CANS: Showing Analog Films in the Digital Age

Analog media is having a moment. Whether due to the encroaching dread of our AI-driven obsolescence, or the basic consumer desire for tangible stuff, the signs are everywhere. The music business is clocking vinyl record sales in the billions, and cassette mixtapes are part of the Marvel Universe. Instagram is awash in scanned Polaroids. Are we seeing a paradigm shift back to when things were things?

Nothing expresses this vibe shift stronger than the movies. Here in Austin, the iconic Paramount Summer Classic Film Series boasts “the most 35mm and 70mm prints we've screened in years.” Across the pond, the British Film Institute will screen its archival 1977 print of Star Wars, gleefully thumbing its nose at Lucasfilms’ replacement of the original trilogy with CGI-upgraded abominations. (Han shot first.) If you’re in the right place at the right time, you can even see a Carl Dreyer classic projected through nitrate, the notoriously flammable film stock that caused theater fires before being phased out in the 1950s.

Anyone born in the previous millennium grew up watching movies this way: projected between sprockets of physical film, typically 35mm in width. But like many things over the past two decades, the medium has mutated into binary code fed to streaming platforms, phone screens, and, theatrically, digital cinema packages (DCPs). 

All things being equal, not dealing with heavy cans of fragile film reels seems ideal for people in the business of showing movies. So who still does this and why? 

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The Alamo Drafthouse’s iconic Weird Wednesday series has been serving film-heads a steady diet of 35mm psychotronica for over two decades. In an email from late April, current programmer Laird Jimenez theorizes:

 There's nothing that compares to the look of 35mm film when it is in good to great condition. You're looking at light passing through a physical object. All digital information is binary, 1s and 0s, approximating (with increasing nuance and proficiency!) images captured in a real world that, as far as we know, cannot be reduced on any measurable scale to something so neat and tidy. Film is "organic." 

As recounted in the essential oral history Warped and Faded, Weird Wednesday was born when Drafthouse founder Tim League purchased a load of 35mm prints from a drive-in graveyard in the mid-2000s. He screened them as free midnight movies, essentially as a loss-leader for food and beverage sales, in order to quality check the prints. They were often a showcase for what neglected prints look like. 

Noting original programmer Lars Nilsen’s inimitable curation of the series, Jimenez, who took over in 2014, explains:

It wasn't uncommon for a print to have several breaks, focus issues, large chunks of frames missing. I think audiences today are slightly less patient with those kinds of things, but they too can be part of the experience. They lend a certain vintage quality to the images and give the experience a kind of feel that can be commensurate with the subject matter. When you show up to see something skeezy like 1973's The Baby: do you really want that presented as pristine as a new 70mm print of The Brutalist?

The difference being, of course, that modern moviegoers aren’t necessarily lining up around the block to see 1973’s The Baby. (More’s the pity.)  One source says the cost of a 35mm screening has doubled since 2019. Apart from movie production budgets: is there a point where a movie becomes prohibitively expensive to screen the old-school way? Per Jimenez:

 I don't know if I'd agree that it's doubled across the board, but it certainly IS expensive. Sometimes the entity you pay licensing rights to is NOT the same as the entity you pay to borrow the print from. There are many movies I love, and I would love to share with an audience, but the cost of bringing a print in would require that screening completely sell out just to break even. 

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For Eric Kohn, artistic director of the Southampton Playhouse in Long Island, NY, the demand for film-film is distinctly contemporary. Chatting over email in May, he noted:

In an age of digital overload, celluloid stands out as part of the experience economy because it’s so unique to something happening in the room. Of course, a lot of 35mm prints [also] have value for historic purposes, since many movies are unavailable in other formats. We are also seeing a trend toward 35mm projection of recent films that weren’t even shot that way, like Hundreds of Beavers.

The Southampton is currently preparing a 35mm projector to come on line this summer. Kohn adds: 

It’s been an exciting and fascinating process. We are engaging with the best archives out there, including MOMA and AMPAS, to understand how we can meet the highest standards for 35mm projection and treat these materials with the care they deserve. 

Kohn also has an IMAX screen to program, and further notes, “All these formats are valuable for different reasons, but they share one core appeal: You can’t replicate them at home.” The proof is at the box office. This year’s IMAX offerings (Sinners, Minecraft, Thunderbolts) have already done close to $100 million in business, well before the year’s halfway point.

A note on these special formats: 70mm is essentially ultra-widescreen, twice the width of 35mm. IMAX, while also 70mm wide, is much taller, capturing an image almost 10 times larger than 35mm. 

Image via https://archive.orartswatch.org/film-70mm-and-beyond-the-infinite/

All this is not to say that digital filmmaking is on the way out. Even in the upper echelons of art cinema, digital cameras help movies get made and distributed efficiently and cheaply. A recent post by camera giant ARRI claims that a majority of films competing in this year’s Cannes Film Festival were shot using their digital products.

Movies, expensive as they are, represent the ultimate intersection of art and business. Ideally, sacrifices are made to the latter, not the former, and celluloid today is a costly option. Analog may look great, but it doesn’t make things easier for creation, distribution or exhibition. The fact that Sinners was shot simultaneously on IMAX and 70mm cameras is a measure of Ryan Coogler’s clout, using not one, but two, expensive and bulky film formats.

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Interestingly, in an earlier era digital was seen as edgy and experimental. While The Phantom Menace was the first mainstream movie to be screened digitally, 1999’s other big digital hit was The Blair Witch Project. Adherents of the Dogme 95 movement took a perverse pleasure in shooting on consumer-grade digital cameras and blowing the image up to 35mm, as required in their manifesto. The early 2000s could be considered the golden age of digital experimentalism, with auteurs from Agnes Varda to David Lynch to Spike Lee executing their big-screen visions on DV camcorders.

Today sees the roles reversed, with analog film (including lower-res 16mm) providing the texture for projects that are otherwise destined for streaming sites and laptop screens, at best projected in a theater via high-quality DCP, at worst chopped to bits on TikTok.

Will analog cinema persist as a premium moviegoing experience for future generations? Or is it more of a niche for the die-hards who still remember the pre-digital era? It’s up to the people who make it happen.

The artisans who can prepare a print and deliver a seamless reel-to-reel changeover practice a nearly lost art, like being a shoe cobbler or blacksmith. Kohn is keenly aware:

We’re gaining a lot of appreciation for the skill involved in projecting 35mm as we seek out professionals who do it best. As a nonprofit with education as one of our core values, we hope to support the training efforts for future generations of film projectionists.

It’s quite possible analog will continue to coexist with the digital metaverse we spent so much time in. Ironically, one of the biggest factors in the resurgence of film culture is the tech platform Letterboxd. Distributors A24 and Neon, known for their social media-savvy marketing, regularly strike 35mm prints for their cornerstone releases. At the end of the day, there’s one simple reason to keep doing it, according to Jimenez:

I've heard people say it has something to do with the way the persistence of vision illusion functions, but I dunno. At the end of the day, I just think it looks cooler.

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The author’s top five notable 35mm screenings, a sidebar: 

Robocop Director’s Cut (Alamo Drafthouse)
The reinserted ultra-violent shots deleted from the R-rated version looked different from the rest of the movie, degraded and dirty, no doubt due to being stored in less-than-ideal conditions. This absolutely added to the effect of the notorious “shotgun crucifixion.”

Magic BMX (Weird Wednesday)
Fascinating for its near-total obscurity, this film does not exist digitally and was provided from Quentin Tarantino’s personal collection. It was one of the rare chances to see this movie, period, the kind of experience that leads to all sorts of existential thoughts. If a Taiwanese E.T. ripoff drops in 1983, does it exist in any other timeline?

Altered States (Weird Wednesday)
Zoomer quote of the decade: “Why don’t they make movies that look like that anymore?”

Face/Off (Hyperreal for Paramount Summer Classics)
I saw John Woo’s Hollywood triumph the summer it came out. The print that was secured for this 2023 screening could have been the same one I saw in 1997, with its super-crackly soundtrack and scratches aplenty. But along with the rush of Pure Cinema came a sense of nostalgia that a DVD or streaming watch wouldn’t have triggered.

Shogun Assassin (midnight movie, Cinema Village, NY)
Simply the wildest movie screening I’ve ever been to. I found religion in a 50-seater full of midnight miscreants hooting and hollering at every blood-splatter and badass line of dubbed dialogue. For 90 minutes it was the happiest place on Earth. The kids throwing popcorn during Minecraft have no idea.

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