Synopsis
“We might as well admit right away: the original material has been lost, even its authors have been lost, all that remains is the wave of a hand, the back of a head, a pair of sunglasses guarding eyes that will never stop closing. Somehow these private gestures caught on super-8 film, repeated again and again in different families in different continents, enacted so that they can stage the act of family itself, all this has slipped away. Has the need passed? Is this what is being presented in Pedro Maia’s dirt encrusted projections? Here are elusive shadows, the delicate materials turning and strobing and shaking as if to emphasize the fragility of the look, the fragility of these family compacts have come apart at last, and in their dissolution, in the dying moments of their foreclosure and abandonment, these pictures have been left behind. They are unmoored, as stranded as their viewers. Lost. And let us not forget the materials. If the family has disappeared, if Maia’s Super-8 Series marks the disappearance of a certain kind of family (could we name them the analog family? The ones who have not yet admitted the time bomb of the personal computer?) then its remains are equal parts family fragments and the messenger itself, the chemical base of the film, the scarred acetate no longer able to bear even a picture, only an impression of its passing. This too is a signifier of loss. Here is film at its own graveside, mourning itself. In this last moment for chemical cinema the work of Pedro Maia is equal parts celebration and eulogy.” Mike Hoolboom
