Getting the projectors ready

June 23rd, 2009 at 04:01pm Josh

In two weeks, we start what is hopefully the first of many film series done in cooperation with the Museum of the Moving Image (full details here. We’ve been offering various programs in the theater, including films, for 9 months now, but this will be the first time we’ve used our pair of 35mm projectors for a full program. So, I’ve spent much of the past few days helping to get these machines ready for use.

I find our projectors fascinating – they represent entertainment technology from a different era. Each one weighs many hundreds of pounds and is braced with solid 3/4″ iron struts. The lamp-housings are plastered with very real warnings (‘DANGER: Electric Shock, Ultraviolet Radiation, Ozone and High Pressure Bulb Hazard’), and replacing the massive xenon bulb requires protective eye-wear to avoid permanent blindness. The shutter is a semi-exposed lawnmower blade, spinning at 24 frames per second. When the projectors and their associated transformers and fans are on and running, the noise is almost deafening. In the past two days alone, we used files, wrenches, saws, crowbars and a sledgehammer to do the last bit of fine adjustment.

Once I put aside my fascination with big machines, it’s easy to fall into thinking, ‘Why is this worth the effort when we could just use DVDs?’, especially after 8 hours of tinkering to get the picture just right. It occurred to me, however, that this kind of effort is perfectly appropriate for the Museum of Arts and Design. We have plates in our collection that are painstakingly carved from a solid block of wood. We have quilts stitched together from thousands of tiny scraps of cloth. In some ways, it is the nature of much of the work we show to eschew easy, mass-produced solutions, and to embrace the laborious and the handmade. Yes, we could get every work in the series of French New Wave films we’ll be showing on DVD, but watching the digitally remastered version would cheapen the experience for our visitors. Truffaut shot The 400 Blows on film, and if watching this film is purely about seeing what happens, I can stream it from the internet and watch it on my flat screen TV.

So, I hope you’ll come to watch our films, and to appreciate them for the effort required first to conceive and create them, and then to screen them for you. And I hope you’ll go upstairs to the galleries after you’re done to look at hundreds of pieces of art created and presented in the same spirit.

Entry Filed under: mad happenings,museum tech