The end is near. Oh, it is so damn near. And when I stop to think about it, the truth is: it’s been a nice run.
My freshman year I began training as a projectionist for the Film Series. I thought it would be cool, I figured I wouldn’t have to pay to watch movies. In fact, someone would pay me. Coolest job in the world. I started going to a couple shows, watching older kids project in the science center and in the cinema. At home, my dad has an old 16mm projector and we’ve watched prints in the living room over the years. I had been up in a projection booth before as well, but never for too long. And I had sure never run the equipment or been the one responsible for bringing the movie to the people. The projectionist is the last person with the ability to change the delivery of a movie, but this is not why I wanted to project.
I wanted to project so that I could have a relationship with film itself. Not DVDs or tapes or Laserdiscs. I wanted to touch the film, I wanted to lick it. I wanted to unlock the door, turn on the circuit breakers, clean the gate with a Q-tip, spray the thing with a can of air, thread the film up, run the film, and then perform the previous steps again in descending order. I loved the process. I loved being alone up there: just me, the loud whir of the projector, and the crackly sound of the film. I could see the movie and the audience out of my little port window. If I had seen the film, I loved to see their reactions: a big laugh in a comedy, like when I projected “Wet Hot American Summer,” my freshman year, or a big scare in a scary horror film. Watching how an audience responds to what is up there on the screen was as much a learning experience as the physical act of projection. But things also go wrong.
A couple years ago, the Film Series was showing the fantastic Spanish film, “Sex and Lucia,” in the Cinema to a packed house. It’s a hot film, as the title implies, starring the curvaceous Paz Vega (later of “Spanglish” fame) oft in the nude, but it is also a film with a serpentine narrative, as potentially twisty and confusing as a David Lynch film. I sat with the audience watching the picture, when suddenly the film stopped. Everyone groaned. This happens so often anyway, because the projection equipment is pretty old and is prone to malfunction. But the projectionist came out to address the crowd. Lo! It was none other than Benh Zeitlin, future Slamdance film festival winner. Benh told us that the company we rented the film from had mislabeled the film reels, and because of it the film was showing out of order. To remedy this would take some time, and many left, but a few of us remained to watch the film out of sequence. And, yes, it made little sense. But it was one of those brilliant shared experiences of which I say, “only at Wesleyan.” Only here would a bunch of people remain watching a Spanish art-sex film that they knew was completely out of order. Only here could the complete insanity of the “Stop Making Sense,” dance party go unnoticed by anyone outside of the Cinema. Only here could an effigy of Bono be ripped apart by a masked choir of singers and dancers inside a giant chapel.
Things go wrong up there in the booth, and sometimes the show stops, like with “Sex and Lucia,” and other times the show goes on. I once left a showing of Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” with my hands blackened and bloody because the motor in the take-up real broke and I had to hand wind it so that the film would not pile up all over the ground after passing through the projector. No fun.
This history of fuck ups should come to a close next year when the Film Series will be shown exclusively in the new Center For Film Studies. The equipment is newer, better, cleaner. The projection booth is brighter. The seats are more comfortable. The sound is unbeatable. This weekend will be the final one in the CFA Cinema, soon to be a relic of the past. I just watched the ISFPC short “Donkey Trash” in the CFA Cinema and started reminiscing about all the good times I’ve had in there. I watched movies there, I projected them, I made the house manager announcements. I learned how to project in that booth, and then I shot my thesis film there. And the truth is that I don’t think I’ll go in the CFA Cinema many more times in my life.
It’s been a nice run.
So come celebrate the final weekend movie in the CFA Cinema: Brian DePalma’s “Scarface,” starring Al Pacino. You’ve seen that everybody on MTV Cribs has one, but have you actually seen it? It’s pretty fucking great. It’s playing at 7:30 and 10 on Friday and Saturday, and it’s $4.
And let us not forget Ye Olde Science Center 150. You know, perhaps the less said about it, the better. Home of the older and more offbeat stuff we show, and the location of many a dance on top of those long rows of desks. We will lay the Science Center to rest with Roger Corman’s “A Bucket of Blood,” an extremely funny beatnik exploitation horror comedy from the late 50s, on Friday. And then we’ll see Henri-Georges Clouzot’s classic thriller “Diabolique,” on Saturday.
Then, Wednesday, the last ever film series show in the CFA Cinema will be the Turkish masterpiece “Distant,” which won the 2003 Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival.
We will usher in the new era of the film series with “The Incredibles” in the Center for Film Studies next weekend, followed by the film major’s senior thesis presentations. And then, we’re done.
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