Director Jim Jarmusch (Mystery Train, Night Earth, Dead Man) had just finished shooting Super 8 footage for the Neil Young and Crazy Horse music video "Big Time" when the veteran Canadian rocker suggested that the indie auteur produce a feature documentary on his band in the very same format (see "Transforming Super 8," AC Nov. '96). Jarmusch had some initial reservations about the idea's merit, but Young quickly convinced him from both a fiscal and photographic standpoint.

Jarmusch recalls, "Neil liked the look of Super 8 and enjoyed seeing us scurrying around with these little cameras, pulling them out of bags and filming whenever we wanted to. He said, 'I'll pay for it; we'll just start shooting some stuff and if we don't like it we'll throw it away. It's not going to be that expensive; it's not like we'll be shooting 70mm. Just bring those little cameras you used for the video and see what you get.' I thought, 'What a great idea.'"

Using Super 8 format for theatrical film was not that much of an aesthetic stretch for Jarmusch, who offers, "I'm insistent that the visual quality of a film be suggested by the content and nature of the subject. Super 8 seems to go really well with the raw sound of Neil and Crazy Horse, the world's greatest garage band. The footage becomes almost abstract because of the graininess and rawness of the tiny image. The effect of light passing through film of any kind is something I find beautiful; there's something magical about it. Super 8 is such an extreme that, for me, the magic is often enhanced."

The film Jarmusch created, Year of the Horse, is a document of the 1996 world tour staged by Crazy Horse, the ragged hard rock band Young has worked with on and off for nearly 30 years. The film serves as a loose, grainy tribute to an act known for being loud, grungy and, according to their fans and most critics, utterly transcendent.

Ironically, while many of today's top filmmakers made their first images on a Super 8 or regular 8mm camera, Jarmusch did not receive a proper introduction to the format until late in his career. "Aside from shooting a little with my family's home movie camera, I'd never made any kind of a film in Super 8," admits the director. "Salvatore Totino, who was the first camera assistant on Night on Earth, gave me a beautiful old-school all-metal manual Canon Super 8 camera at the end of the shoot. I was excited about the gift, because two years earlier, a photographer shooting me for a magazine had used a Super 8 camera. He explained that he would print frames from the footage as stills; the results were incredibly beautiful."

Totino's gift was used to shoot portions of Year of the Horse. The film's producer and Young's longtime cinematic collaborator, Larry "L.A." Johnson, also filmed the tour in Super 8, but with a more sophisticated crystal-sync rig. (Young and Johnson have produced several films documenting the singer's career since the Seventies, including Journey Through the Past and the acclaimed Rust Never Sleeps.)

In addition to the Super 8 footage, Year of the Horse also features 16mm concert coverage, 16 mm scenes from the band's 1976 and 1986 tours, and Hi-8 video interview sequences. The theatrical prints were made by 4MC directly from a video master that combined all of the various formats.

Despite the emphasis on grain and grunge, Year of the Horse contains some beautiful, dreamlike images of the road, shot with the old Canon by Jarmusch while he traveled with the band. When cut into the concert footage, often in a combination of two or more of the low-resolution images, the sequences are unusual, effective and daringly artistic. "One of my main jobs on the film was to collect a lot of little images from extraneous moments," Jarmusch says of this striking imagery. "My longtime editor, Jay Rabinowitz, and I created little sequences on a Lightworks, doing a lot of adjustments, such as speed changes."

Making any kind of film intended for theatrical release in Super 8 would have been next to impossible until fairly recently when Super8 Sound (based in Burbank, California) began loading tiny Super 8 cartridges with Kodak's latest negative stocks. Previously, only a limited range of Kodak reversal films were available in Super 8. "Jim Jarmusch could have used any current Kodak film stock he wanted," explains Doug Thomas, manager of Super8 Sound. "We slit and perforate fresh Kodak 35mm stock and load it into Super8 cartridges. They used several different stocks for Year of the Horse, But mostly ended up using 500 ASA 5298. They found that the Vision 500T was a little too sharp for their purposes."

"The format has come a long way in the past few years. Super 8 negative, when done right, is now very close in look to 16mm documentary-style photography of a decade or so ago. When a good cinematographer uses our gear with the Vision 200T, the results are often phenomenal."

In fact, Jarmusch actually felt that the images he captured on 98 were a little too high-quality, since he was determined to lend the film a raw, grainy look. Thomas notes, "we were asked to push more light through it on the transfer to video, to un-crush the blacks and produce more grain."

Of course, the availability of the latest 35mm stocks is only part of the game in getting sync-sound Super 8 images up on the silver screen. While Jarmusch's Canon might be a nice old camera, it was not designed for sync-sound use, though many short concert shots made with the wild-running camera were synced to the soundtrack in post and appear in the film.

For sync-sound shooting, Super 8 Sound rents specially modified crystal-controlled Beaulieu 7008 Pro II cameras, which have interchangeable C-mount lens capability and are even available with video assists. According to Thomas, the company has further modified the French cameras by adding "a special microprocessor that self-calibrates the cameras each time they are started, so they run at perfectly precise Arriflex or Panavision speed-lock specs."

The 7008 Pro IIs are usually fitted with a Angenieux 6-80mm f1.2 zoom made especially for the camera. Assessing his experiences with this camera and lens throughout the Horse shoot, L.A. Johnson reports that the lens is, predictably, "superb." Other professional-quality lenses are also available.

Super8 Sound, however, does not promote the format for use in making ultra-low-budget features. "Super 8 is best used for music videos, commercials and special sequences of movies shot with normal film gauges," explains Thomas. Most recently, the small gauge was utilized for the feature (see AC May '97) directed by Gregory Nava and principally photographed by Ed Lachman, ASC. According to Barbara Martinez-Jitner, the second-unit director on the shot the aforementioned Super 8 sequences, Nava is planning to include even more Super 8 in his upcoming biopic on singer Frank Lymon. Super8 Sound is working to adapt anamorphic lenses for their 7008 Pro IIs to facilitate the transfer between film formats on the widescreen feature.

For now, Jim Jarmusch has no plans to make a narrative theatrical feature in Super 8, but he isn't ruling out the possibility. He remarks, "I want to keep working with Super 8 in some way, so that the great experiences I had, and the lessons I learned in making this film, will stay with me."