kodachrome

The print was an old one made from a negative taken in the 1960__ of her parents in Sydney Mines, dancing with thrilled, excited expressions on their faces, in front of a classic car that had been a wedding gift at the time. Her mother__ hair, red back then, was held back by a blue handkerchief, and she was dressed in a billowing skirt and white blouse. Her father__ denim jeans and faded t-shirt were streaked with coal dust as he held her hands and spun her around in the front yard of their old clapboard house, yellow grass under their feet and a cobalt-blue sky with white clouds drifting above. Mandy could almost feel the late summer breeze as she gazed deeply into the print, watching the flamboyant colors come to life. She hung it up to dry on two wooden clothespins hanging from a string above her.

Alecto Sydney Steele, an entity of few words whom society managed to overlook as it rapidly dove into the 21st century. Everything about him, his interests, his friends, his own life, was constantly in danger of becoming an anachronism. And caught up in that mess was Mearth, not exactly evil in nature but just misunderstood. A very long time ago Alecto__ life had been all incandescent sparkles and Kodachrome, but that was before the environmental movement changed Mearth from a perfectly nice and kind guardian, to a deranged and malevolent monster.

There was a super-8 steel town somewhere, where all the forgotten things in the cruel world ended up eventually, Mandy was sure of it_ this place, she decided, was called Smog City.

Alford, Massachusetts: Mandy stood there with her old Nikon film camera, snapping photo after photo of the rural landscape. It was difficult to describe the wonderful feeling of there not being a single cell phone in sight; the only modern technology around was the faint blue glow of a cathode ray tube television in the window of a nearby house, and a few cars and trucks parked in crumbling gravel driveways. She was allowed to see this place, one that would likely be ruined by the 21st century as time went on_ places like these were extremely hard to find these days. A world of wood-burning cookstoves and the waxy smell of Paraffin, laundry hung out to dry, rusty steel bridges over streams that reflected the bright blue skies, apple pies left out on windowsills_ a world of hard work with very little to show for it aside from the sunlight beaming down on a proud community. And Mandy wanted to trap it all in her Kodak film rolls and rescue it from the future.

To be honest, I__e always made films and I never really stopped, starting with little stop-motion experiments using my dad__ Super 8 camera. In my mind, it__ all one big continuum of filmmaking and I__e never changed.

Kodachrome... it gives us those nice, bright colors,gives us the greens of summers,makes ya think all the world's a sunny day,Oh yeah!I've got a Nikon camera, I'd love to take a photograph,so mama don't take...my Kodachrome away...

photographs are very interesting, and you can look into them a million times and still find a new meaning in them, something in the past that was caught in the film itself_

_Maybe I__l be watching super-8 home videos,_ Alecto told her, smiling bleakly. __ love my super-8 camera, it__ an Eastman Kodak one_ Kodak stopped manufacturing them, the world went digital and now Kodak has stopped making Kodachrome film and all kinds of traditional film products_ it__ sad._ __ell, uh_ well, have fun watching your home movies then,_ Mandy finished, but she didn__ have the slightest idea what he was talking about.

How promising today's generation is. They can whip out their cellular phones like sheep, instantly take a million digital photos of their cat and then just delete them. But I'd like to see these kids try to artfully use a traditional film camera or make a super 8 home movie. Traditional film takes integrity, nostalgia, effort, patience and imagination - things that the 21st century has very little of. Everything these days, even a superior medium like film photography with an extensively vivid history and an iconic meaning, is becoming disposable in this age.

People say that a time machine can__ be invented, but they__e already invented a device that can stop time, cameras are the world__ first time machines.

Nobody has ever taken a photograph of something they want to forget. We can build a wall of happy Kodak moments around ourselves, a wall of our Christmases, birthdays, baby showers and weddings, but we can never forget that celluloid film is see-through, that behind it, all the misery of real life waits for our wall to collapse someday.

Yeah, you__e right about having entire rooms full of film and photos_ in that Sydney Mines house I have a darkroom, I have boxes of film and home movie footage_ I have a few projectors, I have piles of Kodachrome slides_ I like photographs. The world is always running away from society and the only way to keep the stuff that__ happened in the past is by taking photographs, I can keep memories of things alive with photographs,_ Alecto responded. __eople say that a time machine can__ be invented, but they__e already invented a device that can stop time, cameras are the world__ first time machines_ The steel mill, the coal mines, the train tracks, the smog in the sky, I__e been able to rescue it on super-8 and Kodachrome, and no one can remediate those photographs, I can keep them as long as I want to.