Abandoned Images by Stephen Barber

Author:Stephen Barber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

The Mystery of Film Projection 1

The Los Angeles Theater possessed the only surviving, operational projection-box among the twelve abandoned cinemas of Broadway; in the other cinemas, the projection-box had been rendered redundant, occasionally transformed, after the end of film-projection, into an improvised office or storage space before being comprehensively gutted, with the battered walls, as in the Rialto cinema, still pinned with pornographic posters or long-redundant delivery schedules, and the broken-glass-littered floors heaped with disintegrated papers and the same mixed deposits – of earth, plaster and finely-ground brick – that comprised the sedimental landscape of the auditorium’s floor. The projection equipment of the other cinemas was mostly long gone, broken down for last-ditch improvisational components to repair plasma televisions, or simply jettisoned into the street as garbage (the obsolete projectors of one moribund Los Angeles cinema had been consigned underground, to form part of the post-cinematic decor of the Hollywood and Vine metro station). A group of filmic die-hards conserved the Los Angeles Theater’s projection equipment in order, once each year, to screen a single film there, to preserve the vital suspension of cinematic abandonment’s moment, their zeal indulged by the financier-proprietor of the building. From the rear of the highest auditorium balcony, a steep spiral staircase ascended to a cracked doorway, and beyond that, the projection-box appeared: a long, oblong room, thick with dust, and sunlit from the open fire-exit at one end, which allowed the distant traffic cacophony of Broadway to bleed into the otherwise silent space. Fire-hazard signs were everywhere, along with negligently discarded film-cans. Two immense film-projectors subsisted from the cinema’s terminal screenings of 1980s exploitation films, though the projectors were at least three decades older; now barely functional and requiring extensive maintenance for their yearly reactivation, they mediated the living coma of cinematic abandonment. Beyond those projectors, a smaller slide-projector completed the line of vision-machines, arranged as filmic weaponry; installed at the moment of the cinema’s construction, in 1931, the slide-projector had been disused for a halfcentury or more. Against the back wall, the original editing-table had been positioned for the assembling of film-reels or for urgent repairs to celluloid that had snapped in mid-screening.

That room emanated in an intense form the mystery of film projection, of its origins and its end. It formed an edenic cinematic space, apparently created with a prescience of its own eventual redundancy in prospect, so that it could constitute a sensitized arena for inhabitation by film’s ghosts, by film’s end, and the ideal, incendiary-prone location for the dissolution into fragments, and incineration into ashes, of film’s final detritus. At this height, the medallion-indented gilt ceiling of the cinema could be seen in detail through the projection-box window; among the terracotta figures of cherubs and naked angels, deep fissures and discoloured patches of storm-seepage constellated that golden heaven, and a calm aura of ruination hung in the air, as though the cinema tolerated its own abandonment, provided it went no further, remaining poised a hairsbreadth from erasure. Only a few

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