A 10 point guide to sav­ing 35mm

There is some­thing roman­tic and noble about 35mm purists who don’t just bemoan the film industry’s tran­si­tion to dig­i­tal but force their every mus­cle to keep swim­ming against the tide. The Close-Up Film Cen­tre on Brick Lane has just opened for busi­ness with a John Cas­savetes sea­son screened entire­ly on film. The process of trans­form­ing from a cult video store (with a col­lec­tion of world cin­e­ma organ­ised by coun­try) to a 40-seat cin­e­ma fit­ted with film and dig­i­tal pro­jec­tors, was an epic ven­ture in terms of both fundrais­ing and labour. But as of 1 July 2015, the cin­e­ma has landed.

Damien Sanville is the man who made this hap­pen. He gave us a tour of the new premis­es which has a spritz of mag­ic con­cealed from the casu­al street pass­er-by. A cof­fee shop flanked by shelves of DVDs holds the front space. But pot­ter around and a pile of great round sil­ver cans – the top one labelled The Killing of a Chi­nese Book­ie – become vis­i­ble in a small side room. The old way lives here. The cin­e­ma itself is tucked away too. In this clean and dark­ened envi­ron­ment, Sanville explained how his two and a half-year project was final­ly realised.

“You can’t run on one pro­jec­tor because most prints now are unique and there­fore the dis­trib­u­tors and archives don’t want any kind of manip­u­la­tion of the film. Before – when many cin­e­mas were equipped with just one 35mm pro­jec­tor – the film would arrive in the box in six or eight reels, depend­ing on the length, and the job of the pro­jec­tion­ist was to check it, but also splice it togeth­er into one big reel or put it on what is called a plat­ter sys­tem and then run it through the projector.

“After the show, or after the sea­son, they would then break the film again into small­er reels and send it back to the dis­trib­u­tor. That is not pos­si­ble any more. At the time, you had loads of prints in cir­cu­la­tion, so it was fine if they get dam­aged. There was lot of manip­u­la­tion with cut­ting or splic­ing. But that’s not pos­si­ble any more because there are very, very few prints. For instance, Open­ing Night that we’re show­ing, we had to send it back because it was then trav­el­ling to Aus­tralia for a screen­ing there. To be able to access those prints and to show them, you have to have a change over sys­tem where you actu­al­ly put reel one on one pro­jec­tor, reel two on the sec­ond. Then once reel one is fin­ished, it’s all synced and reel two starts and the pro­jec­tion­ist exchanges reel one for three, etc. So there is a lot of work behind it, but at the same time there’s no manip­u­la­tion, cut­ting, touch­ing or splic­ing the actu­al films. Once the film has come through, it gets put back into the box and goes back to the distributor.”

“The guy I bought the pro­jec­tors from told me that a few years back he did exact­ly the same set-up for the BFI and it was worth £60,000 – that’s just for two Kino­tons. They used to be extreme­ly expen­sive machines, but with the dig­i­tal rev­o­lu­tion and DCP being the main for­mat at the moment, what hap­pens is that most cin­e­mas decid­ed to chuck them out and make every­thing dig­i­tal. There is this belief that dig­i­tal can be just run through one com­put­er and you press ​‘play’ and pret­ty much any­body can do it, which is a myth on its own because there are a lot of adjust­ments and things to be looked after as in any kind of pro­jec­tions, regard­less of the for­mat. But for them it was just a mat­ter of sav­ing mon­ey on staff and also the con­ve­nience of receiv­ing a box which is a dig­i­tal file that you put straight into the machine.

“So what hap­pened is that most cin­e­mas start­ed to chuck them out. Lit­er­al­ly, just dump­ing the pro­jec­tors. There are bin peo­ple who knew about it. It’s a small world once you’re in this cir­cle. A lot of peo­ple talk, so you call X cin­e­ma and they say, ​‘We’re going to get rid of that one very soon. Do you want to pick it up?’ There’s this guy who has this lit­tle com­pa­ny called Cin­e­ma Mem­o­ries and he col­lects those pro­jec­tors. We got every­thing for £2,500 and that’s includ­ing the PA and machines on the audio side that are already worth £2,000.”

“We had a lot of help from oth­er cin­e­mas, or oth­er places or oth­er peo­ple, who found equip­ment or had some spare equip­ment and kind­ly donat­ed it to us. Also bar­gains and things, because even if we just had DCP, it would already be extreme­ly expen­sive. A DCP pro­jec­tor, for instance, is the same sce­nario – we’re talk­ing £10 to £20 to £30,000 and we got it for £3,500 because there were these love­ly peo­ple in a cin­e­ma in Ipswich who were just get­ting rid of it. It was sit­ting there for a long time and they were not nec­es­sar­i­ly after the mon­ey, they just want­ed to find a good home for it.”

“It’s real­ly easy to get a pro­gramme togeth­er, any­body can do that, but then how do you make it hap­pen in terms of find­ing the prints? Anoth­er com­pli­ca­tion is that it’s all good when the archive or the dis­trib­u­tor has the print as well as the rights attached to it, but it’s quite com­mon to have, for instance the print at the BFI and the rights have owned by some­body else. That can become also quite tricky and time-con­sum­ing. It’s still absolute­ly fea­si­ble. It’s not spe­cial­ist work. It’s just a mat­ter of find­ing out whether the print is avail­able, first of all, and then who’s the right own­er is. And that goes for DCP as well. Tech­ni­cal­ly we’re just talk­ing about the phys­i­cal­i­ty of the print ver­sus the DCP which is more com­mon, but there are cat­a­logues which are avail­able, as well. They’re not nec­es­sar­i­ly up-to-date which is a bit of a pain. There is research involved but it’s not a big deal real­ly. That’s just part of the work, I suppose.”

“At the moment we are only try­ing to work with the prints that are avail­able in the UK. When it comes to inter­na­tion­al ship­ping for prints, it’s extreme­ly expen­sive, to say the least. At the moment we’re just try­ing to have a sim­ple pro­gramme that is also based on the films that are avail­able at, for instance, at com­pa­nies like BFI, Park Cir­cus and con­tem­po­rary films. Once we all get used to the whole cin­e­ma coor­di­na­tion and man­age­ment and we’re a lit­tle bit more on top of things, we’ll become a lot more adven­tur­ous in terms of sourc­ing prints which are in Amer­i­ca, Europe, Japan, etc. That will imply, because of the cost, con­tact­ing embassies and cul­ture cen­tres, to get some punc­tu­al fund­ing to be able to ship those prints. For that we need some time.”

“If I was pre­sent­ed ini­tial­ly with the entire thing – the plans and the mon­ey involved – I would not have gone down this route. It’s financed pri­vate­ly, most­ly by knock­ing on doors of friends, fam­i­ly, banks and things like that. It was always grad­ual in the sense that the over­all fig­ure was very very high, but each time it was a step at a time so it was like 20k there or 30k there. In total its cost about a quar­ter of a mil­lion – prob­a­bly a lit­tle bit more. I lost track at some point. We’re still strug­gling to catch up with a lot of loans and things every­where. It was worth it. Now it’s there. It’s a mat­ter of the next chap­ter which is about bring­ing peo­ple in and see­ing these films.”

“Kick­starter failed because we didn’t reach our tar­get which was prob­a­bly rather ambi­tious. I think that it failed in the sense that it was very abstract for a lot of peo­ple. They thought, ​‘What is this thing of a cin­e­ma com­ing from the guys who run this video shop on Brick Lane?’ They didn’t have a good insight into the scale of what we were actu­al­ly doing. But then we ran a cam­paign on our web­site and we raised about £8 – 10K. The Kick­starter being every­thing or noth­ing, we lost. There was a lot of sup­port but we didn’t reach our tar­get. It was a lot of work but it was a very inter­est­ing expe­ri­ence. I’ve learnt a lot. What is the impact of social media? How does it trans­late into actions?”

“On Twit­ter every­one was retweet­ing think­ing they were doing the good deed but actu­al­ly this didn’t trans­late to a dona­tion. If we had £1 per tweet we would have reached out tar­get, no prob­lem. It’s the same with the pro­gramme. You see all this buzz and noise on social media – a lot of peo­ple talk­ing about it, a lot of peo­ple say­ing, ​‘Wow, that’s great,’ but it doesn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly trans­late to tick­et sales and peo­ple com­ing to the cin­e­ma. The whole oper­a­tion was pos­si­ble because of the land­la­dy and my friend, Gwen­dolyn Leick, who gave us carte blanche in rela­tion to the works and rad­i­cal­ly trans­form­ing the premis­es. She’s also giv­en us a 99 year lease, so we’re here to stay. It’s real­ly sol­id. If it was not for her gen­eros­i­ty and the unique­ness of her way of facil­i­tat­ing those kind of things. It would have not hap­pened, peri­od. Rent-wise and from every per­spec­tive. I tend to call her the Peg­gy Guggen­heim of inde­pen­dent cinema.”

“I tend to com­pare that to paint­ing, right. What would be the point of going to see a Turn­er – a beau­ti­ful pic­ture of a Turn­er. It’s exact­ly the same. DCP is extra­or­di­nary in terms of the tech­nol­o­gy and the qual­i­ty but it’s com­par­ing an oil pant­i­ng with a fan­tas­tic pic­ture of the paint­ing for sim­ple rea­sons that – I’m not going to go exten­sive­ly into the descrip­tions why – but one of the most impor­tant exam­ples is: with film the blacks are cre­at­ed by the obstruc­tion of light, where­as in dig­i­tal the blacks are cre­at­ed by light going through a spec­trum of colours so black is still made of light. Anoth­er thing is that film, as you know, is made of 24 frames per sec­ond which means that you have a lit­tle strip of black in between each image. You can’t per­ceive it, it’s not pos­si­ble – but it cre­ates rhythm, it cre­ates an imper­cep­ti­ble rhythm which is lost with dig­i­tal. There’s no frames as such. There’s a beam light and that’s that.

“So there’s all these ele­ments that makes film, film: its tex­ture, how it feels, its fab­ric and this can be only expe­ri­enced once one is watch­ing the film. Peo­ple com­ing here watch­ing the John Cas­savetes films were absolute­ly amazed by the fact that it was 35mm, and they could tell. There is this myth as well when you talk to any­one in gen­er­al, they’re going to say, ​‘Well, I couldn’t tell the dif­fer­ence between DCP or dig­i­tal and 35’ it’s like, ​‘Yeah, you could.’ If we were to screen the two films side-by-side it would be so obvi­ous it would be almost like watch­ing a colour film ver­sus a black and white film. There’s this obvi­ous­ness or con­trast. It’s a com­plete dif­fer­ent medi­um all togeth­er. I think that is being grad­u­al­ly lost in terms of the under­stand­ing because peo­ple are just used to see­ing DCP. Most cin­e­mas if not all cin­e­mas now are equipped with DCP.”

“Good luck!”