The Magic Lantern: How I Started Writing About Movies

Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680). author of Ars Magna Lucis et umbrae.(The Great Art of Light and Shadow). When I joined Facebook in 2009, I used this image as my profile picture for the first year until people I knew complained that they wanted to see my actual face.

Besides being the year I became a commie-greenie, 1988 was the year I started writing movie reviews, an activity that decades later would come to dominate my free time for years on end.

That fall of '88 was my last semester at the little liberal arts college I attended. I'd satisfied all my physics major requirements, so I was free to take any courses in the catalog that struck my fancy, just to complete the credits necessary for graduation, Among the electives I signed up for on a whim was a film studies course in the English Department---the only film studies course they offered that term, taught by the only professor who taught film. As described in the title of the course, it was designed to examine a specific topic within movie history.

As with most young people then, I took great delight in seeing and discussing movies. In high school in the early Eighties it seemed like all we ever did was go to movies, indoors and at the drive-in. It was rare to miss one of the big ones. 

But as for old movies, my viewing history was limited, and included mostly the ones they'd shown on local television late night on weekends, always edited and chopped up for long commercial breaks. In junior high every guy had his favorite old movies they had showed this way. We looked for our favorite titles each week in the Sunday newspaper, to see if the local station managers had scheduled them.

By college, I'd also seen a few art house revivals, such as the Hitchcock re-releases I saw in Berkeley, or some random classics that been shown at the theater at the CSU student center, Beyond this, I had little consciousness of the history of movies, or film as an art form. Movies were just movies---to be consumed with popcorn. I might recognize the names of famous stars and directors of the past, but would not have been able to tell you much about any of them. Only special movie-obsessed people studied this kind of thing, like my junior high friend James, who had wanted to be a film director, and who had gone off to the University of Chicago to take sophisticated courses on the artistry of the cop movies and old westerns we had watched together, and their relation to the cinema of foreign nations.

These kind of people knew lots about movies. I wasn't one of them. But at the end of my college career, in between filling out graduate school entrance applications, I could finally take a course in film history and pretend to be knowledgable about it for a semester.

Our college is so small it didn't even have a proper movie theater, so the class was held inside a little viewing room in the theater building on campus.  The specific topic of course that semester was something that struck me as random and esoteric, but which now seems almost painfully on point in predicting the direction that the humanities would take in the years to come. It was how movies can contribute to the formation of our very concepts of gender.

The professor was one of the cool grey beards of the English Department---thin, soft-spoken and affable. He wore jackets that had patches on the sleeve. He didn't push his views as dogma but delivered his lectures in a relaxed way as if raising open questions for us to consider, as if he himself were considering all these things for the first time, which in 1988 might well have been true. Also he probably knew that first wave Gen-Xers at a small college in Oregon weren't ready for anything more advanced than that.

At the beginning of the course I went to him and almost apologized. I confessed to him I hardly knew any film history or theory, which I suspected might be an unspoken prerequisite for getting a good grade in the course. He assured me I'd do fine. I get a big laugh thinking about that now.

It so happened that I also needed a work-study job, as I always did each semester, to earn a few bucks. By then I was tired of working in the computer lab as I'd done before, so when the professor of the film class mentioned on the first day, as he handed out the syllabus and the viewing schedule, that he needed projectionists for the course viewings, and that it would be a paid work-study job, with no previous experience required, I leapt to be the first one to talk to him after class.

This work-study job is important to mention because it happens that at the same time I was doing all this, I was also working on the staff of the campus newspaper as one of the editors. As for most tiny colleges back then, the campus newspaper was a part-time activity that got busy only at sporadic intervals for a few days, since we went to press every couple weeks at most, and on no fixed schedule.

In case you didn't know, college newspapers, even big ones, are typically desperate for good writing, It might be more accurate to say that they are desperate for passable writing they can depend on students actually writing and submitting on time. At deadline time, it was not fun was to have a big blank rectangle in your page layout because a volunteer student writer hadn't delivered their copy, and was begging off the whole thing because they had a tough midterm coming up. You couldn't do anything about it. Your ad guy might be able to go out last minute and hustle more revenue from local businesses or the administration to fill the empty column inches. If all else failed you had to make up an unpaid "campus interest" announcement to fill the space.

So when it looked like we might be short of copy for the first issue, Adam, our layout and graphics guy whom I had met the previous spring, made a suggestion. He had learned, during the hours we had toiled over the macs and light tables in the basement of Doney Hall, that I was a passable raconteur. How about I write movie reviews for the paper? People liked them. They were a typical stable of campus newspapers, and no one else that semester wanted to take on that role.

I agreed at once. I'd written news and sports stories before, but movies were different. Writing about them seemed special. The idea that my opinions about them would be read and pondered by other people flattered my ego from the start. Of course I was only going to review new movies, the ones in theaters, not the ones in my film class (that would have been way too uncool)

We both agreed that I needed a persona and title for this regular feature. In my film class I had already discovered a weird phenomenon about being a projectionist. The realization was that trying to watch a movie while also being the behind-the-scenes operator of the projection apparatus, and attending to all the things that came with that responsibility, seemed to impart a curious psychological shift in the way I watched the movie itself.

I noticed that being the projectionist necessarily pulls one out of a suspension of disbelief repeatedly in the most brutal way, more so than just being in your audience seat. Much of the time, at least in the old days before modern digital equipment, one had to keep the suspension explicitly at bay, to make sure the viewing experience is seamless for the audience. Simply watching out for the little white dot in the corner of the frame, that tells you the end of the reel is coming so you can switch from one projector to another, was enough to make me feel like I was experiencing the movie in a subtly different way than everyone else in class. This is not to mention the emergency action that one has to take if the film breaks in the middle showing it, which was almost certain to happen at various times in the semester with the 16mm prints we were using, that came every week in the mail in octagonal metal boxes covered with labels from the distributor. This phenomenon of the film itself breaking in the middle of a movie is famously depicted in one of the movies we showed that semester.

At the time I thought maybe this realization was significant and interesting in a novel way. At least it was something I could write about, and when you're young, having something to write about is a big deal. So I decided to call my campus movie review column The Projectionist. In my first column, in audition to reviewing the movie itself, I wrote about the psychological shift I have just described, from seeing a movie from the booth and not from the auditorium (even though I saw the movie itself under normal conditions).

Many years later, and a few years before I started this blog, but by which time cinema had come into its own as an academic subject, I was reading one of my friend Thor's film history books about the origins of cinema. Most people think of the stage theater as the obvious cultural antecedent of movies, and certainly it is part of that, but the author asserted that the origin of movies encompasses many strands of influence beyond that, specifically the magic lantern shows.

Magic lantern shows were a popular phenomenon that went back many centuries in Europe, probably to ancient times, and were present in other cultures as well. The magic lantern shows thrilled audiences with light and shadow effects---phantoms and fantasy creatures---which the audience often accepted as real on some level. The fact that magic lantern shows no longer exist in the age of cinema---whereas stage theater still continued to thrive for decades after movies appeared---testifies to the continuity of the spectacle between magic lantern shows and movies (it was television that killed the stage).

The author of the book mentioned Athanasius Kircher, a 17th-century Jesuit priest who had written a treatise on the magic lantern show. Kircher made a systematic study magic lantern show operators to investigate how they worked. His eventual motivation for writing the treatise was a rational, scientific one. He wanted to show that the magic lantern shows were not in fact supernatural, as many people at the time asserted (including the promoters, for obvious reasons). By diagrams and descriptions, Kircher showed that the effects seen by the audience were ordinary natural phenomena produced by the operator manipulating light and shadow with various types of lantern apparatuses.

When I read this I realized at once that Kircher had somehow written about being the "projectionist" in exactly the sense I had tried to capture in my newspaper column. My realizations about movie watching, at least the spirit of them, were thus very old, having been expressed three hundred years before I was born (let alone by the auteurs of the 1960s).

As with so many things in my life, it gave me great relief when I realized that someone else had done something, or was doing something, that I thought I had to do myself, because I thought that only I could do it a certain way,

That's a recurrent theme in my life.  Almost all the time, when I think it is incumbent on me to express something about the world, it turns out other people have said the things I would say, and they are saying them better than I ever could. Movie reviews are just one example.

I find it funny. that I can't for the life of me recall any of the movies that I actually reviewed for the my column in the campus newspaper. Maybe if I think long enough, or if I looked at the list of movies released that fall in theaters, the titles would come back to me. No way would I dig out the clippings from my files to read them. That would be too much cringe to bear, as the kids say.

By contrast, I was recently able, without much effort, to recall all of the movies we watched that semester in that film class, the ones I actually showed as a projectionist. It took about ten minutes to recall all of them, from the Hollywood classics at the beginning of the semester all the way up to Rainer Fassbinder's In a Year of 13 Moons. This last film, made in 1978, seemed outrageously edgy at the time we watched it, but these days it would be standard Oscar bait in Hollywood.

How many college classes do you remember the entire syllabus for after thirty years? Whenever one of those movies comes on TCM it's like seeing an old friend again. At the very end of the semester, as part of the final paper we had to write, we had reshown the same Hollywood classic move that we had started the semester with, to highlight the spectrum of gender depiction we had studied across the term.  I would suppose that makes it the ultimate Hollywood film about gender construction (Spielberg would probably agree).

It's a classic movie I'd never even heard of it at the time, but has since become one of my all-time favorites. I'm a sucker for it when it comes on TCM, where it is shown regularly. I almost always wind up watching it again. I introduced it to J, who likes it too, for some of the same reasons I do.

In 2014 when I was in Los Angeles, I even got to meet one of the stars of that film while she was being interviewed by Robert Osbourne as part of the TCM film festival. She was well advanced in years by that time, of course, since the movie was made in 1951. I crashed the interview by booking a room at the Roosevelt Hotel and coming down through the lobby during the taping. Normally I wouldn't care to meet celebrities, or to be in the audience for something like this, but given who it was, I could not pass up the opportunity.

There was just a small crowd of people, so it was easy to slip in. Before the star came out, I threaded my way up to the edge of the little stage they had constructed in the lobby and stood beside the camera operators. I faithfully obeyed the director's instructions to us on how they wanted the audience to stand while the interview was happening. During the taping I grinned wide in a photogenic way the whole time because I knew they would want viewers of TCM to see the audience having fun when they spliced in the reactions for the broadcast. I think I wrote about this in this blog at the time, as part of my travelogue. Both Osbourne and the star have since passed away alas.

So in the end my insight about being a projectionist was not original at all, but that's true for pretty much all my thoughts and feeling from my college days, including especially the ones that created the most drama at the time, that I would never want to write about now. And my career in Hollywood wound up being just one role as a walk-on extra on television. That's the way I'd prefer to keep it. It was the perfect role for me. It's not enough to get my own imdb page, but my friend James has one!