Technique
Why shoot the 1960s on 16mm and the 1990s on VHS
Centuries and Still does not tell you what year it is. It shows you, by changing the film stock. This is a common device in essay and archival documentaries, and it is easy to do badly.
The formats and what they signal
| Format | Introduced | What viewers read from it |
|---|---|---|
| Paper cut-out and illustration | – | The period before moving images; history as reconstruction rather than record |
| 16mm film | 1923 (Kodak) | News film, classroom and industrial film, mid-century documentary |
| Super 8 | 1965 (Kodak) | Home movies of the 1960s and 70s: private, warm, grainy |
| VHS | 1976 (JVC) | 1980s–90s television and camcorder footage, with tracking noise and soft colour |
| Digital | 2000s onward | The present: phone video and surveillance cameras |
The point is recognition. Viewers have seen enough archive footage to date an image by its grain, gate weave and colour before they read any caption. When a film shot in 2021 moves from Super 8 to VHS, the audience feels the decades pass without a title card. Here the effect also carries the argument: the same kind of violence appears in every format, so the history reads as continuous.
Doing it for real versus faking it
Filters can imitate all of these looks, but they tend to give themselves away. Real Super 8 has irregular exposure and frame-line jitter. Real VHS drops out on bright reds and smears motion in a specific way. The team behind Centuries and Still shot on the actual formats, and the credits list a dedicated cinematographer, Isabella Tan, for that work. The trade-off is cost and time: film stock and processing are expensive, and fresh Super 8 now costs more per minute than most digital shoots.
- Super 8: Kodak still makes Super 8 stock (colour negative and Tri-X black-and-white reversal), and several labs process and scan it.
- 16mm: it is still widely used for music videos and indie features, so cameras and labs are easy to find.
- VHS: consumer camcorders are cheap second-hand. The costly part is capturing the tape cleanly without losing the artefacts you wanted.
Mixing formats with paper
The paper cut-outs in Centuries and Still and 60 Years and Still do a second job. Much of the nineteenth-century history has no footage, so illustration fills the gap and marks the scene as reconstruction. A shift from paper to film grain tells the viewer the record is now photographic. That boundary falls in different decades for different communities, which is part of what the films are about.
- Film Shortage and Lester Banks (2021), on the film's use of 16mm, Super 8, VHS and digital. Links on the film page.
- Wikipedia, 16 mm film, Super 8 film, VHS