You probably missed this sprawling, feel-good-about-cinema’s-future Australian documentary “Splice Here: A Projected Odyssey” when it made the rounds of film festivals and earned a limited release a couple of years back.
Celluloid purists certainly wouldn’t have.
Australian projectionist turned doc-maker Rob Murphy takes us through the history of movie projection, the digital revolution and efforts to preserve not just old films, but to keep the novelty of the visually overwhelming, sharply-detailed, richly-colored and textured Big Screen experience alive.
The emphasis here is on the penultimate moviegoing cinegasm, Cinerama, immersive movies shown on huge curved screens via three projectors playing at once, creating a vast, deep and panoramic image that only the rarest cinema palaces — most famously LA’s CineramaDome — could accomodate.
Murphy spends much of the film speaking with his fellow (mostly Aussie) projectionists of prior generations, some of whom became celluloid movie print collectors/”hoarders,” with a few going so far as to rebuild tiny versions of the vast and complex analog projection system it took to show Cinerama.
The role of film print collectors in preserving a vanishing movie heritage is explored via a few eccentric collectors, professional archivists and others with horror stories of all that can go wrong when vast collections of film cannisters are stored safely until the person who knew how to store and preserve them aged out of being able to care for them.
Thousands of films, from the earliest silents to even more recent eras, have been trashed, recycled (for the silver nitrate in the prints), decayed or fast faded into unwatchable due to whatever flawed film process or stock (Eastman Color, take a bow) they were originally shot and shown on.
Murphy tracked-down the now-late director (“Silent Running”) and effects pioneer (“2001: A Space Odyssey”) turned heightened-cinematic-experience experimenter Douglas Trumbull to talk about his efforts to put the “wow” back into moviegoing.
His high-speed projection Showscan system was an abortive effort doomed by the ill-fated but startling to look at sci-fi film “Brainstorm,” most remembered as the movie Natalie Wood drowned before finishing. When Murphy caught up with him, Trumbull’s last sizzle in making and projecting bigger, brighter, sharper and deeper “like looking through a window” images, MAGI, was struggling to get on its feet.
Trumbull is the expert witness to the fact that digital projection, for all its benefits, is lower resolution, dimmer and duller than any of the premium 70mm celluloid projection processes.
Quentin Tarantino backed this up when he presented his generic Western ensemble piece, “The Hateful Eight,” in select cinemas able to still screen it in 70mm. The third act of “Splice Here” is taken up with Murphy’s efforts to help the art deco Sun Theatre cinema in Yarraville, Victoria (Australia) piece together the projectors necessary to show one of Tarantino’s better-looking lesser efforts in the format the filmmaker desired.
QT even showed up for the premiere!
But the engrossing stuff here is all the history, the archaic technology and the fact that if films are to be preserved, it’s the eccentrics still devoted to that form of projection who will be responsible. Because the ever-consolidating/ever-“trashing” old prints studios that made them haven’t made it their business to guard their old investments or their patrimony.
Murphy drops in on the American Library of Congress’s vast underground audio/video archive in Culpeper, Va., for the “Mostly Lost” Film Festival, an event where fragments of old films are screened for experts and buffs who shout out suggestions as to who might be in them, when they were made (automobile’s often give away the year) and what they might have been about.
Murphy is entirely too fixated on Cinerama here, for my taste. It was, when it was introduced (by American journalist and “Lawrence of Arabia” popularizer Lowell Thomas) in 1952, just a gimmick to set movies apart from TV.
“This is Cinerama” didn’t lead to a mass conversion of American cinemas, and only a handful of films were shot and shown in this three-projector super-widescreen format. “How the West Was Won” and “The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm” were the most famous narrative features made in Cinerama. It was outgrowths of that, 70mm films like “Grand Prix” or “2001,” that became more widely accepted.
I’ve seen one or two super widescreen movies at the CineramaDome, and once caught a showing of “The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm” in the basement cinema — furnished with abandoned projectors and screen and seating from closed movie theaters — of a collector in North Dakota.
As critic Leonard Maltin notes, it was a “novelty” way back when, and celluloid 70mm projection and its technical kindred are destined to be that now, as well. Until digital projection closes that visual experience gap.
The recent digital 3D film fad is presented as a possible stepping stone to vastly better digital theatrical projection, as its technology can be repurposed to something that won’t require wearing disposable glasses to view.
But I love the former projectionist’s affection for that skill and the people who ran projection booths, gigantic and tiny, over the decades. I have made it a point over the years to get to as many ancient movie houses as possible, as not all are in Hollywood and thus eagerly preserved by the locals.
I think the oldest cinema I went to is now gone, a 1914 vintage Madison, Wisconsin nickelodeon with wooden terraced floors and a screen canted to the left when you entered the venerable (smallish) auditorium, not directly in front of the rear exits.
Like Murphy and several of the folks he interviewed, movie projection was one of my first jobs, showing films in the absurdly-long-visual-throw-distance performance hall at my university via ancient Simplex carbon-arc (16mm) projectors. It was primitive, mechanical and all sorts of things could go wrong and did.
But I got to learn the job and hang around with the last colorful generation of projectionists in the first cities I lived in after school as I was starting my media career. It was a profession dying out in weeks, not years.
For my part, I spent too much time in the past avoiding movies at theaters that didn’t replace projection bulbs often enough, with scratchy prints and known for sloppy reel changes and crackling sound to ever want to go back to celluloid. But if they can make “premium experience” films with higher digital frame rates, brighter, deeper images and do it without seats that shake and blow wind or spray rain on you, I’m all for it.
Especially if the films that most merit “epic” treatment are the ones that deserve it;
Rating: TV-14, profanity
Cast: Rob Murphy, Douglas Trumbull, Quentin Tarantino and Leonard Maltin
Credits: Scripted and directed by Rob Murphy. A Gravitas Ventures release on Tubi, other streamers.
Running time: 1:57
