David Fewster

SUPER 8

Like Boris Karloff in "The Mummy"

waving his hand over

the Pool of Remembrance,

I touch the digital screen and conjure

grainy, washed-out images a half-century old.

Our youthful selves cavort in

long-lost landscapes.

By the Great God Thoth!--

How can such wonders be?

Spring of '78,

I had been in LA for about 6 months

when I went to a screening of

"Breathless" at the Nuart.

I immediately wrote my parents

back in Rochester NY,

requesting they ship out

my Super-8 camera pronto.

This was the cheapest, lowest-end model

that Kodak made--

it was basically a Crackerjack box

with a motor and round piece

of glass stuck on one end.

Armed with this toy, I was

the Lumiere Bros. &

D.W. Griffith

Keaton & Chaplin

Luis Bunuel & Jacques Tati

My only dream was

to one day shoot

a film as good as

"Fish Heads"

Godard had Paris, but I was without envy,

for I had all of

Los Angeles for a backdrop--

Venice Boardwalk

Santa Monica Pier

Grauman's Chinese Theater

The slums of Mar Vista

77 Sunset Strip!

Sometimes we would stand

on the blank stars,

not yet filled in,

on Hollywood Blvd.

and pretend

our own names were

written under our feet.

Miles of celluloid flowed

as we cranked out our epics:

Disco Roller Granny

Dueling Urban Cowboys

Bob Dylan Sucks Eggs

Sea Monsters Under the Pier

No one can call themselves

a filmmaker until

they've tried to

align splicing tape

along microscopic 

8-mill. sprocket holes

Then came the fateful day

when Fotomat destroyed

the orgy scene from

"Make Me a Star, You Bastard"

giving me a blank reel instead

(was it censored

or taken home for private use

by some lucky employee?--

I'll never know)

and, without funds for reshoots,

I fell into a depression

(not unlike Orson Welles with

"The Other Side of the Wind" debacle)

from which my career

as a cineaste never

truly recovered.

Decades later, I gather

the tiny cannisters of mouldering plastic,

take it to a specialty outfit,

and several hundreds of dollars later

they all fit in

a slim compact-disc sleeve.

Somewhat similar, I reflect

to the pioneering work in

film preservation done at

the George Eastman Museum

(based in the town I was born--

see stanza 2.)

Now all this stuff is on

"The Cloud"

or whatever the hell the kids call it.

Looking at out flickering ghosts,

I wonder if this is how Louise Brooks

felt as she sat in the audience

and saw "Diary of a Country Girl"

for the first time in fifty years--

that the stupid reflection

in the mirror

was a lie

and the images on the screen

are how we

perpetually envision

the face behind our eyes.