Week 3: The lost art of watching a movie

In high school I worked at the movie theatre in my small hometown. The theatre is housed in a large stone building, one of the originals lining the main street, and had a past as both an underwear factory and a slaughterhouse. As a movie theatre, it meets the needs of my small town, with a single screen, old-fashioned plush red seats, and showings of two or three different movies per day. The walls of the screening room are of the same exposed stone as the outside, and on the back wall, opposite the screen, there is a large black and white painting by a favourite local artist, that rivals the screen in size and depicts a theatre audience howling with laughter, mouths stretched comically wide. I am describing all of these quaint, somewhat dated details of the theatre because the most important piece of technology, the projector, was of the same nature until my last year working at the theatre. In my final summer they made the change from a film projector to a digital one, and the biggest difference I noticed at the time was a change in the process of screening a movie, and even, to an extent, the beginning of a lost art.

Before getting the new projector, the three employees who were allowed to work in the booth were projectionists; it was an actual skill you needed to have to apply to the job, knowledge you needed to possess of how to prepare, screen, and dissemble a film and the projector. It wasn’t as simple as hitting “play,” because I should note as well that the theatre operated with the changeover system. A movie is usually too long to be contained on a single reel of film, and so most of the movies came to us on two separate reels, to be screened on two separate projectors in the booth. The projectionist looks for their cue on the film, usually a few small dots in the upper corner of a frame, and has to change the projection over from one machine to the other at the exact right moment – when done properly, the audience will not even notice a break or pause in the action of the movie. As I said, I would argue that this whole process is an actual skill, and one that has largely been lost to movie theatres since the rise of digital projection as far as I know.

In addition to my own experience with the change in process, this blog post has made me reflect on the experience of the projectionists themselves. They didn’t seem overly concerned with the projector machine; rather they lamented for months the difference in the digital movie versus the one on film. In hindsight, I would compare it to the ongoing argument for tree books over eBooks, in which people talk about how much they enjoy the materiality of the former, the weight in their hands, the quality and feel of different papers for the pages, the beauty of an old binding, the smell, and all of the ways that these physical characteristics influence their experience of reading in a way that digital does not. The projectionists had the very same arguments – screening a film wasn’t the same anymore, it wasn’t even film! The alleged smell of it in the projection booth was gone, on screen the movies lacked depth of colour and a certain “grain” to the image, it looked flat and too bright, the digital format was “flimsy” compared to a heavy reel of film in its round suitcase-like container. As a teenager who sold candy and tickets and then got to watch the movies from the back of the theatre, I can honestly say that I don’t remember noticing a difference, but for the projectionists, the entire experience of screening and watching a movie had changed.