I went with a friend the weekend before last to a 35mm print screening of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Andrew Dominik’s languid and spellbinding 2007 rumination on (among other things) unhealthy obsession with fame. It’s a complex and engrossing film, one of the best of the year in which it was released, which is saying something. Other titles from the banner cinema year of 2007: Eastern Promises, No Country for Old Men, Zodiac, and There Will Be Blood. It was also the year of Wild Hogs, Mr. Woodcock, and I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, so 2007 shouldn’t get too full of itself.
According to my records – Letterboxd is a godsend in instances such as this – Jesse James was the first non-digital screening I’ve been to since a special 70mm roadshow screening of Tarantino’s 2015 western, The Hateful Eight. The 70mm roadshow dates for The Hateful Eight coincided with the film’s traditional digital theatrical release.
The Jesse James screening was the first time I was struck by how antiquated projecting actual film stock looks to me now. (If I suddenly go missing after publishing this piece, it means that either the Cinema Illuminati (Cineminati?) or Christopher Nolan have silenced me for good. Tell my wife and my dog that I loved them.)
Please remember that mechanical projection of celluloid was the only way I experienced “going to the movies” for the first three decades or so of my life. It’s not like I’m a 15-year-old who dismisses all silent films as boring.
The crispness and clarity of digital projection has finally, I believe, overtaken that of the method born in the fin de siècle and used exclusively throughout the 20th century. As someone born in what the kids are now calling “the late 20th century,” it brings me no joy to acknowledge that the old way of doing things is obsolete and will likely fade from cultural memory even before I shuffle off into oblivion myself.
In its page on digital cinema, Wikipedia notes that, “[T]he theoretical resolution of 35mm film is greater than that of 2K digital cinema.” Two notes on this. 1: The word “theoretical” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. Lacking theoretically perfect conditions – e.g., projectionists who don’t know what they’re doing, or substandard equipment – a 35mm projection can suffer immensely in terms of image and/or sound quality. 2: As also mentioned in the Wikipedia article, the industry has transitioned to 4K, making negligible the difference in image quality between celluloid and digital, even in a theoretically perfect setting.
There are downsides to the march of progress. Digital projectors are wildly more expensive than their analog counterparts. Repair has become the domain of highly skilled specialists. The days of ancient projectionists who resemble the waiter who delivered a glass of milk to Agent Dale Cooper quickly diagnosing and repairing a malfunctioning film projector to ensure that the show goes on are over.
Mostly I’m writing this because of the conflicting feelings that roiled inside of me during the screening of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. I can’t put my finger on exactly what it was. Factoring in the Old West setting – it’s fitting that this movie was the one that brought these feelings to light, as one of its themes is Jesse James sensing that the world is moving and changing beyond his understanding – the actual presentation of the movie felt ancient.
It was dimmer and fuzzier than what I remembered these types of screenings – from my childhood and early adulthood – as being.
My own knowledge of the process worked against me. I was distracted each time I saw a cigarette burn announce to the projectionist that it was time to switch over to the next reel. The flicker effect – a phenomenon that digital technology has abolished from the movies – caused by each still image being projected for 1/24 of a second, gave bright whites, like many of the winter scenes in Jesse James, a practically strobing effect that detracted from the story in which I was otherwise enraptured.
My experience watching the movie was akin to a feeling I got as an 8- or 10-year-old, when my parents moved us into a new rental house. Our new landlady – at the time, I probably would have told you she was at least 90, which means she was most likely in her 60s or 70s – gave my brother and me what might have been the prototype of the 8-track tape player as a welcoming gift.
That 8-track player looked to me at the time like it was from some other century.
Like a good cineaste, I held the line for as long as I could. Around 2005 or ’06 – sadly, it was before the days of Letterboxd, so I’m not quite sure – I was excited to go to a local independent theater for their retrospective series on Hitchcock. I attended their screening of one of my favorites from the Master of Suspense: The Birds. Seconds into the screening, I realized it was a projection of one of the DVD releases of the film. It was the “Universal DVD” animation and logo that tipped me off.
These were the very earliest days of commercial movie theaters dipping their toes into the digital projection waters, and often that really did mean simply projecting a standard-definition quality DVD onto the screen. The inferior image quality of the DVD to that of celluloid, especially when projected at that gargantuan size, was impossible not to notice. I was incensed. “If I wanted to watch the damn DVD, I could have done that at home,” I thought to myself. I wanted to see the FILM The Birds, not the DVD The Birds.
Little by little and very slowly, the financial and technological benefits of digital projection over the mechanical method made the change as inevitable as the adoption of sound and color to cinema’s repertoire. Throughout the 2010s, I stopped noticing when a movie was presented digitally, because it changed from being an anomaly to being de rigueur. I have an oddly clear memory of going to see a movie – although, sorry to relate, I can’t remember what it was – and realizing, as the credits rolled, that what I had watched was basically a video file stored on a computer hard drive.
Cue Norma Desmond’s famous lament: “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.”
The last 15 years or so of watching everything from MCU spectacles to intimate independent character studies projected onto screens in radiant, digital clarity, have made the old way of exhibiting movies feel like that 8-track tape player. Change is inevitable. Who knows, I may be writing a follow-up piece in the year 2052, in which I wax philosophic about the new technique of projecting movies onto giant screens from the crystals onto which the images and sounds have been etched.
As long as I can sit in a giant, dark room with my fellow cinephiles and have The Birds wash over me in pictures that are 50-feet high, I’ll consider myself lucky.