Super 8 in the City: The Early Films of Sergio Garcia, 1970–73

When filmmaker Sergio García died in 2010, he was remembered as “the Superochero,” a master in the art of making what he called “uncompromised” experimental films without institutional support and with minimal resources. He was the most enduring of a movement of politically-minded super-8 filmmakers that emerged after 1968 as a democratizing alternative to a stale and prohibitive film industry and as a means of self-expression for disillusioned youth. In later years, the movement weakened due to ideological differences, generational shifts, and ultimately technological advances that made the cameras obsolete. García was one of the very few who continued to advocate for and make films in super-8. It was not until 1989, after completing his most successful feature-length film, that he held a “funeral” for the camera and began to make films in video.

In those nineteen years, his films shifted from countercultural, fictional shorts of hippies lacing the city’s water supply with LSD, to political documentaries that merge urban and rural, local and transnational concerns, to rockumentaries about grassroots urban rock and renegade youth in the 1980s. Present in most of these films was a concern with social justice, freedom, and rebellion and the preservation and cultivation of urban subcultures. Unlike many leftists in the 1970s who decried cultural imperialism, he advocated for the liberating possibilities of the counterculture and democratizing potential of super-8 cameras, particularly when focused on contemporary social “realities.” This presentation examines Mexican cultural history through a biographical and visual lens, focusing specifically on the films in which the city played a major role and how it changed over time. In doing so, it shows how Garcia made sense of his own life as an advocate of social change and of the rapid changes around him that seemed to consistently contradict that very endeavor.