The Wabi-Sabi in Super 8

There is wabi-sabi in your good-morning-coffee-pot that you use day after day, it is in your hiding place behind the twisted trees that only you know about, it is in this plastic toy here, in that fascinating irregular pattern on the ground, it is in that strangely formed cloud that pops through a row of trees for only ten seconds, it is in that thrown away cardboard box with the weird withered colors that you stumbled across this morning and it is of course in your cat.

You extend your antennas and begin to notice the subtle beauty that exists in so many banal, imperfect, impermanent and incomplete things and existences. You fill your camera with a super 8 cassette, hide behind the lens, play spy, step on your right track and find it.

Super 8 has the capability of teasing out and capturing the wabi-sabish soul of things and occurences. More than just displaying, picturing one-to-one-wise – it soaks up beauty molecules, cells, souls and spits out beauty grains – simply because Super 8 is magic.

And then: the things tell a story! You capture it. It works. It’s fun.
Because the Super 8 Wabi-Sabi transcends your way of looking and thinking about things. You give them importance.

Wabi-sabi is the quintessential Japanese aesthetic.
It is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. It is a beauty of things modest and humble.
It is a beauty of things unconventional …
It is also two separate words, with related but different meanings. “WABI“ is the kind of perfect beauty that is seemingly-paradoxically caused by just the right kind of imperfection, such as an asymmetry in a ceramic bowl which reflects the handmade craftsmanship, as opposed to another bowl which is perfect, but soul-less and machine-made. “SABI“ is the kind of beauty that can come only with age, such as the patina on a very old bronze statue.

[Wabi-Sabi: For Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers,
by Leonard Koren]

“Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There's a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.“

[Leonard Cohen, “Anthem“]