[Frameworks] pageant arc projectors

[Dave Tetzlaff]

I’m more techy-geeky than most. I once tried to get an old pageant arc projector going in an effort to get a brighter image in our schoolo auditorium, but gave up. The technology is not really suitable for infrequent use sans tech support: there’s that massive old-school power supply driving a short-lived arc-lamp, and it’s all ‘analog’ in the sense that if it’s not in tip-top condition it still ‘works’ but in a substandard way. Thus, while I did get the one we had going, the image was far too blue to be usable and not much brighter than a regular Pageant either. I thought about getting a new lamp (dude, it’s not a ‘bulb’) but after checking price, availability, life, and the odds that would make it usable (too dicey), I scrapped the project. Part of that was concluding the best I could get it would still leave any prints I could readily get projected too far out of proper color balance for reasonable aesthetics. I.e. Xenon lamp color balance is off for most available prints, but tolerable most of the time, but the arc lamp seems significantly more cool than a Xenon and intolerable with a tungsten balanced print.

My firsat conclusion was/is that these old Arc Pageants just aren’t worth the time/effort/operating expense now. It’s a shame because they are ‘classic’, and sort of film-artifacts in themselves. But if the idea is to get a nice celluloid image on a screen, they’re just a ball of frustration, and there are better ways to spend your budgets of money and (especially) labor. 

After I junked the Pageant Arc, we inherited a pristine Xexon lamp Elmo, and I thought we were set for the extra brightness I was hoping to get. But even that was hardly a no-brainer in terms of bightness v. color-shift tradeoff. So my second conclusion was that the best 16mm projection option was getting the brightest tungsten lamp and fastest lens. I found you can use a brighter lamp than the one speced for the projector if you’re careful, assuming there’s one that fits…

The auditorium I was using didn’t have that big a house, but did have a fairly good sized screen, so the throw was pretty short, requiring a fairly wide angle to match the image from the video projector in the booth, around 27mm IIRC. I never was able to obtain an ‘optimum’ combo of 1) bright lamp, 2) fast/wide lens 3) reliable projector mechanism that would be kind to the film. Lenses were hard to find in the mid-late ‘00s when I was searching, and I can’t imagine it’s any better now.

So my final conclusion was the then-Frameworks-heresy that video projection from a three-chip DLP (we managed to get a nice, big Panasonic ‘professional’ model) from a DVD source was the best solution to both represent the films I was showing the students well and preserve what was left of my mental and physical health. Since even the SD digital sources looked fine (upconverted to 720P by the players), I can only imagine any native HD would be even better. Sure, nothing beats good projection of a fresh celluloid print, but you don’t get fresh prints from FMC or MoMA – you get shifted color, lots of scrathes, and plenty of ineptly made or now-separating tape splices that look like crtap at best, if they don’t send the print off the sprockets or collapse the loop, or just come apart and dump the film on the floor or in some other way add even more damage to the print - keeping in mind that your old 16mm projector no one within 500 miles can service has seen better days, too. So (yes, reluctantly) each time I taught my class I wound up using more video sources, only using 16mm for the films I felt I absolutely HAD to have on the syllabus and weren’t available in any electronic form — most notably ‘Christmas On Earth’. 

Of course ‘A Roll For Peter” falls into the 16mm only territory, and the ionstitutional situation is different for a cinemateque than for the sort of small college where I worked, so YMMV. There’s no getting around the fact that 16mm projection is a real challenge. So rather than tear your hair out trying to make it ‘excellent’, my been-there/done-that advice is just do the best you can with the resources you have, and save your stress and energy for the non-technological aspects of keeping ‘experimental cinema’ culture alive and well in the age of Trumpism.