ABSTRACT
As a general term untied to any specific country or period, “underground cinema” has connotations of secrecy and subversion. Underground film-making implies minority activity that is anti-establishment or runs counter to the mainstream. Coming at the end of a whole evolutionary chain of home movie apparatus which stretches back beyond the turn of the twentieth century, almost to the invention of cinema itself, the Super 8 format was designed specifically for the home movie mass market. This chapter looks at a brief period in the mid-1980s (more or less from 1979 to 1986), barely half a decade in British cinema history, during which the availability of a particular medium gave rise to a version of underground film-making with its own subject-matter and distinctive visual style. It examines the origins of and both positive and negative influences on 1980s British Super 8 and takes the work of one proponent, the artist and film director John Maybury, as a case-study. A feature of this work is that very little has been written about it, both at the time and subsequently, and much of the information here has been gleaned from primary research undertaken for a documentary, Super Eight, commissioned by Channel 4 television and transmitted in May 1986, and from an interview with John Maybury conducted in November 2014.
