Cinema and Movies: Projecting Movies
[Under development: 31 May 2005 ]
I have the vaguest of memories from my early childhood of throwing an image onto a wall. Maybe I am simply remembering the magic lantern show in Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander. As technology marches on, and slide projectors and overhead projectors beaming images from a transparency are being replaced with digital projectors hooked up to laptop computers, it is easy to forget that even three of four decades ago, throwing an image onto a wall was an act of magic, portrayed with love and tragedy in Cinema Paradiso.
Sometime in the mid-1960s, my father bought a Super 8 film projector. I have no idea why. To my knowledge he never hired a film in his life. Neither could he afford to by a movie camera. So what was the point? The effect on me was to whet my appetite for involvement with film.
In my teens, at secondary school, I became more acutely aware of that magic. As the school projectionist, I showed mostly science films, about polymers and fluorescers, and I could never understand why so few other pupils were interested, for it was, after all, a film. When the film ripped, the spell was broken until I had spliced it back into one piece, and the film was re-threaded through the mechanism. “Lights!” and we would all settle back into watching white nylon being spun from stainless steel spinnerettes.
I wish that my father had hired films for the family to watch on the projector he bought when I was a child. As a student, I screened public film showings in lecture theatres similar to that in The Freshman, but raising money for charity rather than promoting myself. I still occasionally show films, mostly about counselling (Gloria, Cathy, Right to be Desperate). In teaching some counselling-related topics (such as therapy, suicide, drug use), I have earmarked up to a dozen video clips. For example, suicidal ideation is portrayed in Hamlet, attempted suicide appears in Educating Rita, The Full Monty and Brassed Off, and actual suicide in Romeo and Juliet and The Pillow Book.
Projecting films was and is, for me, about my desire for involvement. My involvement with film exploded once I bought a camcorder.
