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Splice This! Super 8 Film Festival, July 1 - 3, 2005
review by John Porter, photos by John Creson
Splice This! is in its 8th year and 5th location.
The new location is XPACE, an art gallery in Kensington Market run by
the Ontario College of Art & Design's Student Union. (The first
Toronto Super 8 Film Festival, 1976-'83, was started at the Ontario
College of Art by students.) The room is large with a high enough ceiling
for a large, raised screen and relatively good sight-lines. Seating
& climate (air-conditioned) are comfortable. The cash bar was closed
during screenings. Attendance reached 150 at some screenings.
Inside the entrance every night, CineCycle artist Janet Bike Girl (janetbikegirl@yahoo.ca) was selling her custom-stencilled "Splice This!" and "Super 8" clothing.
Polly Perverse's super 8 projection was good, using the Images Festival's quiet, bright, Elmo ST-1200HD M with a 150 watt lamp, and veteran musician/filmmaker/technician Fred Spek doing sound. The DVD player was slow to start each time. (I don't know why people bother w/video!)
July 1 & 2
"Remake" - the annual, themed program of commissioned
works made for the screening. Spread over two nights, there were fourteen
super 8 films, and eleven videos shot on super 8. It was a strong program
with a variety of genres including some silent, some abstract and some
very disciplined works.
Friday, July 1
"Fast Wurms" - a two-set spotlight on the veteran Toronto
art duo (Kim Kozzi & Dai Skuze) who made many radical, raw, super
8 sound films with third member Napoleon Brousseau in the early 1980s,
but later switched to video. They began their in-person intro with an
emphatic thankyou to The Funnel (1977-'89) where Monthly Open Screenings
(1977-'81) inspired them to produce.
They showed four old super 8s on video (two of them quite long), and a 2005 sound video shown while a silent, super 8 copy of the video was projected simultaneously on a side wall at an oblique angle - a double projection. The rare video-to-super 8 transfer was good, with no flicker, and done at Exclusive Film & Video, a sponsor of Splice This!.
The annual "Print This!" Photo Exhibit during the festival this year was many large, vertical-strip, paper banners of Fast Wurms' super 8 frame blow-ups, hanging on one long wall of the gallery/screening room.
Saturday, July 2
"The Cine Sonnets of Storm de Hirsch" presented
by Pleasure Dome Artists'
Film Exhibition Group. These were super 8 prints and 16mm blow-ups of
short, silent, super 8 diary films made by an obscure woman poet/filmmaker
in New York in the 1970s. The prints were made for The Women's FILM
PRESERVATION FUND of New York Women in Film & Television.
"Soundstripe" - annual program of bands performing live to their films or videos. Six were super 8 films and three were videos shot on super 8.
