Sometime in the 70s, a father in West Berlin used his Braun Nizo 4056 loaded with a roll of Super 8 Kodachrome 40 with sound to film his child crawling around listening to Elvis and taking a bath. This film cartridge remained undeveloped for forty years, many years after the last Super 8 Kodachrome film had been developed in it’s traditional technique. Forty years later only the ghost of the grains remained. In a chaotic sea of silver, images reveal themselves. Upon receiving the film back, I was instantly mesmerized by the effect of the age and special processing was needed to salvage the images.The images seemed to float within an endless sea of grain, finding a strange level of order in the chaos. It was mesmerizing. And yet, all our images, are captured on grain or pixel or some material organized into order out of chaos. The sound, captured on magnetic tape, was preserved. The final film combines this footage with colour footage shot in Vancouver, Canada, and the rest in modern Berlin.
derne.
About David Jeric Avelino
Born in Calgary, AB, David Jeric Avelino moved to Vancouver in 2013 to attend Simon Fraser University’s Film Program. A lover of cameras and all-things-analog, David’s work has always concerned the role of images in human relations. An avid Germanophile, his latest film A Meditation on Grain (2020) was created from a heavily aged roll of Super8 Kodachrome sound film salvaged and developed roughly forty years from it’s original capture in Berlin.
His directorial debut short, Seldom Looked Upon (2016), was nominated for the Best Canadian Short Jury Award at the Vancouver Asian Film Festival in 2016. In 2018, his grad film, Freiluft (2018) was a part of the 8th Analogica Festival, in Bolzano, Italy.