‘The Last Reel’

Oh wow, that's the Little Art Theatre in Yellow Springs, Ohio! I went to Antioch College there and that theater was a mainstay of the town. Thank you for bringing back fond memories of the place and reminding me of all the films I saw there....

Antioch College had a philosophy course that required the students to see Ingmar Bergman films, many of them at the Little Art, and write about the philosophical aspects. I will never forget learning about philosophy through those films...

I've had the privilege of viewing a nitrate print at the Eastman house (discovering, with awe, why they once called the cinema "the silver screen"). I've projected 16mm films at a midwestern university, breaking into a sweat at the cue of the dots which signified a reel change - but which more often than not signified the onset of mechanical failure. The audiences were pretty tolerant of the mishaps, presumably because the films were so damned good. Those who've never worked in the film business will never know what a tactile art it was. I still miss the crisp sound of film moving through a camera; I miss the scent of emulsion. It's a lost world, and I appreciate this love letter to it.

(Almost) everything goes extinct.

Until then it's a kick to see my old favorite movie house from the middle of the Pacific by way of New York, sort of.

I think this little documentary takes a slanted nostalgic view. The quality of the film image is effected by poorly kept film stock, poor quality projection equipment and last but not least, lousy projectionists. How many times would I have to get up to find the projectionist smoking a cigarette in the back alley and tell him (undoubtedly a him) that the image he hastily set up was out of focus.

Lovely little piece of documentary reportage. I tend to agree with the woman owner of the Little Art, there is something too clean and shallow about digital projection. Luckily for my family and friends we have a few theaters in the Bay Area that still project real film. One especially worth mention is the Pacific Film Archives that projects marvelous 35 and 16mm films from their collection and from other collections from around the globe.

http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/filmseries

A different film or two every day! The PFA has a marvelous collection of their own of classic Japanese and other foreign films, many of which will never be transferred to digital I would venture to say. Film is here to stay albeit in limited venues. I also have a friend who owns his own projection theatre that he has fashioned in his basement. Two weeks ago he showed us 'Autumn Leaves' directed by Robert Aldrich with Joan Crawford and Cliff Robertson (tour de force performance btw). It was a 16mm print and it had scratches in places, but there was something about it that made it for me, more alive. In conclusion-As the man said, "don't expect anything but change."

You need to die young if you don't want change.

I too, as a filmmaker, will miss standing next to the camera and hearing the sound of film going through the gate... but seeing this beautifully shot doc (which must have shot digitally) gives me home for the future of moving images. Well done.

I had some of my most wonderful film-going experiences at the Little Art Theatre when I lived in YSO from 1974 to 1978. I am lucky enough to be able still to see an occasional film projected in 35mm at Yale, but the Little Art will always have a special place in my heart. Thanks for this fine remembrance.

A film print can sit fo a hundred years and not consume any energy and in that century it will still be useable. The print is made from plastic or cotton and cow bone sprinkled with silver.

The new digital projector may last six or seven years before it's highly complex DMD block dies from heat soak. The hard drive the movie was delivered on is made of exotic materials and lasts only five years or ten, maybe. Digital information has no known ling term container and requires a constant input of energy and new exotic storage containers which are invariably not backwards compatible.

Long live film.

It's ironic that this Op-Doc about the disappearance of 35-millimeter projection is a digital video. And there you have it.

Now if they could only return to the quality of story lines and script writing.

Ok, I understand nostalgia. A classic '65 Mustang has its charms, but, objectively, the cheapest new Hyundai will run circles around it.

When CD's were introduced they were "universally" hailed as "perfect" sound reproduction "infinitely superior" to vinyl. Records were pronounced forever dead.

Or so everyone thought. True audio enthusiasts clung to analog sound because of its warmth, depth, and character. There is a reality to analogue sound because sound comes in waves rather than saw-tooth imitations of ones and zeroes. Digital sounds "too perfect", "too "clean", too artificial and soon produces listener fatigue as a result. It took 30 years, but CD sails continue to plummet as record sales now continue to rise. Many young people today won't be caught dead listening to a CD because they have rediscovered what audiophiles knew all along. Music should be full of color, warmth, depth, and character.

It may take 30 years or longer for the same to happen with film, but one day film makers and cinephiles will tire of the artificial clarity, the "too perfect" look of digital film, the cold, exaggerated, character-free resolution of digital images. History has a tendency to repeat itself. And just like vinyl records have risen from their long-forgotten racks, so too will analog film rise from their canisters and retake their proper place in state-of-the-art theaters. Film has not died any more than records died. Film sleeps. Sooner or later, film lovers will discover that what they really love is film and not an endless streams of ones and zeroes which seek desperately (but artificially) to emulate it.

. We own theatres and work with theatres, consult with the last of the dying theatres that can't figure out how to let go and move on. As a tribe, theatre operators from the concession stand to the office to the booth all loved 35 mm film. But just as soda used to come in bottles to soda fountains before pre-mix, back when all cars had manual transmission, before there was air conditioning, before there were garbage bags, bathrooms (my grandmother used an outhouse in Hell's Kitchen). elevators, jets, heart valves, sound, electric lights, and on and on: things change, not always for the better but certainly they change. I prefer plastic garbage bags over the old rotting crumbling brown paper. We were holdouts at The Colonial and The Temple in Maine. They pried our fingers off our Brenkert's. But would we go back? Not a chance. Do we find the "films" flat and lifeless? Not for a minute. Just as Steve McQueen in The Sand Pebbles spoke to his ship, we still speak and sometimes curse at our projectors. They have changed. But the art of telling a story is healthier today than it ever was. The ability to tell a story: look at the "op-doc" featured here: without digital it could not happen. We move on and all I know is that audiences still come, sink into their seats, suspend disbelief, and they say "tell me a story." And that's what we do. Ahhh... You had me at Cinema Paradiso.

I did photography for many years using film, chemicals and paper. One of the best parts of the experience were the tactile sensations--winding the film on the developing tank reels in absolute darkness, sloshing prints in trays of chemicals, the feel of a really good rag photo paper. I can't get the same sense from digital photos.

Bo hoo hoo - Go get a wireless set and live on a Farm in Iowa.

Digital is gorgeous and provides more creative flexibility and a better bottom line for everyone involved.

Maybe buy a mimeograph and start a small newspaper?

This brings back good memories of being a part-time projectionist at a small Navy theatre in the the 1970's. We showed one movie a night and had 35mm carbon arc projectors when I started. One of the solenoids was broken so I had to manually try to switch from one projector to another at the end of a reel, and occasionally the film would break and melt in the intense heat. I had to quickly remove the reel, splice the film, rethread the projector and get it going again while getting boos from the audience. At some point the Navy replaced the 35mm projectors with 16mm projectors which were nowhere near as fun. All this and $7 a movie, which was a lot for a part-time job then. It was the best job a high school student could have.

We have also become accustomed to seeing movies shot on film at 24 frames per second. There is a certain quality to the motion in these pictures that digital doesn't capture. I recently bought a new ultra HD TV, and my wife complained that a Blu-ray movie we watched looked too "sharp"; she intuitively sensed the difference between the motion-picture film and the digital view. We changed a setting on the TV that tries to smooth out the difference between video frames, and voila! The film "look" was restored. I wonder whether we will lose that experience completely when the entire movie-making process, from shooting to projection, is digital.

We may be beginning a debate similar to the controversy regarding digital and analog sound (think vinyl.) Some think sound from tube amps is superior.

I wish I could attend the upcoming preservation festival, The Nitrate Picture Show, at Eastman House in Rochester, NY, but maybe some film lovers among the Times readership can go:

http://eastmanhouse.org/nitratepictureshow/The_Nitrate_Picture_Show.php

I don't miss vacuum tubes, nor vinyl records, nor compact tapes nor VHS; not even my nifty Super-Eight camera; gone are still-film cameras; gone are Polaroid instant cameras—which I liked a lot better than showing the images on the face of my phone.

I worked at a weekly newspaper and I saw the machines that replaced the linotype go and paste-up artists and hot-wax machines go. Everything went and now, even the streamlined digital newspaper with the ghosts of all the workers once needed to put it together, are going, going, and soon gone, all of them, forever. Do we know what's next to go?

For those who haven't seen it, you must watch Cinema Paradiso!!!!

It's why I rarely go anymore. I can watch digital projection at home. 35mm I can't get anywhere but a theater.

What a bittersweet homage to the Little Art and the last days of film. I lived in Dayton for 15 years and the Little Art was one of my favorite places (my wife and I saw Cinema Paradiso there in its original release). I understand the theater's imperative to switch to digital, but it's sad nonetheless. Still, the Little Art is worth the trip -- try their artisan malted milk balls (the best anywhere). While you're at it, head down the street to the Winds Café for a meal that will truly nourish your soul.

I knew a man. A cinematographer. His name was Warren Rothenberger. My wife and I visited his home in Pennsylvania, Honesdel, if I remember correctly, in the early 1980s. He had Hundress of films on big movie reels. A personal big screen and projector and rows of couches. We were so impressed. Now, I have more DVDs than he had movies. And with Netflix and VUDU Streaming digital video, limitless. It cheapens the experience. But because he was a part of the movie machine, his collection was so much more impressive. Plus he was the nicest man I ever met. He truly cared that you were happy to visit him. Film is history. And without it there would be no digital technology.

Are you also nostalgic for celluloid? Or the nitrate based films used before celluloid and the fires that led to their replacement?

Recall Cinema Paradiso, when Alfredo was blinded when the nitrate film caught fire. The past isn't always what was cracked up to be. I personally don't care for scratched, warped vinyl records and on the rare occasions when I go to the movies, I don't want a scratched print. It doesn't matter to me that others have seen that very same print. And if I am in awe, it is because it is a great movie, not because it shown using obsolete technology.

It was color that ruined everything. No, wait, it was photography itself that diminished us all, and motion photography that undermined live theater, just as music recording wrecked live performance.

I have to laugh at some of the technophobia on display here. If a digital production crew wanted to emulate the dirt and wear on old prints they could easily do so. Film fetishists are just like hipster vinyl fetishists, investing old media forms with totemic importance.

Apart from providing audiences with exactly what the directors and cinematographers intended, the copy cost of digital is radically lower than that for film prints, insuring that we won't lose so many works in the future.

I have come to appreciate cinema greatly since my son dove into filmmaking. Sadly, digital is an inevitability. My son made a similar homage of the film to digital changeover in Pierre, SD. It's more abstract, sans interview, and ultimately, very sad. (And ironically shot on digital)
https://vimeo.com/74382881

There was already an award winning short documentary made about this almost 2 years ago. It is called "Going Dark: The Final Days of Film Projection" and can be found on vimeo.com. It's only 15 minutes long and is very, very good. If you are interested at all in this topic, I highly recommend it.

When I began at Columbia in 1961 we had a film one night each week. Very low admission (I think 50 cents...I see there's no symbol any longer) and some wondered why, when there were many film theatres all over town, inc. up and down Broadway (most gone, alas). But a small group of us worked to maintain this.

And we projected them into a big (long throw to the screen) new auditorium on very old carbon arc projectors. Striking the arc at the right time for each reel took some experience and judgment; the carbons would burn for only about 22 minutes (anyone correct me?) but there were other problems. The feed for the carbons was not always perfect, so I'd need to move them forward a bit by hand or the light would begin to fade and the colors change.

And, most difficult was the fact that the film drive motors of our very old projectors would not reliably start or run when cold. The trick was to run the motors for some minutes to warm up, then shut them down as late as possible before I needed to start the next reel--then quickly thread that reel into the mechanism.

But we had fun. And I have some memories I won't give up.

My cousins, older brother and I spent many hours in the dark cocoon of the Isis theater in North Side, Ft. Worth, Texas. It was cheap baby sitting, an easy way to get the kids out of the parent's hair for hours on end. Another guy who used to hang out there is Bob Schieffer, host of Face the Nation and one of the best known reporters working at CBS News (he told me of his adventures there himself).

We, or I, took in movies the way the thirsty take a long, deep drink after a full day in a desert sun. It was my Cinema Paradiso. My eyes opened to the world and have never closed, it was my pathway to another world that led to books, learning and writing and continual investigation.

While sitting there, I would look back at the flickering light coming out of the end of the projector. As the images changed on the screen, the flickers would make different patterns. I wondered if this could somehow be made into an art form itself, flickering lights. Many years later, this might have been what led me to eventually create photographs of focused light images, such as the one that is my profile picture for comments.

No matter how much they are loved, film theaters are all but gone. As Ultra HD moves toward the living room, it is not hard to predict that theaters themselves will be gone within ten to fifteen years, or reduced to relics of only three or four per major city. The community experience of watching movies is fading to black.

I love real film projection, but can you substantiate the claim that digital projection is better for the environment? I actually wonder about this, even if it "makes sense" on the face of it. There are unbelievable hidden environmental costs in our supposedly "green" digital economy. Just think of those server farms burning electricity, etc....

I remember a friend that managed a big movie theater in L.A. showing me the projection rooms 15 years ago. There were huge horizontal platters holding the entire film spliced together vs using multiple projectors. More amazing was one film was running on multiple screens via this elaborate film transportation system. One piece of film snaking through two projectors at once, running this film all over the place. What a sight that was.

A lovely film. There is an extremely important issue which is not getting enough attention when discussing 16mm and 35mm prints and projection. Many, many classic feature films, documentaries and independent films are housed in the archives in PRINT FORM ONLY. It would be cost-prohibitive to transfer them to digital. When screening this films, the wonderful projectors and artful projectionists have their niche. In addition, film is the only stable preservation medium. Digital rots over time, and tapeless formats need to be migrated every five years. It would be wonderful if this nation could provide government funding for the preservation of American film.

Some 30 years ago, I watched "Gone with the Wind" at the University of Chicago law library auditorium, a wonderful theater for viewing 'reel' films. The second or third reel caught fire just as Atlanta went up in flames, making for one of my most memorable movie moments -- one that can never be repeated in digital. I can still see that ring of fire projected on the screen as the powerful light burned the celluloid and recall the growing awareness that we weren't watching a movie anymore.

I sit in a darkened theater where the film runs even if there's no audience. When you arrive late during the previews to an empty digital theater, the awareness the thing can go on without you breeds a gnawing despair. Films running without an audience.., the intolerable WASTE! THE NEXT STEP: Phantom waiters serving meals to empty tables in restaurants teeming with no one! Mechanics working on cars retrieved from junkyards, just to keep the grease monkey mojo working. The lights dimmed in the box office under a hastily scrawled sharpie note: CLOSED FOR REPAIRS! Its all we can hope for in a declining post-sub-prime world!

Without getting into the analog/digital debate, lat's acknowledge that digital is rapidly extinguishing analog for most purposes. But I, too, lament the passing and loss of a certain richness in audio and visual arts. So it goes...

However, the Little Art Theatre, against all business-school odds, survives! Thanks to Jenny Cowperthwaite's leadership and dedication, the "uneconomic" changeover to digital was achieved, and the theatre survives as an enduring part of its quirky and unique community. If I just pretend that it's film I'm watching, I'm back to my student days in the early 50's.

Thanks, Jenny et al, for keeping it alive!

A well deserved elegy for 35mm file print. But the larger issue is that folks are going less and less to movie theaters (it is well documented trend) because almost everyone has a 60 inch TV at home. That's an issue that isnt going away.

Like "nemo" I recall the saturated colors of Technicolor. They werent realistic colors but it made for a great movie watching experience.

I have so many magical memories of watching movies at the Little Art as I was growing up in Yellow Springs. It was always a mystery to me what was happening up in that tiny projection booth. Often the film would break . . . or it would be out of focus . . . or the sound wouldn't be working, and we'd all start yelling up to the projection booth where some shadowy man would turn on the lights, make some tweaks and changes, and the movie would start rolling again, with its scratches and dust and little hairs crawling across the screen. Jenny is right when she says that film had a life of it's own, that is for sure!

As it turns out, it was only last summer that I first got the opportunity to visit the mysterious projection booth of the Little Art. Of course now it's just a computer that downloads the movies and protects them out into the theater. And the issue isn't film breaking or scratches on the lens, it's now about slow downloading and why isn't this stupid thing working -- like we all have with computers these days.

Film is gone and it's probably for the best. But I am glad to have experienced the wonders of the reel thing. Someday I'll tell my grandchildren about the glory days of the Little Art, where the film broke and the crowd cursed the poor projectionist as he scrambled around in his nest to get it working again . . . bringing the magic back to the screen.

A very nice short; it brings back so many memories. I was head projectionist at my midwestern university in the mid-70's (16mm, not 35mm), plus the head of the student film committee. I then moved to New York City and spent 10 years in the film business, first shipping film cans all over the country, later in advertising for small distributors. Just as we mourn the loss of film as digital takes over, I well remember when 3-part Technicolor gave way to Eastman color. Technicolor was so much richer, more vibrant, that the Eastman color process, although more stable and easier to work with, seemed dull in comparison. Movies have always been part Art and part Technology; change is part of the process, but I do miss film. Thanks for the reminder.

Gorgeous, the story of 35 mm film by Steven Bognar - "The Last Reel" - at The Little Theater in Yellow Springs, Ohio. That the time of 35 mm movies (100 years of flickering black and white and technicolor movies) has passed into history is worth mourning. From the silent movies to the talkies, 35 mm has been relegated to the ashbin of movie history. Alas. Sometimes - often - the old and tried and true is worthier than the new (cf digital film).