Hand Crafted Films

A forgotten Super-8 film – a partially-completed stop-motion re-creation of Rohmer’s 1969 masterpiece “Ma Nuit Chez Maud” – is the focus of this autobiographical essay about the temporal nature of memories, analog media, and digital video.

Shot in 1985, the Super-8 film cartridge sat deteriorating in an attic shoebox for over a decade. It was finally recovered and processed in the late-1990s – amidst the explosion of the World Wide Web and digital filmmaking technologies. The resulting reconstruction – “Éric Rohmer’s Star Wars” – was one of the foundational works of the nascent digital video medium.

This video essay traces the history of the film’s development – from initial genesis, filming, and current remastering – as it makes the argument that digital video works are decomposing faster than the analog celluloid films they were designed to replace.

2022
Short
U.S.A.
English
9 minutes
Evan Mather