

That distribution system (70, 35 and 16 mm features for theaters, 9.5, 8 and Super-8 digests for home),  also ensured that movie theaters, even neighborhood theaters, revival theaters, parish theaters, or film clubs, were always full of people, with spectators entering a world of dreams, in theaters with giant screens, with uniformed ushers, velvet curtains, and a ceremony that was quite an event.

This English book studies that period of Super-8 as a commercial phenomenon