A Week Spent Behind the Projection Booth: Screening Experimental Shorts in Ottawa

On Monday evening, listening to the cooling fan of the 35mm projector inside the booth, I pictured how the week would unfold. When I told the theatre manager I'd programmed five experimental short films to screen over five days at a small venue in Ottawa, he gave me a look that said, "Will anyone actually show up?" Honestly, I wasn't sure either. But the most fun happens precisely when you're not sure.

Tuesday. War with the Equipment

The first screening was a 16mm film developed by hand processing. The problem was that while our venue's projector did physically support a 16mm gate, the sprocket tension was unstable. During rehearsal, the film jammed in the gate once, and I swear my heart dropped to the floor. In the end, I manually adjusted the tension spring and applied a tiny amount of silicone lubricant to the film path to fix it. Being a projectionist might look romantic, but in reality it's a constant string of physical problem-solving.

I counted the seats before the screening started. Thirty-two people. More than I'd expected. When the first short began, the audience fell silent. Rough, grainy black-and-white images flowed across the screen, and instead of a soundtrack, only the optical noise of the film itself resonated. I heard someone whisper from the back, "Is this a movie?" That question is exactly why I put this program together.

Wednesday through Thursday. Cracks and Conversations

Wednesday's screening was a digital work, a piece made by intentionally corrupting a video file's code using glitch art techniques. During the DCP conversion process the colour space got warped, making the colours completely different from what the original artist had intended. Two hours before the screening, I urgently contacted the artist, got a ProRes file, and switched to outputting directly from a laptop. It wasn't part of the plan, but it saved the image on screen.

On Thursday, I talked with the audience after the screening. One person asked, "Isn't experimental film just the director's self-indulgence?" I'd been waiting for that question. My answer went like this: narrative film was also an experiment at first. When montage techniques first appeared, audiences were confused. The film grammar we take for granted today is the accumulated result of someone's experiments. I don't know if that audience member was convinced, but at least the conversation continued.

Friday. The Last Night

I placed the most challenging program on Friday. It was a dual-projection screening, running two projectors simultaneously to layer the images. Technically, the key challenge was syncing the two projectors, something that would be handled simply with timecode in digital but in analog requires manual cueing. I ran three rehearsals, and during the actual screening there was a moment where they drifted about two seconds apart. That accidental misalignment actually created a curious rhythm.

The audience was around forty-five people, a remarkably good number for a weekday screening. Afterward, a young film student came up and asked where to start if they wanted to make handmade films too. I told them to dig through the NFB archives first and gave them a few sources for 16mm film stock. Moments like these are what keep me doing this work.

As I locked up the venue and packed away the equipment, I tallied up the energy I'd poured into the week. Equipment rental and film shipping costs came to roughly $800, and ticket revenue didn't even cover half of that. By the numbers it was a loss, but the value of this work doesn't live in a spreadsheet.

The projection booth is cramped, hot, and loud. But watching the images I chose unfold on the screen, and seeing someone's eyes change after watching them, nothing else can replace that. I'm thinking of scheduling the next program for winter. This time I plan to go in a direction that combines sound art and video, and I'm looking into a somewhat larger space. Before the fatigue of the week has even faded, I'm already looking forward to the next one.