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d116095
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photographs are very interesting, and you can look into them a million times and still find a new meaning in them, something in the past that was caught in the film itself...
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canon
capture
film
fujifilm
grief
joy
knowledge
kodachrome
kodak
loss
love
meaning
nikon
nostalgia
past
photo
photography
romance
super-8
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Rebecca McNutt |
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4440d30
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"Yeah, you're right about having entire rooms full of film and photos... in that Sydney Mines house I have a darkroom, I have boxes of film and home movie footage... I have a few projectors, I have piles of Kodachrome slides... I like photographs. The world is always running away from society and the only way to keep the stuff that's happened in the past is by taking photographs, I can keep memories of things alive with photographs," Alecto responded. "People say that a time machine can't be invented, but they've already invented a device that can stop time, cameras are the world's first time machines... The steel mill, the coal mines, the train tracks, the smog in the sky, I've been able to rescue it on super-8 and Kodachrome, and no one can remediate those photographs, I can keep them as long as I want to."
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|
cape-breton
capture
coal
coal-mine
darkroom
digital
film
industrial
kodachrome
kodak
memories
nostalgia
nova-scotia
photo
photograph
polaroid
pollution
smog
steel-mill
super-8
train
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Rebecca McNutt |
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97e3315
|
"I guess if there's one thing I can say about the 21st century, it's that the 21st century is all flash and no substance... everything is digital, nothing but files of invisible electronic data on computers and mindless zombies on their cellular phones... it's sad how because of the digital age, society is ultimately doomed. Nothing in the digital age is real anymore, and you know, they say celluloid film and ray tube televisions and maybe even paper might become obsolete in this century? ...What's most annoying is that nobody cares, they've just learned to accept the digital age and get addicted to it... none of them are ever going to step up and say to the world, "you're all a bunch of sheep!" and even if they did say anything, I doubt anyone would listen... they're all too obsessed and attached to their cellular phones and overly big televisions and whatever other moronic things they've got these days... it almost makes me want an apocalypse to happen, to erase digital technology and force the world to start over again."
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|
apocalypse
bleak
book
books
camera
cell-phones
celluloid
depressingly-honest
digital
doom
film
future
paper
photography
poison
scary
super-8
|
Rebecca McNutt |
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78b5c6b
|
"At last evil and corruption take over," Mearth laughed icily, her eyes filled with a wild glow. "Someday you'll become so unstable that you'll kill anyone you've ever cared about in your life, and when that happens I only hope that you leave any outsider witnesses alone as you fade out of the world." Alecto froze for a moment, completely silent, setting the camera down on the fence and thinking things over. Mandy could see him clearly now that he was on the video, but he looked obscure. "What's on your corrupted mind, pretty little Sydney Tar Ponds?" Mearth asked, dropping the wire cutters and stepping closer to him. "I hate you," he answered icily. "Oh, no you don't, you just think you hate me," Mearth insisted, her voice kind, caring, almost loving. "You didn't mean to try and kill me, you've been worn-out by life, you've been alive a very long time, your mind is a storm and your usual insight is gone." Mandy was inclined to agree with Mearth; he looked like a storm, his eyes had dark shadows under them, he was limping when he walked, he was shivering and coughing and his head was leaning to one side slightly. Nonetheless, he still seemed to be able to reason, because when he noticed Mearth's falsely cheerful words he glared at her hatefully, smoke trailing from his cigarette. "I'm going to tell Cheryl what you've done, all those times you tried to kill me, I'll tell her and she'll know what you did," he threatened. "No Sydney Tar Ponds, you won't," Mearth replied softly, "because if you tell her, I'll kill her and you'll have a few more super 8 home videos to add to the collection of celluloid memories." "...You wouldn't," Alecto exclaimed. "If you really do love her, if you really care about her and she's your friend, you'll stay silent," Mearth told him. "You think what I'm doing is cruel, sadistic, but it isn't... you aren't even a real person, you don't understand." Alecto said nothing back to her. The television screen faded to black and Mandy just sat there in the darkness, her expression blank."
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mother-earth
movie
sadistic
screen
silent
super-8
sydney-tar-ponds
television
watching
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Rebecca McNutt |
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f10b249
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"You should find something better to do with your time," Mandy told him. "I spend my time shooting people, and then I take them to darkrooms and blow them up." "...Come again?" Alecto questioned with a tone of alarm in his voice. "I take photographs and develop them myself, I've got my own darkroom... it was a joke," Mandy laughed. "I love photography and I'm gonna be a photojournalist someday." "Really?" Alecto asked. For the first time since she'd met him, he sounded slightly enthusiastic. "...I take photographs and I film my own home movies, I have a darkroom as well... but I can't be a photojournalist like you... I can't be anything... still, at least I can take photographs, it's fun."
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april-fool-s
blow-up
camera
chemical
crazy
dark-room
darkroom
demented
develop
disturbing
enthusiasm
film
friends
funny
hilarious
home-movies
humor
insane
instamatic
joke
kodak
murder
nikon
photography
photography-humor
shoot
strange
super-8
weird
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Rebecca McNutt |
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b42e34b
|
Alecto isn't a person! He's just something that society made and then threw away, a memory that refuses to die.
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canada
cape-breton
coal
created
death
dying
kodak-moment
memory
mining
nostalgia
nova-scotia
person
pollution
society
steel
super-8
threw
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Rebecca McNutt |
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739c692
|
There was a super-8 steel town somewhere, where all the forgotten things in the cruel world ended up eventually, Mandy was sure of it... this place, she decided, was called Smog City.
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canada
city
concept
cruel
death
film
forgotten
grief
heaven
kodachrome
kodak
nostalgia
smog
steel
super-8
|
Rebecca McNutt |
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8a0d0c5
|
Super 8 film is the language of silence.
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|
cape-breton
film
kodak
kodak-moment
language
nostalgia
nova-scotia
obscure
photography
seventies
silence
super-8
|
Rebecca McNutt |
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bf81d56
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Oftentimes she wondered what had happened to super 8. Sure, it made perfect sense that nobody wanted the hassle of spending money on a three-minute cartridge of film and threading it through a projector, but though digital cameras were convenient and cheap, Mandy didn't care. Super 8 had integrity, it wasn't just nostalgia, it was art, it was history, it was a little recording medium that somehow possessed the power to evoke lost memories, to turn back time, and there was something dazzling about waiting excitedly for a reel of film to come back in its yellow and red Kodak envelope, eating buttered popcorn while the projector paraded life's best moments, and capturing something beautiful in only three minutes.
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|
digital
future
future-shock
home-movies
integrity
kodak
lonliness
movies
nostalgia
photography
popcorn
projector
retro
super-8
vintage
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Rebecca McNutt |
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20fb7a6
|
"Hey Alecto, film this!" she called out. With the slide being as tall as a two-storey house, it felt slightly risky being up there. "On second thought, why don't you come up here? It's a blast being up here." "I don't really like to be in high places," said Alecto as he filmed her, the camera lens reflecting the entire playground, which was partially secluded by tall trees that cast otherworldly shadows dancing across the ground. "If you don't like being in high places, then why'd you take so many drugs in the seventies?" Mandy questioned jokingly. "Do you want me to go up there and push you off the top of that slide?" Alecto threatened coldly. "You'd never do that, we're best friends!" Mandy pointed out. She reached over and picked a bright red maple flower from one of the long branches of the trees, tossing it down to him. "Even in this failing 21st century, where people are cell phone addicts and crude humor and violence is the norm, even when society falls apart and drowns in its own mistakes, we'll still be best friends!" She looked incredibly eccentric, never mind the fact that she was an adult woman wearing a trippy rainbow Pucci dress from the 1970's, standing on top of a slide at a children's playground. Alecto didn't seem to mind, he just continued to film her with his camera like she'd asked him to."
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70-s
camera
canada
cape-breton
drugs
film
flower
friends
friendship
heights
nova-scotia
park
psychedelic
seventies
super-8
sydney
trippy
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Rebecca McNutt |
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bfd58d2
|
"Alecto... what do you think would happen if people found out about you? Your abilities, your life, Mearth's super 8 films, those powers of yours... how would they react?" "I don't know," said Alecto, "but ordinary people like a show, especially when it's a disturbing one. They enjoy seeing misery... probably because it allows them to pretend that they themselves are not so miserable, too. Also, they would probably find out about you, how you know about Personifications, how you saw the films... they would put us in cages and throw peanuts at us, I guess." "All joking aside, Alecto...." "Who is joking, Mandy Valems?"
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film
humor
joke
misery
ordinary
peanuts
powers
psychokinesis
psychokinetic
pyrokinesis
pyrokinetic
show
super-8
super-8-film
super-eight
telekinesis
throw
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Rebecca McNutt |