Vintage Baker by Nicholson Baker

Author:Nicholson Baker [Baker, Nicholson]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-42994-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2004-08-29T16:00:00+00:00

Even after the electric motor eased the physical labor of the projectionist, silent film studios often furnished cue sheets along with their prints, which itemized the changes in speed that, like tempo markings on a piano score, were an important part of the experience of films such as The Birth of a Nation. One of the reasons silent movies can seem so ridiculous now (in addition to the fact that some of them are ridiculous, of course) is that they are frequently presented at the fixed, twenty-four-frames-per-second rate adopted for equipment in the late 1920s, in conjunction with the optical soundtrack (the ear can’t tolerate changes in speed the way the eye can), rather than at variable rates more in the vicinity of sixteen frames a second, as was conventional until then.

But despite these momentous changes—the stabilization of film speed; sound; Technicolor; the replacement of nitrate-based film with fire-retardant acetate; xenon bulbs; platterization—the really remarkable thing about the evolution of the projector over the past century is how similar in motive essentials a 1994 Simplex machine is to the original Armat/ Le Prince design. Film still moves on sprockets with sixteen teeth, and the crucial “intermittent” sprocket—the one that actually stops and starts the film—is still powered, as it was at Koster & Bial’s Music Hall, by a lovely piece of precision machinery called the Geneva movement, which was first developed by Swiss watchmakers to prevent springs from being overwound. The Geneva movement has two main pieces: a Maltese cross (or star, or starwheel) and a more pedestrian cam, both of which splash around half submerged in oil. The pin on the steadily turning cam slips into the slot in the Maltese cross and forces it to rotate a quarter of a turn and then stop dead, immobilized by the cam’s circular edge. When the star is stopped, a single immobile image floods the theater screen for a few hundredths of a second; when it turns, the film advances under cover of shuttered darkness. The moviegoer’s brain, hoodwinked by this succession of still lives, obligingly infers motion.

“You know what a Maltese cross is?” an itinerant projector-repairman with questionable toilet habits asks an incompetent projectionist near the end of Wim Wenders’s mammoth film-fleuve, Kings of the Road. The projectionist takes a guess: Some kind of drink? The repairman shakes his head sadly and tries to explain it to him. “Without this little thing, there’d be no film industry!” he says. The projectionist is unimpressed, and (because Kings of the Road is a semi-comprehensible art movie) he casually inhales the flame from a cigarette lighter to close out the scene. But the workings of the true star system, though they may take a moment to grasp (Fig. 2), repay meditation: seldom has a mechanism so simple, so unexpectedly heraldic, persisted without modification at the center of a ruthless business that has otherwise undergone continuous technical, artistic, and financial upheavals.

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