cinemas

[Pj]

Personally I have enjoyed watching films shown digitally in the cinemas recently. However for me a great part of the cinema experience has always been watching the adverts and trailers that were heavily scratched and often badly spliced, once I was watching a film and the reels were spliced in the wrong order. It seems as if everything is way too clean and sanitized these days. In England it looks like all the Odeon cinemas are now projecting films digitally as are Vue Cinemas and Cineworld. When these cinemas went digital I wonder what they did with their 35mm projectors. I am trying to find out which cinemas can still show 35mm prints.

Pav

[john59]

I agree pav....................I think that the way they used to do things gave us a bit of a laugh...............

[doug]

The smaller cinemas were fun, especially in later years when ticket sales were down. I remember at my local once the curtains failed to open and cheering the manager as he creakily wound them back by hand. (He ran the cinema practically single handed) And another time watching some desert adventure in the depths of winter with no heating.

[Will2]

I went to see Moonrise Kingdom at a local "art" theatre. I was excited since it was shot in Super 16 and printed on 35mm. I went later in the run and the print was just tore up. I mean nasty. Looked like the educational 16mm films I used to watch in elementary school. My wife asked if all the lines and marks were because it was 16mm; I said no, it's just a really crappy print.

I've seen some of the big digital productions towards the end of their run and it looked as good as the first projection. Not that a good 70mm print wouldn't look better, but we rarely see films as they were meant to be shown. Mass produced 35mm prints were usually several generations away from being as good as they could be.

[woods01]

The damage to a film print is both the beauty and the bane of film distribution. If it was an old movie it was somehow more tolerable but when it was new film a long vertical scratch was such a distraction. And for anyone who ever had a film print struck of their own work there was always that moment of disappointment when the inevitable damage first appeared. For commercial distribution its film's weak point.

[doug]

Despite my earlier thoughts about our local 'Palace', I don't recall seeing actual bad projection in 35mm in those days. I think the projectionists had to be quite skilled, and they made sure the picture looked right. Unlike today when you may have nice comfortable seats and so on, but any film screenings can look terrible. Some time ago at Cineworld Weymouth they showed Warhorse out of focus. It looked like the anamorphic needed adjusting but when I complained they seemed to think it was nothing to do with them, and did nothing. I haven't been back since. Probably all digital now.
Coming back to Pav's search for 35mm cinemas, I wonder if there's a list ?

[carllooper]

All mainstream cinemas in Australia went digital a while back, under some deal with the large film companies. It was cheaper and/or easier for the film companies to distribute films digitally than it was to move cans of film around the universe. The film companies paid for the projectors. For the consumer there are obvious benefits - a digital film doesn't accumulate wear and tear. It's no longer necessary to make opening night in order to see a work with the least amount of scratches etc.

For an older generation it can be quite disconcerting to see a work so clean, rock steady, noiseless, etc. One can think one is watching video - because one is. But the problem with video was never it's cleaness, rock steadiness, etc. It was only ever it's definition. Film was always preferable, despite it's scratches and jitter, only because it otherwise looked a thousand times better than video in the definition department. Or at least that's always been my beef with video. Today that's no longer the case. Video (or digital) brings with it, the original advantages it always had, and adds to that what it previously lacked: much better definition.

So the brain signal which provokes the "video" alarm no longer requires the auto-conclusion: "low definition". One can relax into the cinema seat. Well, most of the time. Not all digital projectors are the same and some cinemas, if they think they are getting away with it, will be putting their crappier digital projectors to work.

That all said, it's a completely different frame of mind one brings to alternative cinemas: those set up in a bar, an art gallery, on the street, a theatre, the loungeroom. Here it is a live experience rather than escape-from-reality time. A film's "faults" can become it's vivid and compelling features. There is a sense of connection with, not only the film in terms of it's content, but all of the mechanisms in play that have brought this work into being. The filmmakers themselves may not be far away, either literally behind the projector, or a simple enquiry away. The mechanical effects become extremely surreal. The splices passing through the gate produce a physical sound. The grain swarms in a frenzy. Materialism and spiritualism conspire with each other. Dream and reality play off each other. A thousand philosophical questions fire.

C

[Nicholas Kovats]

Beautifully written and evocative of a live tactile physical film screening, Carl. Swirling grains of an analog trip. I saw an incredible live band the other day playing under a huge live liquid projection. It was awesome and very real and imperfect.

[carllooper]

Beautifully written and evocative of a live tactile physical film screening, Carl. Swirling grains of an analog trip. I saw an incredible live band the other day playing under a huge live liquid projection. It was awesome and very real and imperfect.

Thanks Nicholas. I'm an addict for live performance work involving the projection of film, even more so now than ever before. I worked for a number of years, in the early days of digital (late 90s), with a theatre group (called Splinters), doing all sorts of live digital projection work. It was a real buzz. I became a professional computer programmer out of that experience - a job I maintain to this day. But these days, purely for the fun of it, and sheer enjoyment of it, it's film projection that provokes in me the deepest responses.

Now that I've recently bit the bullet and started shooting film again (and hand processing it which I'd never done before) I'm in heaven. I want to try and set up a live sync sound work, ie. projecting film (16mm) but with the soundtrack coming from a computer - in sync with the film.

The idea I have in mind is a little photo-sensor on the projector lens, perhaps via a two way mirror which diverts just a small percentage of the projector output, to the sensor. This sensor would provide the computer with a sync signal. I figure the density of the film, no matter how opaque won't be as opaque as the shutter blades, ie. that there should always be a threshold, in the light levels, where one can distinguish between shutter blade cutoff and the darkest of films. The resulting signal is just counted by the computer and the sound track is adjusted, in real time, to the film in the projector.

The only remaining problem is the start signal. The simplest solution here would be to ensure a particular start frame is sitting in the projector gate, prior to projection startup. The sound is likewise cued to it's start position. As soon as the projector is started up, the sync signal starts up and the computer starts up (counting from zero).

By using an external sensor on the projector lens it means it can be used on any projector, rather than requiring a custom mod on a particular projector. The slight downside is robbing the projection of some of it's photons. Will require some experimentation/research to work out the minimum diversion required for the photon sensor.

Anyway the result would be a live 16mm film, but with really high quality sound (to big speakers), ie. much better (and cheaper!) than an optical soundtrack solution.

I reckon that would be a really cool experience.


An additional point I'd like to make is in relation to the ongoing concept of "film is dead" or almost dead (how long has this concept been thriving now?) which has only ever been around the mainstream use of film. It completely ignores those who use or make films regardless of whether it is dead. Lets just say film is dead, because well, in relation to what that proposition means (it's mainstream usage), it is all but dead. But in relation to those who still very much enjoy working with film, it doesn't matter whether it's dead or not.

By way of analogy, for those who enjoy restoring old cars, and driving them around, or restoring old houses and living in them, it doesn't matter whether the technology they are working with has been dead for fifty or five hundred years.

In relation to film, the same thing will emerge. It will become, in due course, a non-issue. It should be a non-issue right now. It should have already been a non-issue for a while now. For me, film died about thirty years ago, so suggestions of it's death being due next week strike me as completely behind the eight ball. I myself recovered an interest in film about twenty years ago, for a short period - not because I had some misconception it wasn't dead, but precisely because I understood it as if it were already dead. It was the joy of working with something I already understood as dead. And in recent years this has resurfaced with even more power than it did before, precisely because it has been dead (if only for me) for that much longer.

So to those who keep predicting the death of film I say - wake up - film has already been dead for a very long time now. Or to put it another way - it has already been reborn for a very long time now.

What I hope should emerge from this discussion is the realisation that it doesn't actually matter that film is dead, (or alive for that matter) because for those who continue to work in film, it means it never really did matter. Like restoring old cars, or old houses, one can do it just for the sheer fun of it - indeed one can be attracted to doing it, precisely because it is dead. And the longer it has been dead, the more enjoyable and rewarding it can become for that reason.

C

[Pj]

For me the experience of watching a film in the cinema has changed with digital projection in cinemas, it feels like I am just watching a large television screen. The magical quality of a flickering screen with images embellished with random grain and blemishes has gone. However, like I said before watching a film in a digital cinema [for me] has been good so far, it’s a different feeling now. I suppose if you’re running a cinema that has a digital projection system it would be easier to run, but maybe a bit boring, you wouldn’t need skilled labour to splice up prints and thread prints, but a bit more fun as you’re physically connecting with the film. It would be good to see which cinemas here in England project films traditionally.

As far as the notion that ‘Film is dead’ is concerned, it’s one of those topics that comes up regularly on forums and often brings in heated debates, I feel it’s not worth to get drawn into this subject as I think individuals, hobbyists and artists will continue to use film for many years to come, thus the notion is really irrelevant. Many feel that the future of film lies with Kodak and I would say their film stocks are definitely better than others, but I don’t think the future of film is inextricably tied to the future of Kodak, we’ve already heard that the Italian company Ferrania will start to manufacture film. I use film for all sorts of reasons, like to capture the family and professionally, these days I am beginning to believe that I don’t need to rationalise my reasons for using film.

Pav

[carllooper]

these days I am beginning to believe that I don’t need to rationalise my reasons for using film. Pav

Yes, the film scene is starting to change for the better I think. For that reason. I think it's just been this strange time. The rise of digital and the way it can seem to undercut all one's arguments about why one might shoot film. And then the growing realisation that it doesn't actually matter. That it probably never did matter. That one always enjoyed it anyway. Or if not then one didn't do it. I think it's quite a liberating time at the moment. A renaissance for film makers perhaps.

It's quite possible we're living through a time not unlike that which faced painters when photography arrived on the scene. There were exclamations that "painting is dead". And by painters themselves! But it was only ever a particular kind of painting that died. What followed was Impressionism, Post-Impression, Surrealism, to name but a few movements in painting. Alongside photography. It seems ludicrous today to understand how anyone could have thought painting was dead. There is something about the nature of the universe that rearranges the chairs every now and then, to wake us up. To see the world in a new way. But the materials available don't change. Or don't need to change. What changes is what we find we can do with them.

Carl