Reel Change: A History of British Cinema from the Projection Box

The book explores the history of cinema in Britain from the perspective of projectionists, highlighting their overlooked and undervalued role. It documents the key facets and challenges of their work, evaluates their contributions to the big screen experience, and examines the exploitation and poor working conditions they faced. It also examines the recent transition to digital projection and its impact on projectionists.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 256 pages
Publication date: 05 August 2022
Publisher: John Libbey & Co

Ten years ago, a technological revolution swept through cinemas around the world, as analogue projectors were replaced with digital equipment. This transformation not only removed the plastic medium of film from projection boxes but also evicted the human projectionists who had been in charge of screenings for most of the history of photographic moving image projection. Projectionists had been hidden from the sight of audiences for most of their history, and their redundancies went largely unnoticed and unremarked upon. This book focuses attention on what has been happening behind film spectators' heads for the past 130 years and attempts to write the history of cinema in Britain from the perspective of its habitually overlooked and undervalued projectionists, beginning in the silent era and continuing to the present day. Drawing upon extensive archival research and lengthy interviews with former projectionists, it documents the key facets and challenges of their work, and how these evolved in response to previous waves of significant technological change. It evaluates how projectionists helped to design and maintain key aesthetic characteristics of the 20th century big screen experience. It shows how the institution of cinema in Britain has been historically underpinned by the harsh exploitation of projectionists by many employers, detailing inadequate wage levels and poor working conditions that formerly provoked government investigation, and explaining why these problems were never successfully ameliorated by trade unions. It also charts in depth the recent fateful transition to digital projection, delineating how and why projectionists were so swiftly and ruthlessly consigned to the past, and assessing whether this form of ent.

Weight: 434g
Dimension: 225 x 151 x 22 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780861967513