Borrowing Super8mm Reduction Prints for Anthology Film Archives Series

[Dan Burgos]

I'm programming a series at Anthology Film Archives focused on reduction/digest Super8mm films, specifically narratives (as opposed to comedy shorts, cartoons, musicals, or sci-fi). I've already sourced prints of The Godfather, Ben Hur, Chinatown, MASH, Coffey, Psycho, The Birds, DeMille's Cleopatra, and The French Connection, but am seeking others and thought there might be a few collectors here willing to lend their prints to be screened by Anthology's capable projectionists once or twice. Turns out, no archive wants these prints, nor will any institution keep or seek them out, so they're surprisingly hard to get without straight out buying them (which I've also done)!

I've listed some films I'm seeking below along with the companies that produced them, in order of desirability (my white whale is to source a copy of Hardcore). If you're interested, please contact me directly. The series is still coming together, so dates are TBD for early 2025. If you have any other questions I haven't thought to answer, please ask. Thanks all!

Hardcore (1979, Columbia)
The Neverending Story (Derann)
The Boston Strangler (1968, Ken Films)
The Godfather Part 2 (Marketing Films)
Jaws (Ken Films) (this and Star Wars are the exceptions to 'no genre' since they're so familiar to a wide audience, they'll help calibrate what reduction films do)
The Omen/The Omen 2 (1978, Ken Films)
Straw Dogs (ABC)
The 39 Steps (Walton)
Assault on Precinct 13 (Derann)
All The President's Men (Columbia)
The Boys From Brazil (Derann)
The Riddle Of The Sands (1979, Movieland)
Black Sunday (Marketing Films)
Doctor Zhivago (MGM)
The China Syndrome (1979, Columbia)
Casino Royale (Piccola Film)
The Magnificent 7 (Derann)
Alien (Ken Films) (same exception as Jaws)
Saturday Night Fever (Marketing Film)
The Crimson Cult (1968, Ken Films)
The Public Enemy (1931, Ken Films, United Artists)
The Dirty Dozen (MGM)

[Douglas Meltzer]

Hello Dan,

I live in NYC and I have a number of the titles you're looking for. We should speak!
I'll send you a PM with my contact info.

Hardcore might be the toughest one on your list. it was one of the last releases from Columbia 8mm (along with The China Syndrome, which I have). I rarely see that title on used film lists.

A couple of corrections (sorry!): Jaws was released by Universal 8, not Ken Films. The Boys From Brazil is from Walton. I believe Riddle of the Sands is from PM Films. Casino Royale, from Piccolo, has German audio. Would you still like to screen it?

[Brian Fretwell]

Movieland did relase a full length version of Riddle of the Sands (I have a 200ft extract which I am not sure who produced) and Assault on Precinct 13 was originally PM Films (I have a copy on Fuji) but re-released by Derann from the same negative on LPP or Agfa.

[Douglas Meltzer]

Brian,

You and Dan are absolutely right about Riddle. I just checked my feature print. It turns out the film was sent to me in PM Films boxes, but the artwork does say Movieland. I've been wrong about this for about 18 years!

[Brian Harrington]

At the risk of being pedantic, all Super 8 films from theatrically released films are reductions from 35mm. I got confused when I read the title and the first sentence of the first post. The usual terminology is digest, extract, abridgment, etc. Not all are digests, since many Disney extracts focused on one scene, often featuring a song. E.g. I WANNA BE LIKE YOU.

A full length feature on Super 8 is still a reduction.

You need to add more U8 2-parters, since they generally do a great job of telling the story in about 32 to 34 minutes. THE STING is one of the best, and it barely feels like anything is missing unless you have seen the whole film. The 400’ THE GODFATHER is one of the worst.

If you want to make a good impression on your audience, avoid badly faded color films. Find those on LPP stock, or decent Agfa or Fuji. You gotta be really lucky to find a decent Eastman with good color left.

[Joachim Schmidt]

If you are looking for information about the culture of Super 8 home cinema copies, you may find useful information at off2.de - it is more focused on the German Super 8 market, which was, results from my researches, the biggest market worldwide in the 1970th. I know that it is difficult to find anything about this period of home cinema anywhere at „official“ archives. I work together with the University of Mainz on this topic, and everything is oral history only and to be found in private archives of collectors.

[Brian Harrington]

That's a nice website, Joachim. I had to use the translate feature on Firefox. I hope other than the Ged Jones video that some more are in English.

Dan,

I hope it is pointed out to the audience at that film series in NYC that there was a lot more to Super 8 than just digests. Many, many features were available as well. I'm afraid people will just toss it off as "quaint," especially if beet red prints are shown.

Also, I hope they are told that the hobby is alive and well despite public perception, and that new digests are still being produced! We Super 8 people will not go away that easy!

I'm curious what projector you will use at the show, and how big a screen you will use.

I'm also a little confused by what "no genre" and "narratives" mean in this context. All films fit into at least one genre, and I would hope they all have a narrative. Some on the list are gangster films which is a genre in and of itself. I see Westerns on there, and Horror, both specific genres.

And regarding the terminology, sometimes they were advertised as "selected scenes" as well. And it should be noted that Castle Films' "complete" editions were nowhere near complete!

[Joachim Schmidt]

That's a nice website, Joachim. I had to use the translate feature on Firefox. I hope other than the Ged Jones video that some more are in English.

Thank you Brian. A few weeks ago I added a translation function to the website (to be found on the bottom left - maybe I should change that). It is a machine translation, but they are nowadays not too bad. Since April 2022 all my German videos do have English subtitles, not automatically translated by YouTube, but with an external tool and checked by me (not always perfect, it's a massive workload to do this). All the older ones should be accessible using the Youtube translation subtitles, they do improve. And in addition there are some videos that are indeed in spoken English.