Film Projectors

Two years after Paul Thomas Anderson forced the issue by releasing The Master in a limited (very limited) number of theatres in 70mm, Christopher Nolan has pushed the envelope by gently demanding not only 55 70mm runs but another 190 35mm runs for Interstellar.

When Nolan talks, they listen. His films have made over $2 billion dollars worldwide and any scheme he has breathes golddust.

With delicious irony, the film is being released by Paramount who announced last year they would be the first major studio to stop distributing their films on 35mm - convert to digital or get out but if you ask nice we do still have 35mm stock (foreign markets are still mostly analog).

The apparent attraction to exhibitors was the film versions would open 2 days early (November 5th) and enjoy the high first-nighter grosses, be in Mr. Nolan's "preferred format," wouldn't be scratched yet and hey, you know, he shot it in film not that digital phone camera crap.

It's been a mere 2 years since all the 35mm projectors were not only wheeled out of the way but ejected from the major chains' booths. Certainly we can move them back in?

But based on numerous reports from friends, professionals and various websites the sad truth is the skill to install, run and maintain 35mm has already gone the way of hot-type. Sound mixes way off, audio tracks going silent, dirt and scratches running through the middle of Kansas and the void of space, etc. 70mm is a more rarified format with its own challenges you'd assign only to a journeyman projectionist.

Anderson, more an instinctual businessman than filmmaker, ended up with ten 70mm installations (most re-installations) for The Master in 2012, a manageable number and good enough for the publicity of the gesture. Nolan's (it's on him) aggressively retro, certainly well-meaning stubbornness may have inadvertently hastened the audience's disdain for old film formats.

Presumably Tarantino's The Hateful Eight is being released in 70mm as well as a couple others. (But not Star Wars VII - Abrams is using 65/70mm stock, the standard IMAX strategy and hasn't announced an actual 70mm release.)

This is not a trend so much as a fetish. These filmmakers value the texture as much as the text and precious few (Tarantino, Nolan, Spielberg, barely Anderson) have the power in Hollywood to be petted and indulged. Others (Fincher, Abrams, Scorsese) have the mojo to keep movies on film and out of our handhelds but choose to weave different myths.

Most every member of the sold-out crowds who witness a bad presentation due to lost skill and scratched prints will avoid the next film release if they have a choice. To them 70mm is already like the gimmick of 3-D. An acquired taste and of questionable financial and aesthetic value.


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Picture from DoobyBrain.

30 Frames A Second

Digital cinema uses as its source a computer-based file that is comprised of bits, a(n often) rather massive file for all the information that photographic films carry in each frame. It's been estimated that each frame of 35mm film, frames that are "this" (see how close together my fingers are) small, have the equivalent of 40 mg of information - multiply that by 24 frames a second, then 60 seconds per minute, 120+ minutes per film, and you the the idea of the burden of projecting such a file smoothly without hiccups.

Of course the beauty (and curse) of computer files is that they are compressed where detailed information doesn't need to (or can't) be captured. Digital cinema projects at a higher rate as well, 30 frames or even 60 frames a second (the new 3-d processes double this, with the smart glasses to address each eye).

Digital images can capture an amazing amount of the information from a photo-chemical original, but something happens when it's transferred to a higher-rate of presentation. Everything, including scratches, shutter movement, grain and the "slow" flicker can be scanned out. Color tones notwithstanding, the sheer "perfect" evenness of it is uncannily unlike film.

Cinema has unique qualities - it's a physical carrier with pigments, light-absorbing (and light-enhancing) molecules by which a bright light (carbon arc or xenon-based bulb) shines through onto a large reflective screen. It jerks through the projector 24 times a second, and the unique qualities of each frame, often visible by the grain in skies or even unmoving fields are distinguishable by the eye, even if just below the conscious level, as well as the discrete details of the action, captured by the original camera, which also ran at 24 frames a second, grabbing only a fraction of the activity in front of it, serially but incomplete. The actors kept moving as the shutter closed for a split second and reopened, to take another photograph, a moment later, millimeters shifted, and even blurred as the shutter opened again, closed, opened.

The mechanical reproduction of action, tied to the methodical re-presentation of it in a theatrical environment, creates the magic of a transcendental conveyance of the original experience. The art of good editing is famously about what to leave out, and those gaps between frames are like discreet and elliptical question marks. The frames are montage, images juxtaposed in Eisenstein-ian collision, 24 visible frames per second.

We respond to film, projected as such, in a different way than the 30-frames-per-second even-stream (I'm coining a word) of digital projection. I've seen digital restorations of old films (originally film) projected digitally - for example the recent high-end restoration of "Cool Hand Luke" and was surprised to discover it had a haunting lack of "filminess." This isn't a question of image quality - the actual look was clean and clear (I'm still not sure about the blacks) - but of the lack of fluttering juxtaposition of images in a determined perceptible and mechanical rhythm.

The quality of actual film projected creates some sense of urgency. Our gaze is excited and drawn forward in an active way - the gaps are in a way as important as the images in sequence themselves.

It is not a passive medium, like television and its visual drone of perfect even-stream, as first documented in the '60s.

Some of this may have to do as well with being in a large dark room, looking up at the flickering screen, being presented with pieces of a story we put together on a literal as well as symbolic level. The experience is akin to the tribal shaman in ancient times telling the myths of the people in front of the fire at night. There's the flicker, the dark, and your imagination filling in the gaps.

I began thinking about this issue when I saw Pixar's "Wall-E" this year, both digitally and "photo-chemically" projected 2 different times days apart. The source is originally digital of course, and has no "grain" or visual imperfections (intentional lens flares notwithstanding) but was manipulated to recreate movement as film would capture it. (95% of all theatres worldwide do still project film.)

The digital presentation was brighter, more even, and the color palette was declarative to the point of arrogance. The film presentation was darker, demonstrated grain... but seemed somehow "warmer" and more engaging.

Was it just because of the flicker? A story about a robot surrounded by failing technology seemed to benefit from an analog aesthetic that engaged a cognitive sense of perception, not just in its creation, but in its subsequent presentation. My impression of the analog "Wall-E" proves my impression of the digital "Cool Hand Luke." Digital is too concerned with the shiny and perfectly rendered surface.

Not with what the audience may make of it. It's a failure to communicate.

OBJECT/SUBJECT

I've written elsewhere (here, in fact) on how actual prints of films reflect the history and the wear they've acquired as they've travelled through the world, through many projectors, and many hands. Each showing of a film, by dint of its physicality, is different than the one before. Different tolerances, different age and conditions, and slightly (if you're lucky) different wear. And that doesn't even take into account the audience watching, and their response each time.

A film showing to an empty theatre brings up philosophical questions about spectatorship, mechanical reproduction, and semiotic phenomenology that I don't have the space, inclination, or ability to go into here.

Professor Paolo Cherchi Usai has the inclination - he teaches film at University of Rochester in NY, and champions archiving and preservation, especially forgotten silent films. He's gone further than most, however, by suggesting a discipline that looks beyond merely restoring some "perfect" or original version of the film, and considers each copy of the film to be its own unique variant - that reflects the age and treatment its received, changing and veering away from the original state (assuming there is an "original" state of any work of art, which is another phenomenological barrel of wax).

Each print becomes a version - damaged and repaired, spliced or edited, altered for regional, legal, aesthetic, or personal reasons. The usual suspects are film workers, projectionists, and censors, but also may include museum curators, collectors, and even film fetishists. (Pace the numerous prints of "Blow-Up" from 1966 that had frames of Vanessa Redgrave nudity surreptitiously cut out.)

This aesthetic embraces and celebrates the plastic nature of film - the actual physical surface of the stuff, made up of images captured chemically. It's sculpture, and is not "committed" to a final state once released into the world. Each print becomes an interactive and ever-changing and never-completed alternate. Which challenges the concept of "restoring" a film.

Digital restoration processes traditionally remove flaws to recreate a "pristine" copy. But it's not the original, only a representation. While this is useful for access and distribution, it ignores the issues raised by the state of the primary source (or sources).

This entire outlook directly challenges our relationship to physical objects. Are we preserving /recreating a copy that is only an idea of what it "should" be, or should we preserve the actual artifact?

Usai argues that it no longer matters. The original print, no matter how bitched-up and fingered, is an actual source. And the actual state of the variant should be preserved as a historical palimpsest.

This actually isn't as daft as it may first seem. I've heard of this before - many horror films of the '70s and '80s, particularly of European descent, often had different versions tailored to the markets. Trashy films like Lucio Fulci's "Perversion Story" or Franco's "Female Vampire" had violent cuts, or sexy cuts, sometimes even having hardcore scenes cut in by some unknown hand (making the "restored Continental versions" more highly prized to the underground bootleg horndog market).

But this also comes up in the documentary on the recent Kino DVD of Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin." The restorers found a negative of the film in Germany, dating from the late '20s, in the best shape they'd seen by far, but shortened by many shots. They began recreating the film from this censored print, until research discovered that this version was cut by Eisenstein himself to conform to the censorship requirements in pre-Nazi Germany at the time. In other words, a rare (and apparently unique) variant by Eisenstein himself, as valuable as the original.

So the next time you see scratches on a print of the latest Adam Sandler film at your local multiplex, consider it history wrote in celluloid.

(Those interested may find more to read here:)

Rode Hard

As a worker in a modern-day movie theatre, part of my job is to make up 35mm prints to show. Yet, while much ink is being spilt around this year's and next's new and now digital extravaganzas, the digital revolution hasn't quite reached the movie theatres.

Movies are still shown on those old loud clattery projectors. They come on 2000-foot reels, each lasting about 20 minutes a piece, and while in the old days those reels would have been changed back and forth (and if it was done right, you couldn't tell), nowadays you splice them all together onto a platter so once you hit start, the entire film - about a mile long all together - runs through without (if you're lucky) a hitch.

The reason they do this is that multiplexes couldn't survive financially if they needed a union projectionist manning each and every film. The automated platter system allowed less-professional workers (like me) to run the booth with a minimum of damage to the film, and now that most films barely last more than 2 or 3 weeks in theatres, the level of catastrophe possible is mitigated by the fact that you don't have much time to do it, or if you do it doesn't stick around long enough to be a problem (or in a worse-case scenario, if one of the prints of “Superman” is damaged in the first weekend, you just ship that one out first as soon as you reduce your prints next weekend).

What progress the magical future of digital projection has gained has partly to do with the amount of hay the PR guy have made touting downloadable (and presumably security-locked - we'll see how that goes) film files that never fade, scratch or age. This is in theory true - platters, or more specifically, the kids who run film on them, are rough on prints. The digital prints are however susceptible to crashing unexpectedly or become fatally obsolete within months. But presumably after it no longer matters. (You could find a 90-year-old reel of Chaplin and put it on and view it - I doubt you could view or even identify a digital film file from more than 5 years ago.)

(The digital prints have the benefit of becoming obsolete/unreadable right about the time it goes to DVD (or whatever the new format will be). And that's okay - who will want to look at "Don't Mess With The Zohan" 10 seconds after they saw it the first time?)

Digital files also are prone to fail if you get too strong a magnet too close to them. Or it doesn't boot. Or a phone rings too close to them. Celluloid, mortal and deteriorating format it may be, remains the most stable and reliable medium of choice, scratches and all.

Film is plastic, and not just theoretically (the academic discussion of the aesthetic nature of projected film as visual sculpture will come in the future). Indeed it's a long ribbon of plastic, a mile-long series of small photos that run through machines.

Heir as all physical artifacts in this atom-based world are to misfortune, it displays its wear and blemishes like battle scars, projected larger than life onto the screen. Like inadvertent tattoos acquired without its knowledge, the well-used reels of film each display characteristic traces of reckless behavior, each unique, from careless fingers that abused or ignored the curving leading leaders as they inadvertently slapped against the rough edges of the make-up bench, or rolled onto the uncarpeted floor unattended, left to collect dust and scars while other more seductive distractions kept the keepers - the projectionists - from paying proper, more affectionate, attention.

I made up a print of DePalma's 1983 “Scarface” for a midnight show last year, which had been built up and broken back down innumerable times in the last 25 years. Jesus, DePalma's “Scarface,” a midnight cult perennial. Who would have thought it? Ben Hecht is turning over in his grave. (Still. He made a career out of it.) Each reel end showed all sorts of splices at all spots, often cut at any random place, sometimes several feet and seconds into the film, with a panoply of different colors of tape.

This print had its history visible like a palimpsest.

But I was able to put it together, and run it for another couple of dozen of po-mo fans of gangsta retro Pacino chic.

The most crippled film I've had in my hands was a print of the 3-d porn film “Hard Candy,” a typically lame sex film (I use the term literally, as there was sex depicted in it...lamely) with - if you can believe it - the red-and-green 3-d effect most used on old science fiction black-and-white prints. This on a color film from 1973. Not that it was a good idea to begin with, but now the print was faded Kodacolor and turning the distinct red they're want to do (and of course, throwing the supposed color-coded eye separation effect completely out of whack).

This print had been travelling for 30 years, and it seemed that with every edit, with every attachment of the leaders to each head and tail of each reel, more and more frames had been lost, discarded by sloppy edits that cut frames or feet off, probably shortening the film by minutes (not to mention the horndogs that had pulled frames or shots out of the good parts in the middle) by the time we got a hold of it. And the scratches at the reel starts and ends began long before and ended way after the actual reel changes happened. All irrefutable evidence of the mishaps in previous booths, dumping onto the floor or being dragged from table to platter, with no concern for hygiene or the print's future.

It's an interesting experience to actually be cued - visually and even aurally - with scratches and pops to when each and every reel is coming up, like an infernal instinctual clock marking every 20 minutes. This print should have been retired about 100 make-ups ago, but human nature kept this film in circulation and in profit.

Digital mastering seems to be changing everyone's standards for perfection in presentation. Nowadays reviews of DVDs discuss bit rates, aliasing (jaggies on straight lines), pixelation and other digital artifacts. Most of film's blemishes are adjusted out, saving us from witnessing - or even being aware of - imperfections.

Yet physical film damage has developed its own fetishistic appeal. David Fincher takes time out from his fussy narrative in"Fight Club," directly from a scene in Chuck Palahniuk's book that should have been cut, to discuss the cue marks in the upper right-hand corner of each reel (which still appear on films (downward capability rules), but are much more noticeable on many old films shown on t.v. from prints, and in many older VHS and laserdisc transfers(some with hand-made cues). Palahniuk calls them "cigarette burns," like the industry insiders he professes to have walked with. What "industry insiders" really call those cue marks are "cue marks." Really. I think Palahniuk made the whole thing up. Get over yourself.

And reel damage was lovingly recreated in Tarantino's/Rodriguez's “Grindhouse” in 2007, really too late for anyone to really appreciate it, but is instructive as how the “plastic” aspect of film is sometimes more interesting than the film itself. (Eisenstein may have been trying to get to this as well, but didn't have the benefit of having had 42nd street to be inspired by. ) Rodriguez's “Planet Terror” damage was all done digitally, and he even duplicates a reel gone missing (in a bit that transcends the film in ways he doesn't quite have a handle on, but is wildly convenient for his narrative purposes). Tarantino reportedly took his footage out to the parking lot and damaged it the old-school analog way, dragging it across the asphalt. I really appreciate the thought behind this, although I believe it about as far as I can throw Chuck Palahniuk. QT's too precious about his trash being just so to leave it to random chance.

The “damaged goods” wave has migrated downward on the cultural scale - Digital Playground's trailer for their porn film “Naked Aces #3” brilliantly duplicates for 2 minutes a faded, scratched print of a 30-year-old trailer (culled from the film itself?) better than the film itself can possibly deliver on.

But the best in-home entertainment duplication of bad in-theatre presentation I've seen - best precisely because it was unintentional - was a VHS copy of an Italian pre-record I acquired from the fine folks at European Trash Cinema (see link) of a early '80s Italian Serena Grandi sex comedy - at each reel change, on this prerecord, the image would go out of frame and move up or down within seconds, back in frame. Like the projectionist was asleep up in the booth. Now, they transfer these films on an expensive telecine machine, and presumably they line the reels up before pressing “record,” right? Yet they managed to get each reel, one every 20 minutes, out of alignment, on an official release.

Not that I'm missing bad projection. There's still plenty of that in the real world.

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I won't give you the link to the Naked Aces #3 trailer. Do not google it. Do not type in Naked Aces 3 trailer.

(Adults only!)