When Super-8 cinema went into a coma in Spain, between 1981 and 1983, its strength continued in both Great Britain and Germany. Me, always an Anglophile, subscribed to "Movie Maker", in 1983, and later, simultaneously, to "Making Better Movies."
Last night, taking a look at an issue from the late eighties, to read the technical test of the Zenith Krasnogorks-3 camera, which I have converted to Super-16, I took the opportunity to enjoy myself with the announcements of Tony Shapps and his world famous shop The Widescreen Centre, offering anamorphics, the Beaulieu projector, the Beaulieu 2016 16 mm motion picture camera and the Beaulieu 7008 super-8 cameras, both now elusive models; I bought my 2016 from him, at a special discount price, because was a "shop soiled" unit (although mint). Tony Shapps, and his wife Beryl, are the parents of the current British transport minister, Grant Shapps esq., at that time a young student who delivered Fumeo 9119 cinema projectors to the homes of customers of The Widescreen Centre!!!
In this issue I discover a photograph that makes me very excited, in which my wife and me we appear, very young, with all our British filmmaker friends.
Those were the good old days of "Movie Group" when, armed with our motion picture film cameras, and in the company of luminaries like Sir John Mills and Tony Rose (from whom I learned the secrets of cinematography), we traveled around the world, with our beloved leader, the late John Wright, aboard "Leonid Brezhnev" in the wonderful times of the Cold War and, also, when collapsed the Iron Curtain, as I explain in this documentary, in which I take the opportunity to narrate the sad end of the once spectacular ocean liner, which proudly wave its red star and the hammer and sickle through all the seas of the world universe, in all its roundness, and that today, in the hands of the mafia, half rusty, is a low-class brothel-casino in red China.
BREZHNEV, MON AMOUR from IB CINEMA Motion Picture Films on Vimeo.
Quite a curiosity: when I published the S8 documentary "Brezhnev, mon amour" in Vimeo (narrated both in English and Spanish), the 3rd largest selling newspaper in Spain, "La Voz de Galicia", dedicated a full color page to it (written by Fernando Molezún, the great journalist from La Corunna; digital version: CLICK HERE )
