The Third Cambridge International Super8 Festival got off to a strong start on Wednesday evening with the first competition showing, introducing the jury to the audience before the 90+ films they have tosit in judgement on.
The second sitting offered a complete change of style, with local enthusiast and retired art teacher Ted Coney operating a genuine Victorian "Phantasmagoria" magic lantern show, using heavy
wood and glass slides from the 1880s with ingenious mechanisms and levers to create the first moving image effects, accompanied by a tape of period fairground organ music.
This device was the forerunner of projected cinema: the Lumiere brothers may have developed the principle of intermittent real motion, but the magic lantern aesthetic continued through George Melies and still influences film to this day: what else is Bladerunner or Tron?
