Projectionist Nikki Jones loads one of Dendy’s 35 mm projectors at Dendy Canberra. Photo: Nicholas Ward.
If you went to the movies 20 years ago, a projectionist had hand-spliced the film together, wound it onto a cassette and carefully loaded it into the projector before the first frame even rolled.
Today, virtually all movies, even ones shot on film, are digitally projected.
But while the heyday of 35 mm film is behind us, a few passionate Canberrans are preserving film in its original medium.
“I think the fidelity of film is not matched quite yet in digital cinema. You get blacker blacks, bluer blues, and greener greens in film,” projectionist Nikki Jones said.
“Just because of the way you strike a print onto film. It’s very similar to how your eye works, whereas digital is always just going to be pixels.”
Nikki works at Dendy Canberra, which has brought its film projectors whirring back to life for its program Cells Out – The Film Project, presenting classics and blockbusters in their original 35 mm format.
Intricate preparation is needed for every film Nikki sends through a projector. She has to splice the film together and wind it onto a large flat cassette. The film is then looped around a number of arms to prevent too much strain being applied to the film.
Dendy projectionist Nikki Jones says she is particularly looking forward to Fight Club and The Fifth Element. Photo: Nicholas Ward.
It then runs through the mechanism in front of a xenon lamp, which projects the 35 mm strip of film across the screen.
The lamp is so hot that if the film pauses for even a second, it can melt the polyester.
“It’s a little nerve-racking, just because it’s a physical object, it’s a piece of art in the room with you, and there’s so many things that can go wrong because of that,” Nikki said.
“Every screening is a little bit of its own kind of performance. It’s very different to pressing play on a digital film because you’re there.”
Nikki first learned how to use a projector when she was 15. Today she works as one of the last film projectionists in the city.
The nearby National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA), from which Dendy gets some of its prints, offers the only other regular analogue film screenings in Canberra.
Nikki said the film program has been a surprising hit with a wide variety of moviegoers experiencing the format.
“I can never predict who the audience is going to be,” she said.
Before each program Nikki comes down and gives a short introduction to the film.
She said many visitors were amazed how different a 35 mm projection could look compared to digital.
The film is a strip of polyester, 35 mm wide, treated with light-sensitive chemicals; 24 frames per second creates the illusion of movement.
But it still evokes a strong response from audiences.
“I get some ‘oos’ and some ‘ahs’ if I pull out a bit of film to show them. So sometimes I’ll come down with a bit of that header we’ve chopped off.”
The NFSA boasts the largest collection of film in Australia.
Film services manager Neil Richards handles some of Australia’s rarest and most valuable films. Passionate about physical film, he says it creates beautiful images thanks to its depth and colour.
Neil also digitises old films to make the NFSA collection more accessible and shareable. Even if a film doesn’t exactly match the original, it comes close.
“Preservation is quite complex,” he said. “You’ve got to have very high-end scanning equipment to meet the standards we’re after.”
Neil’s work shows why it’s so hard for digital to match the quality of film.
“One frame is about 120 megabytes for 35 mil’ feature film, and there are 24 frames a second.”
That can equal as much as 20 terabytes or 20,000 gigabytes per movie.
As much as Neil loves film, he’s not shy admitting its time has passed.
“Considering the scale of our collection, well over 100,000 films, digitisation is really the only logical pathway to actually preserving the bulk of it.”
A strip of 35 mm film, each frame is as much as 120 mb – likely five to 10 times the size of your phone’s photos. Photo: Nicholas Ward.
The scale of the collection can be daunting and Neil jokes that despite being around film all day, he watches fewer films than ever. But there’s one piece in the collection that always stands out for him.
“It’s a newsreel shot in about 1930 in Melbourne… the first police radio cars in Australia. My grandfather worked with them, so I could see in the footage some of his friends I knew from family dinners. It was one of the first films graded.”
Neil has spent his career watching the decline of film, something he finds tough. But like many, he believes it has a future.
“People are still shooting on film,” he said.
“I don’t think it’s impossible that it will continue in a fairly robust way for some time to come.”
Though digital is more practical for distribution, film has made a resurgence in Australia with new chemical developing labs opening around the country.
Dendy’s Cells Out – The Film Project is currently showing in Canberra; find its program here.
The NFSA broadcasts films throughout the year in its ARC cinema; find its program here.
