All power to the super-8
French fries in flickering light. Grey roofs and walls of Berlin city architecture. Feet scrape past the camera. A view onto a street. Rubbish collectors load their bins. A car drives past construction sites. Two naked men splash in a public fountain. A woman runs through the streets of Berlin.
The Super 8 experimental film POMMES FRITES STATT KÖRNER (French fries are better than health food, Yana Yo 1981) resists the "back-to-nature" gesture of the hippies, using the attitude of punk to set urbanity as an aesthetic of ugliness and dilettantism. Nudity is celebrated here, with relish and humour, in a concrete, public space and not in the green countryside. Movement, in front of the camera as well as in the shaking of the hand-held camera, induces a dynamic component to the point of unbearability. And the colours of the films build up to a dramaturgy build on contrast that is far removed from the green and brown tones of the ecology movement: Individual objects, kept in the strong, cold colours of the early 1980s, and changing colour filters resist the flat colour aesthetic of the amateur medium Super-8 as well as the grey of urban concrete.
POMMES FRITES STATT KÖRNER is just one of many Super-8 films made in West Berlin in the early 1980s. Independent from established experimental filmmakers who used 16mm or 35mm film, independent also of the medium of video, which was in the process of developing its own media aesthetic, a movement of Super 8 filmmakers established itself around 1980 and found one of its focal points in Berlin. The movement took up influences from experimental film, political film, home movies and amateur feature films and combined them with ideas from the visual arts and the pop culture of the post-punk era.
In West Berlin, the political climate and geographical isolation led to a cultural momentum that created a special subcultural microclimate: West Berlin, that was the city of Tabea Blumenschein and Wieland Speck, of Rosa von Praunheim and Ulrike Ottinger, the city of Einstürzende Neubauten, Tödliche Doris and Notorische Reflexe, the city of Tempo, PVC and Ätztussis, the city of squatters and street fights. Much like in West Germany, however, Berlin was also the venue for conflicts between different currents of popular culture, between the avant-garde and the anarchist heirs of the punk revolution.
The close ties between avant-garde punk currents and art also had an impact on the Super 8 film movement. Super-8 filmmakers adopted punk motifs, modes of staging and intermediality strategies, thus illustrating the far-reaching legacy of the pop-cultural revolution of 1976. Super-8 can even be considered a punk medium par excellence, since it fulfils the punk demand for dilettantism, anti-professionalism and do-it-yourself on a media level.