While promoting Magnolia at the end of the 1990s, Paul Thomas Anderson spoke about digital projection in cinemas as one of his biggest fears: “Ultimately, it’s like watching the best TV screen in the world as opposed to watching 24 frames flicker through light, which is a hypnotic and wonderful experience that should never go away.” In the decades that followed, other famous filmmakers expressed similar feelings. During a conference in 2014, Christopher Nolan weighed in on the issue, sharing a slightly more open-minded yet still skeptical position. “I’m a fan of any technological innovation, but for me, it’s going to have to exceed what came before, and it hasn’t yet,” he said.
Since the early 2010s, digital technology has become the norm in mainstream cinemas and film projectors have mostly disappeared. In the world of independent movie houses, however, film projection still survives. In the United States, 35 or even 70 millimeter screenings of films can often be found in cities like New York and Chicago, with plenty of demand for rep screenings as well as screenings of movies like Brady Corbet’s newest feature, The Brutalist, shot on film with the intention of being projected in that format. This is well-known to most people. What isn’t as obvious is that many independent cinemas also use digital projectors, not just because most movies today are shot using digital cameras, but because of the format’s quality and the unique advantages it brings to the table.
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Jack Theakston is a projectionist and archivist with over 20 years of experience working in multiple premier venues in the United States. When talking about digital projection in cinemas, he claims that most people are unaware of how much the technology has improved in the past couple of decades. “If you look at the first film digital projectors that showed up on the market in the early 2000s, there’s no comparison,” he says. “We’ve gone from sub-2K quality to 2K quality to 4K quality, and now we have HDR in the mix and laser projection, which is more efficient as well.” While the question of which format looks better under ideal conditions is a contentious one with strong opinions on both sides, there is no doubt that, in 2024, digital is more than capable of delivering an excellent quality that will satisfy most movie-goers. If that is the case, are there any downsides to modern digital projection?
Leaving aside aesthetic concerns, the main complaint raised against digital is related to the equipment. The cost of a good projector can be in the six figures and repairing them can mean a big investment for movie theaters. That’s not mentioning that, as science moves forward, there is a real possibility that projectors might become obsolete in the near future. This makes digital less desirable when compared to old film projectors, which are made to last for a very long time. This complaint is not universal, though. According to Theakston, “it is more expensive to maintain a digital projector on paper, but it is more expensive to maintain a film projector now because none of these parts are being manufactured anymore.”
For the American film historian and curator Max Alvarez, the bottom line is that “if the cinema is a serious cinema run by serious people, when they install a digital projector, it will look great.” Despite this, he firmly maintains that film is the superior medium when it comes to projection. “For a while, I was buying into the trend and saying ‘Well, times change. Technology changes. It’s time for a new look in cinemas and digital projection probably is the way to go.’ But in the 2010s I made the mistake of going to Lincoln Center to see an archival 70 millimeter print of a Robert Wise film from 1968 and it looked magnificent. It looks so much richer, and there was so much texture and depth there. It was far superior to having seen something digitally.” Andrew Lewis, who currently works as a projectionist for the New York art house New Plaza Cinema, feels similarly. While his experience with projection is limited to digital technology, he is fascinated by film and is “constantly on the lookout for 35 millimeter screenings.”
However, when recounting anecdotes related to film screenings, Lewis also mentions a handful of bad experiences. Even ignoring extreme examples, most cinephiles who go to film screenings are familiar with scratched or poorly maintained prints. For cinemas this can be a major hassle. For 24 years, Chris and Nasim Kuenzel were the owners of the CAMEO Art House Theater in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where they used film projection up until the 2010s before transitioning to digital. When bringing up the topic, the first thing that comes to Nasim’s mind is the time they had to cancel an event because the print they received for the screening was unacceptably scratched. “That’s one of the horrible things about the actual 35 millimeter. You’re hoping that the guy before you did a good job for the last 20 years,” she says. Chris agrees – just transporting and manipulating the film prints was difficult and required extreme care, and bad prints are not rare. “Prints coming in with scratches… When we had film, I would say, there was at least one a month.” For the Kuenzels, who retired as the theater’s owners this past August, there are just too many inconveniences when trying to run an independent cinema in a smaller city like Fayetteville, and the benefits of one medium over the other were not something they could worry about. “We’ve been so focused on finding ways to get the audience back – since the pandemic, you know – that the whole projection aspect is something that we just kind of take for granted,” says Chris.
Digital projection has also helped cinemas in other less controversial ways. In the past 20 years, the advancement in digital technology has allowed for a revolution in film preservation and restoration. For Theakston, “digital is essentially a godsend for maintaining quality while being able to tackle projects and problems that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to do in the photochemical world.” According to Bruce Goldstein, who has been working at the New York art house Film Forum as a repertory programmer since the 1980s, “digital has opened up the world of repertory cinema for theaters that could never do 35 millimeter.”
Hundreds of classic titles have been digitized in the past decade and found their way into cinemas around North American and the rest of the world because of new technologies. In the days of film, shipping costs and the fragility of prints meant that companies were very selective when distributing old movies. Today, small theaters of all sorts can showcase old, rare films easily. “Some of the recent digital restorations are gorgeous,” says Goldstein. “And I think the audience would prefer to see that than an old beat up print that was faded, for example.”
At the same time, Goldstein is not in any way against the use of film. “We do a lot of 35 millimeter screenings at Film Forum for the simple reason that the younger audience is thrilled to have 35 millimeter.” To him, the popularity of digital projection has given way for the showings of 35 or 70 millimeter to become more of an event. The uniqueness of the medium makes people excited, which is a way for cinemas to make things feel special. “We have more options now than ever before, and I think that’s great,” he says.
