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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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photography
grief
loss
romance
joy
meaning
past
love
fujifilm
nikon
kodak
kodachrome
super-8
canon
photo
capture
film
knowledge
nostalgia
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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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memories
industrial
polaroid
steel-mill
kodak
coal-mine
darkroom
kodachrome
cape-breton
super-8
nova-scotia
photograph
smog
photo
digital
coal
pollution
train
capture
film
nostalgia
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Rebecca McNutt |
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97e3315
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"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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photography
future
books
bleak
cell-phones
celluloid
depressingly-honest
super-8
camera
digital
paper
doom
apocalypse
book
film
scary
poison
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Rebecca McNutt |
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78b5c6b
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"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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television
screen
sydney-tar-ponds
super-8
mother-earth
sadistic
watching
silent
movie
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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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photography
murder
friends
funny
humor
april-fool-s
blow-up
chemical
dark-room
demented
instamatic
nikon
photography-humor
home-movies
kodak
darkroom
super-8
disturbing
develop
camera
enthusiasm
shoot
weird
film
strange
hilarious
joke
crazy
insane
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Rebecca McNutt |
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b42e34b
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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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death
created
threw
kodak-moment
cape-breton
super-8
nova-scotia
coal
mining
steel
canada
pollution
society
person
dying
memory
nostalgia
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Rebecca McNutt |
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739c692
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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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grief
heaven
death
kodak
kodachrome
super-8
concept
smog
steel
canada
forgotten
film
cruel
city
nostalgia
|
Rebecca McNutt |
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8a0d0c5
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Super 8 film is the language of silence.
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photography
silence
kodak-moment
kodak
cape-breton
super-8
nova-scotia
obscure
seventies
film
language
nostalgia
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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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photography
integrity
future
future-shock
home-movies
kodak
projector
retro
super-8
vintage
popcorn
digital
lonliness
movies
nostalgia
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Rebecca McNutt |
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20fb7a6
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"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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friends
friendship
cape-breton
psychedelic
super-8
nova-scotia
trippy
70-s
heights
sydney
park
camera
seventies
canada
film
flower
drugs
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Rebecca McNutt |
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bfd58d2
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"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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humor
peanuts
psychokinesis
psychokinetic
pyrokinetic
super-8
super-8-film
super-eight
telekinesis
throw
pyrokinesis
ordinary
show
film
powers
misery
joke
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Rebecca McNutt |