Prof. Gerda Cammaer shows off her collection of DVDs and film canisters.

Otiena Ellwand

Gerda Cammaer doesn’t look like a dumpster diver, but she’ll make an exception for old film reels. Her office is stacked with 16mm, 8mm and Super 8 film canisters, many of which she salvaged from North York Central Library’s garbage.

On the shelf, she has a copy of French-Polish director Roman Polanski’s first short film, Two Men and a Wardrobe, and the first commercially successful documentary film,Nanook of the North, made by the American filmmaker Robert J. Flaherty in 1922.

Cammaer is a film professor at Ryerson’s school of image arts and her office is a museum dedicated to the art of analog.

“I’m interested in the history of the medium and I’m trying to keep it alive,” she said. Her PhD explored the effect that the transition from analog film to the digital format is having on the art form.

She said the changes in film have less to do with the switch to digital and more to do with market forces that demand production companies to release the least challenging content possible in order to appeal to a wide audience.

Instead of defying the industry’s evolution, she’s gone with the flow by uploading all of her own films to Vimeo. 

“Who wants to buy experimental films? I was never making any money on my films anyway,” she said. “I don’t want to make money off of my films, that’s not the point. I want people to experience them.”

Cammaer isn’t giving up on small film formats. In her office there are two different projectors, a 16mm and a Super 8 projector. She also has a 16mm and a 35mm splicer for cutting negatives. “The texture of film grain, the colour and light you can get on film stock gives it a much more dream-like quality. . . They’re working to get digital to that level, who knows, maybe in five years from now it might look the exact same.”

Her favourite film, Man with a Movie Cameraby Russian director Dziga Vertov, bridges the divide between digital and analog. The silent, experimental documentary from 1929 was originally printed on 35mm film, but is now a DVD sitting in her office. That, along with all the other room's contents, represent her passion for small film formats, forgotten film genres and ephemeral cinema.