(voiceover) Good evening and welcome to TEDxUMontana 2015.
My name is Andy Smetanka, and I am pleased and honored
to be this year's artist in residence.
I created the images which will proceed each speaker this evening,
and I hope that you enjoy looking at them as much
as I enjoyed making them. I did get up to a little mischief.
If you're familiar with my filmmaking, you're probably familiar
with the stuff that looks like this,
but, in fact, I use the same technology to make things like this,
and this,
and most importantly, probably things like this.
Now, as you know, the theme of this year's talks is language.
I think we can all agree that film constitutes a language,
possibly languages, in both a very broad metaphorical
and a very narrow linguistic sense.
There isn't really time to go through every particular in similarity here,
but film has grammar, syntax, a lexicon,
and its smallest grammatical units of meaning, just like a language.
In film, meaning possibly originates within the shots,
and things arranged within the shots,
and then there's the sequence of shots and editing,
of course, is where the film language really takes flight,
in terms of its ability, its capacity to express
more complicated ideas and feelings.
There's poetics to the film image, for sure, and there's also the level of language,
which linguists call pragmatics.
Say you're in a band, and you're playing your first show,
and some cool kid comes up and says, 'You guys rock',
you kind of know that you're not meant to take that utterance
at face value, despite the encouraging sound
of the words themselves. Well, that's pragmatics.
Now you know the look of Super 8.
Maybe some of your own childhood memories are preserved this way, maybe not,
but I bet you've seen it in the movies, where it performs the explicitly pragmatic role
of invoking memory without necessarily coming quite out
and saying that something is memory.
It's a place apart from the film. Childhood birthday parties, something fondly,
or un-fondly remembered from childhood, some traumatic event perhaps,
where we're supposed to recognize the germ of a character's future character or their actions.
If you squint a little bit harder in the movies,
you can maybe see Super 8 or some simulation of it,
used for things that seem somehow destined for memory,
things which even in the moment of the film seem deserving
of some heightened means of recording or perception.
Now, all you really need to know about the history of Super 8 film,
is that back in the 60's, Super 8 replaced a fairly cumbersome
and accident-prone way of making home movies
with an easy and reliable one
by sticking a 50 foot length of film into a self-loading cartridge,
black plastic cartridge.
A generation of home movie makers was off to the races,
which is precisely the point that I'd like to come to.
Within the broader metaphor of film as language,
Super 8, I think, is a dialect.
It was never really intended for professional use,
to be in the movies, to be high art.
It was created to allow people to record their everyday doings, their adventures,
and their loved one's fleeting childhoods, and their fleeting time on earth.
Super 8 language is a dialect of home and hominess,
with all the rough and tumble, and the blurry focus,
and the unexpected endings of real life.
I shoot my home movies on Super 8 for precisely these reasons.
I use it to record images that are very much of a time and place,
but that I want to look somehow timeless for posterity.
Things that should look timeless. I mean, shouldn't memories look like this?
People play to a Super 8 camera.
They're happy to see it, makes a funny noise,
so kids find it just endlessly fascinating, almost a personality unto itself.
They know it's different because they can't see the results
right away either.
Of course, the funny thing is that people chatter and sing away,
despite the fact that there's no sound,
has not been sound on Super 8 film for years and years.
Whether they know that or not, isn't always clear from the footage,
and I guess I don't always say anything.
In a funny way, this actually deprives people of language,
it sort of mutes their image for all eternity.
Someday, I think I might hire the services of a lip-reader
to help me go back and reconstruct whatever linguistic context can be recovered
from beneath all those dreamy, dreamy layers of film emulsion,
but I don't really think it matters.
I mean, what are these people talking about?