5 Questions With: Head Projectionist Jesse Crooks
5 Questions With is a recurring feature where we sit down with a member of the film community to get their unique perspective. Here, we ask Jesse Crooks, our Director of Operations and Head Projectionist, about celluloid and his preparation for the Ambler Theater’s upcoming 35mm screening of Baby Face (1933).
Why is film still relevant?
I would say it’s the superior medium, for sure. When it’s in good condition and shown correctly, I think that it’s always going to blow digital [projection] out of the water. With black and white film especially, if it was a well done restoration, or an original print that has a higher silver content in the emulsion than later reprints, it’s going to look better. Hands down.
[Baby Face] is an archival print that’s been preserved by the Library of Congress. To this day, photo-chemical film has proven to have the longest longevity of any motion picture format. You still have playable nitrate film from the dawn of the film era. With digital formats, no one knows for sure how they’re going to be able to access video one hundred years from now. When you look at format obsolescence and the number of formats that we’ve gone through in the past twenty years — a lot of people don’t even have disc readers anymore — how are you going to watch a Blu-ray or DVD? That’s not to mention the fact that those actual storage formats degrade, as does magnetic tape, as do hard drives. The idea of long term preservation of digital media is still very much an open question at this point.
When you’re watching this print, you’re watching the same print that audiences have seen on screen for decades. If you think about the scratches or damage on the print, you can view that as the life it’s lived, the experience of past viewers, the equipment it’s been run on.
What goes into running a film like this?
In terms of inspection, you have to actually run it through your hands and feel for damage, look for damage. Literally every inch of film passes through your fingers as you inspect it.
Because it’s from an archive, they have very specific handling and projection requirements. You’re only allowed to run a film like this is you run it reel-to-reel [on two separate projectors], without cutting it apart and splicing it together. That also means that you need to have a dedicated projectionist there for the entire run of the print. Here we’re going to have two projectionists, one for each projector, so that someone is constantly monitoring the print as it is being projected. Especially with an acetate print like this, which is an older print, one tiny tear could cause a film break, and you need to be able to respond immediately to that. You need to keep an eye on the focus, adjust the tension to make sure that the image is stable, and keep your eyes on the projector — as well as the screen — at all times.
What should we be looking for when we see a film on 35mm?
To me, there’s a luminescence that’s lost when you show something on a digital format. The quality of the light is different, the contrast is noticeably different. It’s like looking at different mediums, like gouache versus oil paints, you know? There are differences in them that you might not say are better or worse.
What’s the future of 35mm exhibition?
There are some places moving forward with new 35mm installations and there are a lot of places that never got rid of it. Now that we’ve gotten past the immediate industry crisis of digitization for first-run films — within the space of a couple of years became the only format that people could run if they wanted to show first-run films — people are beginning to once again appreciate the value of running 35mm and 70mm. Think of how far people are willing to travel now for one of the new films being released on 70mm.
A lot of organizations, such as ours are including more 35mm in their repertory programming. It’s still the best format. And still the format that’s known to last the longest. In the last year we’ve run prints that are from the 50's. I think the oldest one was from 1951. We’re still running those exact prints, and 50 years from now, people will be able to run the same prints we’re running now, you can’t really say the same for whatever digital format is the standard for one fleeting moment as technology rapidly changes.
What drew you to film?
I’ve been a film projectionist since 2006. Before that, I ran a little bit of 16mm film in college. Even when we were running film full time for our first-run titles, I preferred it to other formats. This is especially true for original release prints from the 50’s and 60’s, and technicolor, which gives you colors on screen that you just don’t get with most other film. You literally get a color palette that isn’t represented anywhere else. That’s always been my favorite part of the job.
I love getting to work with archival prints, really special films that can look better, and haven’t been seen on screen for decades. Being able to work with the challenge of dealing with the peculiarities of either old archaic repairs, or issues with the way the film is aging over time. Being able to look at a print and see what a projectionist did with a piece of film fifty or sixty years ago is pretty amazing.
Baby Face is presented as part of our Hollywood Summer Nights series, and plays at the Ambler Theater Wednesday, August 15th at 7:30pm. For more information on upcoming classic film and other special events, you can view our lineup here.
