SUPERNATURAL GIFT FROM SOLEDAD MIRANDA

Some gifts seem to arrive carrying a historical weight, almost metaphysical. About ten years ago, following my advice, Soledad Miranda purchased a Bauer C109 from the fondly remembered French shop of André Egido. Recently, she decided to part with two Super 8 cartridges she would not be using, which had been resting in her dressing table drawer for years. With a generosity I deeply appreciate, she has given them to me.

One is a Kodak Tri-X, a black-and-white emulsion I have always loved: noble, contrasty, with that organic grain that turns light into substance.

But the other cartridge is something else entirely: a Provia 100 in Super 8, an absolutely cult emulsion, packaged for a brief period by Tak Kohyama of Retro Enterprises from the glorious Fujichrome Provia 100 slide film. It belonged to a strange, almost twilight era, when color reversal seemed destined to disappear and Fujifilm was the only remaining option, since Kodak had, at that time, abandoned Ektachrome.

Tak undertook a considerable investment in a machine capable of reperforating 35 mm film down to Super 8. For a small company, this was no minor technical feat. Adapting a film designed for still photography to the demanding 8 mm Type S gauge required precision, risk, and faith in a market already wounded.

Retro Enterprises began selling Provia 100 in Super 8 cartridges at a moment when no other color reversal stock existed. It was also offered in Single-8, the system created by Fujifilm in 1965, and “killed” by the same company in 2014, although the format survives thanks to those of us who continue to reload our own cartridges.

Then, suddenly, without warning (very much in keeping with the enigmatic nature of Fujifilm), the film supply was cut off. The project was abruptly terminated. Thus ended that brief golden age of Provia in motion picture form.

The cartridge now in my hands is therefore a relic of that adventure. There is no way of knowing which batch it belongs to whether it is from the early runs, now quite expired and potentially affected by perforation issues, or from a later, more stable production. It is, quite literally, an encapsulated unknown.

Shooting with it will be a game of photochemical Russian roulette. Will there be chromatic stability? Unpredictable color shifts? Perforation deviations?

In any case, risk is part of the charm. This is not merely a cartridge: it is a capsule of industrial history, of technical resistance, of romantic stubbornness.

Thanks to Soledad Miranda, I now have the opportunity to face that challenge.

And ultimately, what is photochemical cinema if not precisely this? To measure the light,  and to accept that sometimes uncertainty is part of the miracle.