Echoes of the 63rd Ann Arbor Film Festival

September 30, 2025

Film still from Constellations Super 8 by Helga Fanderl

This new blog series revisits essays from the 63rd Ann Arbor Film Festival, opening with Scott Northrup’s in-depth look at Helga Fanderl’s special program Constellations Super 8 and its lasting impact.

Helga Fanderl: Constellations Super 8 

by Scott Northrup

Drinking glasses travel by boat, twinkling in fading light… A carousel whirls, rises, falls… School girls run to and from trees, then one is injured… Airplanes pass above, float away, dive to the ground… 

Hold your breath, anticipate, feel each moment witnessed by the fully engaged eye-heart-hand of Helga Fanderl, the German-born filmmaker whose Super 8 shorts and their subsequent programming are exciting, direct, thoughtful, and of the moment. The films are wholly present—never stuck in time. They are as much about the act and impulse to pick up a camera as they are about their individual subject matter.

Fanderl’s films radiate a sense of wonder and playfulness, though she is consciously aware of detail and form. Each press of the trigger results in a new exposure, a notation; each release, a cut — a form of punctuation. It is filmmaking as both process and practice. She intentionally leaves no room for postproduction, instead embracing spontaneity, chance, and her own decisiveness at the point of encounter. She says, “I lose my mind when I film, and I love this… unity with what I’m filming.” She is a born film-poet, which is evident in her visual phrasing and flow.

Initially a student, then a professor of language and literature, Fanderl took a filmmaking workshop in the mid-1980s, later studying under Austrian filmmaker Peter Kubelka. For Fanderl to become comfortable with the camera and understand the filmmaking experience, Kubelka suggested she carry and use a compact Super 8 camera without inserting a film cartridge. She began by using the camera as a tool for seeing, leading her to make films in her mind’s eye. 

Perhaps due to this experience, the films are reactive, impulsive, deeply felt. They draw our attention to the ephemeral. Fanderl’s innate sense of rhythm and perspective hold an undeniable poetry, confidently guiding us without commentary. 

A frenzied throng of museumgoers, with a variety of digital cameras, smartphones, and tablets raised above their heads, tap and pinch their screens, turn for selfies, take photos and videos, then disappear after a brief, mediated look at the Mona Lisa…

Once a common means of preserving memories, Super 8 film is no longer a vernacular visual language. It is now a specific, specialized way of seeing in an age populated by cheap, fast, digital moving images and thoughtless overconsumption. In many ways, the material qualities of Super 8 reversal film stocks make it the logical, perhaps best, medium for Fanderl’s film-poems. 

Programming and showing this work are as equally vital to Fanderl’s practice as making it. She personally prepares and presents each screening herself, selecting and grouping films from almost four decades of filmmaking into “multiple, potentially endless montages,” offering clarity, opposition, and new insight to the individual films. “It’s a dense and, at the same time, loose web of relationships, correspondences, and contrasts between motifs, colours, rhythms, and textures,” she says. The films—lyrical visual fragments, documents, mash notes, everyday poetry—expand and contract in relation to each other, both in time and meaning, resulting in an intimate conversation between the filmmaker and her audiences.

Children play in a public fountain… One waits for the water from an inactive jet, one is surprised by a blast to the chin… Two younger boys, probably brothers, walk along the lower edge of the frame holding hands…

Fanderl’s point of view shifts often placing us within the action, allowing moments to register without drawing attention by using cinematic tricks or fussiness. She shows us where to look but not what to think. The films are all silent. There are no added soundtracks, narration, effects, or melodrama—the thought of which calls to mind the notion that all films are a sort of fiction, though veracity is not in question here. Fanderl composes each event—a polar bear swimming in captivity, the act of ironing in the streets, fireworks—revealing details unseen or possibly missed, invoking subtle shifts in our emotions, inspiring our own curiosity and recollections, inviting us in as active participants rather than simple observers. Ultimately, we are encouraged and engaged in an act of seeing anew.

---

Scott Northrup is a filmmaker, artist, curator, and educator with an MA in Media Studies from the New School. His multidisciplinary body of work has been programmed, exhibited, and published internationally. He is currently chair of the Film, Photography, and Interdisciplinary Art + Design programs at College for Creative Studies in Detroit.