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This chapter written by a new friend from Germany, who I had the pleasure of meeting at the 2023 Blackpool convention.
Joachim Schmidt
Ged asked me to write here about my experience with Derann Film Services. To be honest: I don’t have any. At least none directly. Which, admittedly, I regret.
However, this is not unusual for a (West) German born in the late 1960s. When I started saving up my first Super 8 titles at the age of 12, the market for Super 8 prints was already in decline in West Germany in the early 1980s. It was only possible for someone like me to buy 400ft color sound films at all, which were offered at a fraction of their original price. Far and wide I seemed to be the only one interested. I bought locally from photo shops, even ordering a few directly from Piccolo Film. In the end, I didn’t end up with more than two dozen reels. The selection became smaller and smaller, but the price was still too high for a student. And then I also found… the video tape. The end justifies the means: to be able to see as many films as possible for little money.
It wasn’t until the 1990s that the medium revived for me. By a stroke of luck, my student digs offered me the space to initiate large-format open-air projections. In a large circle, with fellow students, friends and even professors.
Beamers were still unaffordable, but the Super 8 equipment was still available. I subscribed to the magazine “Der Film-Sammler” (The Film Collector) to drastically expand my archive (which was possible only because the prices for Super 8 copies on the second-hand market were really low at the time). This magazine was simply ingenious: it consisted entirely of sales lists from collectors, who all sent their lists to the editors, who then sent them as a bundled issue to all subscribers. A fantastic pre-eBay solution!
My archive grew, new projectors were bought until… I moved and became a family man. Then Super 8 disappeared again for me. Other things became more important, so much so that at some point I even asked myself what I should do with the old stuff in the cellar? The reference was gone. Totally. Let it lie for the time being… Exactly at that time we lived for a few years in Reading, England. Derann was still around then… but I didn’t know it, and probably wouldn’t have cared. What a shame!
It was only 8 years ago that Super 8 made a comeback for me. I think it’s a mid-life thing. No affairs, no motorbike, no, the Super 8 projector is now the object of desire again. It took quite a while until I found access to the active Super 8 community – but maybe I was just a bit stupid 🙂 In the meantime my
film archive has grown considerably. Film prints come to me to stay. I’ve only sold a film once in my entire life (damn, now I don’t have it!). I now rarely buy via eBay, mostly directly from other collectors (you’re networked now, you know 🙂 or in specialist shops like bd-cine.com in France, super8warehouse.com in the Netherlands or Classic Home Cinema in the UK (Brexit did a bad job here: buying in the UK became tremendously expensive for Europeans). I would be interested in titles Steve Osborn may have, but it takes weeks for a list on paper to arrive here, so the shit hot is already gone…
But maybe a small selection is also better. For the wallet anyway (you know what I mean, don’t you).
With a resurrected love of the format, I realized that everything to do with it is gradually disappearing, at an increasing rate. And that the film print on Super 8 seems to have disappeared completely from society’s memory. Everyone only talks about VHS as the beginning of home cinema (except those who know better, i.e. those like us). Incidentally, in West Germany Super 8 was actually the first medium to bring film prints into private living rooms as a mass medium. Unlike in Great Britain or the USA. German society, which was still being built up standard of living, apparently had neither money nor interest in the luxury of private film prints on Regular 8, and also private filming on Regular 8. In East Germany, things were actually somewhat different.
This general forgetting that film prints on real film were once available everywhere, in photo shops, department stores and mail order, before the VHS, that was the trigger for me to develop the project off2. Not primarily for the Super 8 community, but to explain the medium and its characteristics to an audience that doesn’t yet know about it. And to preserve as much as possible in an openly accessible archive on the WWW. Since April 2022, I have invested additional time in adding English subtitles to every new video on my YouTube channel. In the course of the associated research, I came across Derann again and again. A bulwark of the Super 8 community until its late demise. In the meantime I also have a few copies of Derann on my shelf (by far too few), and I am always surprised at the quality of that late releases.
After meanwhile three years off2.de has published over 100 elaborately produced videos on Super 8, dozens of interviews, a large number of PDFs of various old Super 8 magazines (all in German, pardon) and quite a few articles on the subject. Post Corona, I was also able to slowly bring Super 8 out of the digital world and into the real world: a university lecture in Mainz, several appearances at film festivals… and a lot is in the pipeline. But one of the best things is the many great contacts to friendly people and their exciting experiences with Super 8 that have developed since then.
So: the Super 8 train is rolling, and it keeps rolling. Let’s see where it goes before it reaches its final destination.
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