The Memory of Our Trip to Europe, 2005, super-8 film

Filling our backpacks in New York, we headed for London, then Genoa, Sardinia, Cinque Terra, and finally northern Spain where the days were 18 hours long in mid summer. Weeks of planes, trains, ferries and feet. I brought my super 8 camera and one 50foot roll of film. Wanting to make the 50feet last as long as I could I quickly switched from 24 fps to single-frame shooting. Now I had thousands of individual exposures if I thought of the movie-film-cartridge as a giant roll of individual snapshots! Certain moments required a return to shooting live speed like a cat sipping rain water from a garden bucket and sweet Jenny taking a bite of delicious homemade pastry on the coast of the Mediterranean. I thought the condensed flashes of all the places we went mixed with the sensory experiences of sound and taste would approximate memory better. I was right. As a slide show it would take days, and who’s got time for that? Instead, you get to see it as I remember it, not as I experienced it. Enjoy.