Abstract
In order to document, investigate and analyse the soundscape of the analogue projection box before it passes into history, a series of audio recordings was made within functioning boxes, a selection of which have been released as an ‘album’. The recordings, made in UK boxes that maintain both 35mm film projection and digital projection, also capture the shifting sonic texture of this environment as it changes from primarily analogue to primarily digital operation. This article explores the role of phonographic field recording as a practical methodology within a film historical research project that investigates the role of the film projectionist and cinematic projection throughout the history of cinema exhibition in the UK. It proposes a set of systematic principles for approaching the use of phonographic field recording in this context, and shows how they may be applied. Through an analysis of both the recordings themselves and the experience of making the recordings, it extracts some observations regarding the character, history and culture of the projection box as a lived environment and workplace. Just as cinema-goers seldom get to see inside this hidden room at the back of the auditorium, these sound recordings also reveal it to be a soundproofed box, a noisy environment in which the interface between operator and machine takes audible form, in which noise of one sort indicates smooth operation, while another sort indicates faults that need to be addressed. The article considers the legibility of noise and proposes that the relationship between projectionist and machine is significantly aural as well as visual and tactile.
Highlights
This article describes an attempt to adapt and integrate sensory ethnographic procedures within a film historical research project
As part of my work on the Projection Project I made a series of audio recordings within working projection boxes in the UK, which document the sonic environment of the film projectionist’s workplace
The recordings, made in projection boxes that maintain both 35mm film projection and D-Cinema digital projection, capture the shifting sonic texture of this environment as it changes from analogue to digital operation
Summary
Beyond making these vital supports of the cinema experience invisible, the enclosure of the projectionist and their equipment within the projection box ensures that they remain inaudible. While the background inadvertently comes along for the ride and often emerges as a valid source of information for analysis, it is seldom the case that the background is the primary subject of the original recording In this respect the field-recording practice of Ernst Karel and its role within the wider work of the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Laboratory (SEL), provides a key reference point and methodological model for my approach to the recording of the projection box. Barrow glosses the significance of this approach nicely: ‘recording estranges lived experience; by isolating sound’s aesthetic qualities, it makes it possible to think historically about what lies behind them’ (ibid.: 16) This function rests upon the separation of sound from image: to ‘isolate’ and ‘estrange’ through the decision to represent only the soundscape of an environment. The recording asks for a critical attentiveness to sound in the absence of a visual reference point, in order to facilitate alternative ways of thinking about the sources of the sounds
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