Stephanie Gray: The Poetics of Super 8 and Hand Processing
Gray’s beautiful, haunting Super-8 films were the recent subject of a three-day retrospective at New York’s venerable Anthology Film Archives. Amy Taubin writes in Artforum: “Gray’s commitment [is] not only to celluloid but specifically to the narrow-gauge medium of Super 8. She has mined its particular expressive qualities — graininess, smeary color or low-contrast black-and-white, limited focal range, on-the-fly sync-sound recording and, especially, the fragility and instability of the film strip itself during shooting, editing and projection.
“Like the places and people she has filmed, Super 8 has all but disappeared. Most of the filmmakers who briefly explored it turned decades ago to video and digital technologies. But for Gray, whose work is defined by its stubbornness, Super 8 is the artisanal medium where she celebrates handmade imperfection and mourns its passing.”
Gray is one of three experimental documentary filmmakers visiting the School of Cinema in February for screenings and hands-on workshops with students.