Carolyn Funk has handled thousands of miles of celluloid. She works for various repertory theaters and museums in New York, one of the last places on Earth where it is still possible to build a career as a film projectionist. According to Screen Slate, there are usually between four and 12 celluloid screenings in the city each day. The dark booths where Carolyn spends her working hours are meant to be invisible to moviegoers. For her, they are private worlds of machinery, images and sound.
In medieval times, nuns and mystics were confined to tight, enclosed spaces. It has been suggested that enclosure elicited visions.
Sometimes it can feel like that in the projection booth. You’re alone in this dark room with no windows. The hours are brutal. But you’re producing these images, these visions, on the screen.
I learned to project in 2006, when I was a grad student working at the university cinema. The head film tech offered to teach me, and I was so excited. It’s not an easy skill to learn.
I learned through trial and error that summer, which is something you cannot do now that film is so rare. I was given room to make mistakes, like when the soundtrack showed up on-screen because the reel was wound incorrectly.
In 2007, I got my first job as a projectionist, at Anthology Film Archives, and joined New York’s projectionist union, Local 306.
The union was founded in 1913. At its height, in 1950, it had 2,450 members. Its members were considered blue-collar laborers.
When I joined, we still had a healthy membership because all the major multiplexes used film.
But between 2010 and 2012, membership decreased dramatically. That was when all the major movie theaters switched to digital projection. Many projectionists lost their jobs, and the art of film projection became an even more specialized skill.
The experience of seeing a film is so ephemeral. It’s hard to comprehend how much of the job is physical.
Now, all film is considered archival and projectionists are required to do in-depth print inspections. Studios don’t make hundreds of prints of a single film anymore.
I lay the film out on a rewind bench with a little light box, looking for damage.
Celluloid is so beautiful and tactile. It’s heavy and translucent. It can sometimes smell like vinegar. You can see scratches made by previous screenings.
Every time a film is screened, it is damage from an archivist’s perspective, but the point of a print is for it to be shown. I recently projected a series of Hiroshi Shimizu films from the 1930s that the Museum of the Moving Image had shipped from Japan. They had never been shown in the United States, and they could be screened only once. Handling those prints was a beautiful experience.
My specialty is reel-to-reel projection, which most archival films use. Reels can be up to about 20 minutes long, and you need to switch them out throughout the screening. So a two-hour film is usually six reels. It’s very labor-intensive, and you’re tied to the screen, looking for these cue marks that signal when to do these changeovers.
The machine is noisy and fills the whole environment. You can forget yourself. I sometimes feel as if I’m part of the machine. For that reason, it’s rare for me to be moved by a film from the booth, but I’ve had some exceptions.
For example, I screened a collector’s print of David Lynch’s “The Elephant Man,” which I had never seen. It is such a beautiful, moving movie; I remember crying in the booth while I watched it.
I have always had plenty of work as a projectionist in New York, but there’s nowhere else I could do this job.
There are celluloid screenings every day in this city because there are so many arthouse theaters. There’s a community of people who really appreciate the experience of being in a theater.
I am freelancing at museums and theaters now because I started to feel burnout. Working 14-hour days alone in dark booths is exhausting.
I also screen digital, which is its own presentation, skill and technology. You’re ingesting files, building playlists, testing and sometimes reformatting digital content. It still requires a lot of attention to detail and a skilled technician, but it’s a different headspace. You don’t feel as physically connected to the process.
It might be the same movie, but the experience is vastly different, just as it might be for the audience.
You can still have a deeply moving experience, but there’s nothing like celluloid. Celluloid is magic.
