J.J. Abrams’ science-fiction movie “Super 8” is a big, boisterous homage to the now somewhat distant technological and cultural phenomenon of 8mm film. Before there was cellphone video, there were camcorders, and before camcorders there were readily affordable 8mm cameras that exposed 8mm and Super 8 film stock.

The 8mm gauge—”regular 8″—went on the market in 1932 and was one of Eastman Kodak’s most ingenious inventions. During the Depression, when the country’s citizens were patronizing movie houses as never before, the inexpensive 8mm system arrived to give amateurs their own film-making tool. The 8mm system was cheap and easy to use thanks to a clever innovation. An 8mm film spool actually held a 25-foot length of 16mm film (at first only black-and-white, but later you could obtain color film). When the spool was inserted in the camera, one half of the 16mm film was exposed during shooting, after which the spool would be flipped for exposing the other side. Developing processors would split the film down the middle, making a 50-foot, 8mm creation with a 3-minute 20-second running time. 8mm films created memorable companions to the family photo album. From weddings to backyard barbecues to children learning to ride bicycles, 8mm quickly became a trove of personal history.

Although the small size gave the imagery a grainier resolution than larger gauges, the medium had its undeniable appeals. First was the verité spontaneity in the filming, most often handheld recordings of unrehearsed, happy subject matter. Even the lack of sound, in my estimation, imbued the moving pictures with a kind of quiet reverence—a reverence that would grow with the passage of time. Few experiences are as immediately engaging as screening one’s old silent 8mm films from another time, allowing one to catch, as Proust might put it, flickering “remembrance of things past.”

8mm films—silent, fragmentary, imperfectly lit—are like memories themselves. In 1965 Kodak introduced Super 8mm stock. It came in a cartridge that, unlike regular 8, did not require flipping halfway through filming. Super 8 was manufactured with fewer sprocket holes, which allowed a larger frame size and, hence, sharper picture resolution. Super 8 cartridges could also be bought with a very narrow and thin oxide stripe on one side for sound recording.

This is the film used by the teenage protagonists in Abrams’ “Super 8.” The movie recalls an even deeper cultural significance of 8mm: it was like a gateway drug for youngsters interested in filmmaking. Steven Spielberg led the movement, making a number of “regular” 8mm “adventure” films as a teenager, including one, “The Last Gunfight,” which earned him his Boy Scout photography merit badge. Royal Oak, Mich., native Sam Raimi (director of “The Evil Dead” and the Spiderman films) made Super 8 films in the 1970s that he entered in the Ann Arbor 8mm Film Festival held annually at U-M from 1970 to the early ’90s. Abrams, who also wrote “Super 8,” sets the film in 1979—the year he was given a Super 8 camera by his grandfather. Thirteen at the time, Abrams took to making horror movies with lots of blood and gore .Not surprisingly, “Super 8″‘s plot involves five teenage boys and a girl who are making a zombie movie.

The kids’ Super 8 is oxide-striped, so the film includes dialogue and sound recording. A chubby Charles Kaznyk (Riley Griffiths) is directing the project, assisted by good friend Joey Lamb (Joel Courtney) who is coping with the accidental death of his mother. Charles plans to use Joey’s Lionel train set for a special effects scene in the film. The source of this plotting detail derives from Spielberg who in one of his 8mm adventure films created a train wreck with his Lionel set. (Spielberg was “Super 8″‘s Executive Producer.)

Abrams’ script draws on elements from Hollywood genre movies that inspired amateur 8 and Super 8 filmmakers: science run amok, surreal happenings, mysterious disappearances, and a terrifying extraterrestrial creature. The mayhem begins when the young film crew witness the derailment of an actual train as it speeds into Lillian, Ohio. Their Super 8 movie disrupted, the youngsters set about trying to discover why their biology teacher, Dr. Woodward (Glynn Turman), drove his truck onto the train tracks to cause the wreck.

While the movie is stuffed with action, its strongest moments grow from the poignancy of close relationships. Joey and the young Alice (Ellie Fanning), the “love interest” in the kids’ movie, are brought closer by unhappy home lives. A lovely moment occurs when Joey watches a silent 8mm movie of his now-deceased mother holding him as a baby on her lap. And though Charles’ zombie film production gets pushed aside by other more dramatic events in Lillian, the project is eventually completed and we get to see “The Case” when it appears on the left side of the screen during closing credits. Everything about it, from imagery to content, is pure Super 8.

Dr. Michael Frierson, now a professor of film at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, made films and taught film using the Super 8 format while a graduate student at U-M in the late 70s and early 80s. He was also a central figure in the running of the university’s 8mm Film Festival. His memories of the Festival include the screening of a Super 8 feature starring a very young Madonna, and short claymation films by Tim Hittle, now a top Hollywood animator.

Recalling his time with the Festival, and of making 8mm films himself, Frierson says, “The thing I really loved most about Super 8 was the tactile feeling of the image—the tape splices with dust and fingerprints, the scenes that flare out at the end of a reel, the film weaving in the gate. All that makes the image feel raw and fragile and ephemeral, like it’s going to disintegrate as you’re watching it. The colors were always lurid from the reversal stock; gorgeous, saturated Kodachrome in full sun, the sickly underexposed cast of Kodak Type G. And narratively, many of the films in the 8 Fest were clearly ‘first films.’ You could almost see the directors’ thought process unfolding in front of you as they were grinding out each set up, and watching how beginners intuitively construct or destroy their stories was always jaw dropping. It really was a great part of my education at Michigan.”

Kodak ceased marketing regular 8 in the early 1990s, but Super 8 is still widely used in film classes and as an inexpensive means of creating film images for transfers to video for post-production editing. And there are still 8 Fests across the globe. As Abrams and Frierson attest, 8mm films should be thought of as a significant part of motion picture history.

What’s your experience with 8mm? Did you make films when you were a kid? Do you have a drawerful of old super 8s? Share your thoughts in the comments section.