[Frameworks] pageant arc projectors

Wed Mar 1 01:05:58 UTC 2017

Thanks!

Fred

On 2/28/2017 7:01 PM, Eric Theise wrote:
> Fred,
>
> Re:Voir has released Rameau's Nephew, etc., on DVD.
> http://re-voir.com/shop/en/michael-snow/70-micheal-snow-rameau-s-nephew-by-diderot-thanx-to-dennis-young-by-wilma-schoen-3493551100393.html
>
> Eric
>
>
> On Tue, Feb 28, 2017 at 4:49 PM, Fred Camper <f at fredcamper.com 
> <mailto:f at fredcamper.com>> wrote:
>
>     Since I've been known as a rather arch defender of film on film, I
>     have to weigh in a bit on David's side here.
>
>     As film projection becomes rarer an d rarer, various perhaps
>     unexpected but not unanticipatable problems occur.
>
>     A few years back I went to a projection of Snow's /Rameau's
>     Nephew/ at a generally well-run college film society, committed to
>     showing films on film. I had not seen this complex and impressive
>     film since the mid-1970s, when it was first released, and so was
>     eager to see it again. It's over four hours long, and doesn't
>     exactly play often at the local Bijou. As most likely know, Snow
>     stands with Gehr and Kubelka as being unwilling to release his
>     work on video, the idea being that it was made for film and
>     should, or must, be seen on film.
>
>     The film started. There was something seriously wrong with the
>     sound. Specifically, it sounded like the film was threaded loose
>     around the sound drum. Any experienced projectionist would
>     recognize this sound, because we've all misthreaded this way at
>     least once. At the same time, I remembered Snow played around with
>     the sound quite a bit in this film -- I just didn't remember what
>     he did at each moment. After about 20 minutes, though, I was sure
>     the projection was wrong, and sent a friend sitting with me who
>     knew the student projectionists back to tell them to fix it. The
>     message came back that they had tested the film in advance, and
>     that this is the way the film was supposed to sound.
>
>     They had mounted it on two huge reels, so after the first two or
>     two and a half hours there was a break. The whole first half had
>     been shown with this wobbly sound, and now I was 100 per cent
>     certain that, however faulty my memory of short sections might be,
>     I would have remembered if the sound of the whole first half had
>     had that "loose loop" quality. I sent my friend back again with
>     the message that someone present had seen the film when it was
>     first shown forty years ago and was certain that the film was
>     being projected incorrectly. Three students huddled around the
>     projector for twenty minutes, investigating the situation. When
>     they finally started the second half, the sound was fine.
>
>     Is anyone to blame here? Perhaps projectionists could be better
>     trained, but that is less and less likely to happen with fewer and
>     fewer films being shown on film. Perhaps others in the audience
>     should have recognized the telltale sound of film loose around the
>     sound drum, but how rare it is to see film on film anymore, and of
>     course for an "experimental" film perhaps some would feel that one
>     can never quite be sure what it is "supposed" to sound like.
>
>     I left thinking how much better the screening would have been for
>     me if the film had it been shown on DVD, though of course it is
>     not on DVD. But still. The sound is just as important as the image
>     in this film, if not more so, and the damage done to the sound was
>     the aesthetic equivalent of showing the film severely out of
>     focus, out of focus to the point of an almost total blur, a blur
>     that anyone would have loudly objected to, whereas the damage done
>     to the image in transfer to digital projection, even on a sub-par
>     projector, would have been far, far less.
>
>     Those of us, such as myself, who might have at one time
>     self-identified as "film fundamentalists," have to awaken, however
>     sadly, to the realities of our current situation. I would guess
>     that David made, from my point of view, the best possible choice.
>
>     At the same time,we should of course support those venues that
>     continue to show film on film.
>
>     Fred Camper
>     Chicago
>
>
>     On 2/28/2017 4:41 PM, Dave Tetzlaff wrote:
>>     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.
>>     _______________________________________________
>>     FrameWorks mailing list
>>     FrameWorks at jonasmekasfilms.com
>>     <mailto:FrameWorks at jonasmekasfilms.com>
>>     https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks
>>     <https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks>
>     _______________________________________________ FrameWorks mailing
>     list FrameWorks at jonasmekasfilms.com
>     <mailto:FrameWorks at jonasmekasfilms.com>
>     https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks
>     <https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks> 
>
> _______________________________________________
> FrameWorks mailing list
> FrameWorks at jonasmekasfilms.com
> https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/pipermail/frameworks/attachments/20170228/9762553b/attachment.html>