#ZUKUNFT: IN CONVERSATION WITH COOKING SECTIONS
Artist duo Cooking Sections’ work combines art and activism, using food as a gateway to…
Interview by Johanne Björklund Larsen
It is a warm evening in June, and I am sitting in the cinema. The auditorium is full, the audience is a lively and diverse mixture of cinema-goers both young and old, and there is a distinct murmur of excitement in the room. The reason is that we are at the opening night of a new film festival, the BFI Film on Film Festival, at BFI Southbank (British Film Institute) in London.
The festival does what it says on the tin: Every single film screening across a long weekend is being shown on physical film rather than being digitally projected (as is now the norm in almost every cinema in the world). We are waiting to see a print of the classic 1945 melodrama noir, Mildred Pierce, cause for excitement in itself, but this screening is special because we are to view the great film on an original release nitrate print.
Nitrate film is extremely flammable and explosive, to the extent that it can cause catastrophic, lethal damage if mishandled. In May 1897, the Paris Bazaar disaster was caused by a nitrate fire, claiming 126 lives. This terrible event came early in cinema’s history (the first moving images were captured by the Lumière brothers in 1895), and led to a rush of regulation and legislation, as well as technical innovation. By 1948, a non-flammable alternative, acetate safety film, began to supplant its predecessor. This screening of Mildred Pierce is the first screening of a nitrate film print in the UK for a decade, and BFI Southbank is the only venue in the country that can legally screen these increasingly rare and potentially dangerous artefacts.
Robin Baker, the Head Curator of the BFI National Archive and the festival’s lead programmer, steps onto the stage to introduce the new festival and the not-so-new film. As he does so, he looks a little perturbed. Diplomatically, he explains that during testing, the skilled team of projectionists noticed an issue with the projector which meant that safety couldn’t be absolutely guaranteed. There will be no nitrate screening this evening. Handily, however, the BFI has created a brand new 35mm acetate print of the film which can be shown instead. Understandably disappointed, the audience lets the news wash over them. Once the lights go down and the projector whirrs into action, nobody seems to mind.
The moving image is by some distance the most pervasive cultural form in the world. In the smartphone and streaming age, it is everywhere, instantly, all the time. We are exposed to it whether we like it or not. Given the perception of instant access to the entire wealth of human culture, what is a festival like Film on Film trying to achieve? More importantly, why did thousands of people come to view battered old prints of forgotten films on a warm weekend in early summer in London?
In a sense, the answer is simple. Because it is possible to view an awful lot of content wherever and whenever we want, it’s easy to believe that we have access to everything. In truth, we absolutely do not. Though streaming platforms sell us infinite choice, in reality, only a proportionally small handful of the history of cinema is available to view digitally. Most films only exist on celluloid. If you cannot project them on film, you can’t see them at all. The issue goes deeper still: Approximately 80% of all films made before the year 1930 are currently completely lost, unavailable to view in any format. Your average Netflix subscriber may not mourn the loss of the last viewable print of a 1923 German Expressionist oddity, but that’s not to say that it isn’t a valuable historical document, or indeed an important aesthetic statement that deserves preservation.
Almost all of the films shown at the festival came from the extensive collection of the BFI National Archive, one of a number of globally significant film archives, alongside others such as the Cinémathèque Française and the UCLA Film & Television Archive, who preserve, curate and restore screen heritage. Without these organizations, our access to the work of even famous filmmakers would be cast into doubt. In 2012, a project by the BFI National Archive restored Alfred Hitchcock’s first nine silent feature films, none of which were viewable prior to this work.
People want to see films that they can’t see anywhere else, but they also want to experience a film print projected, with an audience, because that is how the filmmaker intended the work to be seen. BFI Film on Film Festival showed a lot of underappreciated classics, but on its closing night, it also screened an original release print of Jaws, complete with the original mono soundtrack. Despite being a film that can absolutely be seen at the click of a button, the screening sold out fast, perhaps because people wanted to experience the film as it had been seen upon release. Through the print they were shown, that audience was linked to the audiences who saw the very same print in the summer of 1978: a continuity of experience through time, transmuted through acetate and light and thrown into the ether.
If a film was made before the turn of the millennium, chances are that the filmmaker shot it on film, and expected the work to be exhibited in cinemas on film prints. A digital rendering is not better or worse than celluloid, but it is crucially different. On film, the focus may be slightly softer, the grain of the image may be more apparent. Over time and with repeated use, slight movements in the frame or imperfections may become visible. Anecdotally, when DCPs (Digital Cinema Packages) began to replace film prints in cinemas, some projectionists thought that there was something wrong with the digital images they were seeing: The sharpness of the image and smoothed movement had rendered the old magic of cinema eerie and uncanny.
There is now a whole generation of film viewers who may never have the opportunity to see a film physically projected. It’s no wonder that demand for this experience is high. While the global casualization of film watching habits continues, it is important for organizations with a platform to advocate for the value of the cinematic experience. Currently, only one other film festival in the world screens exclusively on film: The Nitrate Picture Show, held at the Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York.
As a new generation of cinephiles looks to engage with the history of the medium, perhaps the Film on Film Festival will be the beginning of a broader movement towards an analogue experience of cinema. The festival’s organizers have pointed to the vinyl revival of the last decade as another example of largely young people searching for something authentic, tangible and physical amid the onslaught of digital consumption. The nuanced aesthetic differences between listening to a record and, say, streaming it on Spotify are mirrored in the even richer, audiovisual experience of celluloid film.
Engaging with the materiality of film also raises the question of preservation. As the amount of ‘born digital’ content swells daily, most of it held within a variety of proprietorial fiefdoms, the challenge of how to effectively catalogue and preserve digital moving image materials becomes ever greater. Organizations such as the Internet Archive continue to fight the good fight in preserving digital heritage and advocating for a free and open internet, but while it may have success in doing the former, the dream of open access has largely died.
Many people implicitly believe that preserving digital materials is both easier and safer than preserving physical film or paper collections, for instance, but this is not the case. If Netflix or YouTube were to disappear tomorrow, none of the content they hold would have its safety guaranteed, and could disappear much more easily than an ageing film canister. To begin the hard and ongoing work of countering these risks, the BFI National Archive has struck a deal with major streaming platforms including Netflix and Amazon to preserve key British material from their collections. The agreement ensures that whatever the long-term fate of the companies, these materials will be safe for future generations to interpret. This is the first such deal of its kind globally, but other organizations will be looking to follow suit. As the amount of potentially at-risk content increases, the issue becomes ever more pressing.
Back at the festival, the sometimes precarious balance between preservation and access was thrown into sharp relief by a couple of screenings. One of these was Charlie Shackleton’s The Afterlight. Only one print of this film exists, and it tours cinemas along with its director. Every film print has a finite lifespan, a limited number of times that it can be screened, and by only creating one print of his film, Shackleton plays with our formal expectations of cinema, which, along with still photography, was the first art form to develop with the expectation of indefinite reproduction. By enforcing scarcity, seeing a screening of The Afterlight is to be reminded of the ephemerality of experience, and to leave with a newfound appreciation for the act of watching. It forces the question of how our viewing might differ if we knew we could never see the images again.
To emphasize this point, the screening of 1968’s The Swimmer was determined to be the last time this particular cinematic release print of the film could be publicly exhibited. The print has now returned to the BFI National Archive for safekeeping, but its quality has deteriorated to the point that running the reels through a projector for an audience would carry too high a risk of permanent damage. A cult adaptation of the 1964 short story by John Cheever, starring Burt Lancaster, the festival audience watched the film in the knowledge that no one else would be able to see this particular print ever again.
Both of these screenings point to the increased contextual pleasure, and complexity of emotion, that can be gained from appreciating both the form and content of a physically projected film. The festival celebrated the films themselves and the stories being told. It also served as a timely reminder of the importance of the artefact of the print, and what a specific print (and its story) can bring to the experience of film viewing.
For the disappointed opening night crowd who were denied their nitrate fix, the last day of the festival brought happier news, when the planned nitrate screening of the 1941 Technicolor curio Blood and Sand, starring one Rita Hayworth, went ahead as planned, with no injuries reported. The festival had brought like-minded film lovers together to experience something unique, in many cases, for the first time. One of the most striking observations from across the weekend was the strong and continued presence of younger people, turning out in great numbers to see physical film. Streaming platforms aren’t going anywhere, but neither is the desire to get together and engage with art. The enthusiasm for a communal, analogue experience gives hope for the future of the cinematic experience more broadly: an experience whose obituary has been prematurely written by every generation since its birth.
Artist duo Cooking Sections’ work combines art and activism, using food as a gateway to…
Interview by Johanne Björklund Larsen
Just because a bed is empty, doesn’t mean it can’t be filled with longing.
Interview by Angela Waters
“The risk is of human stupidity, not artificial intelligence.”
Interview by Marie Dapoigny