Small-Gauge Samurai

Cory Ryan, founder of Flicker Austin (Photo By John Anderson)

When I was very young, I discovered my father's old Kodak Super-8 camera, secreted away beneath the basement stairs in a KAL flight bag. This was the same camera he had used countless times to capture such revelatory and landmark family events as my first treacherous spoonful of Jell-O and my devil's food-besotted third birthday. Similar fiascoes were recorded for familial posterity in households during the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies heyday of Super-8 home filmmaking.

Flash forward to now: Super-8 (and, to a lesser extent, its big brother 16mm) has all but vanished from the scene, replaced by the home video and its wildly popular digital offshoot, DV. No surprise there -- ultimately video is cheaper (no lab fees) and easier (no f-stop) to use. It's utilitarian in a way that is revolutionizing not just home taping but filmmaking as a whole.

Super-8 is rapidly going the way of the kinescope but for a handful of rabid fans who rightly revere the inherent beauty of small-gauge film stocks. No matter how many filters and aftereffects you pile on, digital video doesn't look like film. It's harsher, lacking film's soft grain. It looks, well, digital. For lack of a better word, there's a romance to film that video lacks, which is why, no matter how many DV cams end up under the Christmas tree this year, there's a growing groundswell of underground filmmakers devoted to the simple pleasures of Super-8 filmmaking.

Which brings us to Austin's Flicker Film Festival, a bimonthly mini-fest featuring short, small-gauge (Super-8 and 16mm) films by area filmmakers held at the Blue Theater in East Austin.

Flicker's the new kid on the block, following somewhat in the footsteps of Austin's other microcinema purveyor, the Cinemaker Co-op, but a wholly different beast. There are seven other Flickers scattered across the country and overseas, from the original in Athens, Ga., to New York City, Los Angeles, Richmond, Va., Asheville and Chapel Hill, N.C., and, remarkably, Bordeaux, France.

Flicker Austin founder Cory Ryan, late of the Chapel Hill Flicker, initiated the Austin branch last January after moving here to work for local e-textbook startup Thinkwell. This is, apparently, par for the course of emerging Flickers, whose viral spread through the underground of fringe filmmaking is expanding with a meme-like tenacity. Norwood Cheek, former head of the Chapel Hill Flicker, moved to Los Angeles in 1997 to pursue his film career and took Flicker with him. Screening in the semilegendary Silver Lake venue Space Land, the cheeky Flicker L.A. attracts crowds of young and hungry filmmakers and has become even more of a success than its North Carolina precursor.

Ryan describes Cheek as her Flicker mentor and says, "I knew that when I moved to Austin I'd want to be involved in something similar and work on encouraging the local scene and maybe providing a little bit of money. I just wanted to create a fun place for local folks to see each other's stuff."

Mission accomplished.

At each bimonthly meeting, Flicker Austin awards the Flicker Film Grant -- a check for $100 -- to a deserving filmmaker, which might not seem like much until you realize that a roll of Super-8 film stock costs less than $20. All told, with lab fees and shipping costs (there's only one place in the U.S. these days that develops Super-8 Kodachrome film, and it's in Arizona), a five-minute Super-8 short can scrape in under the $50 wire. The $100 grant goes a lot further than you might expect.

In addition to the grant, each Flicker Fest features a "hat trick": Audience members so inclined write their name and a brief idea for a film on two slips of paper, which are then separated and placed in a pair of hats. At the end of the evening, names and ideas are randomly withdrawn, with the idea that by the time the next Flicker rolls around, people will have a whole new series of films on offbeat topics ready to screen. Flicker offers free use of its equipment -- including cameras, splicers, and assorted Super-8 gear -- to those in need, and apparently the technique works remarkably well.

Local filmmaker Tom Griffin is a Flicker alumnus whose first hat-trick film resulted in his winning the third Flicker Film Grant with the live-action/stop-motion "Deli Very." Griffin, who moved to Austin from Chicago this past December and "almost by a fluke" found himself attending Flicker No. 2, suggests that what makes the Flicker phenomenon so appealing to new filmmakers is the fact that it's not a competition in the traditional sense of film festivals.

"You can bring anything that you made, within reason, and they'll show it. And if they can't show it at this particular screening they'll show it at the next one. It's such a warm support group -- and I know that sounds a little too warm and cuddly -- but they're very much 'Yeah, make a film and c'mon out and we'll show it!' There's no judging or awards or any of that sort of thing; it's much more like a very stripped-down celebration of filmmaking, a celebration of microcinema and DIY filmmaking."

The main problem many makers of film shorts encounter these days is a lack of outlets to display the finished product. With the occasional exception of shorts programs on the Independent Film and Sundance cable channels, there are few other avenues outside of the regular film-festival circuit. Unfortunately for small-gauge filmmakers, the costs and entry fees of a typical festival often outweigh the cost of producing the film in the first place.

I asked Ryan (whose closet is predictably crammed to bursting with small-gauge film gear) if there is an underlying manifesto unifying the current eight Flickers.

"For me, I want to help keep small-format filmmaking alive, either by encouraging people to keep shooting it by giving it away with the hat tricks that we do or by using the money from the screenings [Flicker's standard entry fee is $5] to fund the Flicker film grants, which in turn encourages the creation of Super-8 films. The most important part of Flicker is getting people in the screenings that have maybe never shot a film before, and getting them to understand that they can do this, too. Maybe someone will pick up a camera that never has before."

Perhaps the most unique aspect of Flicker is the mini-distribution circuit that runs throughout the various camps. For example, a local Flicker filmmaker in Austin can send dubs of his film off to any or all of the other Flickers, effectively sending the work on a microtour that will allow it to be seen by hundreds of people outside of his hometown. This is common practice at all of the Flickers, and a series of compilation tapes featuring "the best of Flicker" has already been assembled.

"And that's all without the filmmaker having to pay for it," adds Cheek. "That's really exciting for a lot of these filmmakers, who, for the most part, don't have much money and are essentially just doing these films for themselves."

Lest people think Flicker is little more than a method of getting downtime amateur work out to the masses, Cheek notes that several former Flickerites have hit the big time.

"There are a couple of folks whose early films we screened back in the day that have gone on to much bigger things, sure. Peyton Reed, who recently directed the cheerleading film Bring It On [and who was recently tagged to helm the big-budget superhero franchise-to-be The Fantastic Four], contributed to the very first Chapel Hill Flicker in '94. John Schultz went on to do a feature called Bandwagon and Drive Me Crazy. Those guys are both living in L.A. and doing really well as feature directors. Certainly a lot of the Flicker filmmakers have gone on to pursue making their own feature, and that's great."

For a such a moribund medium, small-gauge filmmaking appears to be remarkably ambulatory. "You know, it's weird," says Cheek, "but I think that more and more people are getting rid of their Super-8 cameras, especially now that digital cameras have become so readily available and popular, and because of that these old cameras are turning up in thrift stores and garage sales and that makes them more available to the artists and college students who are interested in doing a film on film. I kind of attribute this resurgence in Super-8 fringe filmmaking to -- oddly enough -- the popularity of digital video. All of a sudden, people who may have previously stood by their old Super-8 cameras are discarding them in favor of DV cams, and those discarded film cameras are being scooped up by a whole new wave of film-based filmmakers. It's strange, I know, but there you go."