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Faber and Faber
Introduction to Projections
By John Boorman
Photo: © Bill Rubenstein
John Boorman
Master director John Boorman welcomes online readers to what will be a regular strand of this Faber and Faber page: Projections, a home both for new writing on film and for outstanding archival content from Faber's long-running book series of the same name, co-edited by Boorman himself.
The only certainty about the future of film is uncertainty. It will change, as it always has. As of this moment, Projections, the annual book about the movie-making process which Walter Donohue and I have edited for 15 years, also changes. It goes online.
I shot my last film, The Tiger's Tail (2006), on the digital Genesis camera developed by Sony and Panavision. My first job, fifty years ago, was joining film shots together. I scraped off the emulsion at the edge of the frame with a blade, painted it with acetate cement, then pressed the two frames together until the cement set. Many young people working in editing today have never seen a sprocket-hole. My 14-year-old daughter, like many of her friends, has an editing program on her computer complete with special effects. I had the privilege of working with the great Albert Whitlock who produced a locust swarm for me by moving a magnet under a sheet of glass on which he placed iron filings. Today, CGI has created monsters, imagined worlds and restored the old Hollywood boast of 'a cast of thousands'–or at least, thousands of duplicates.
Old men for whom I worked when I was young had worked–in turn–for the pioneers of film when they were young. We are only three generations from the Lumière brothers and Griffith.
The luminosity of black-and-white silver nitrate stock was replaced with the much admired three-stripe colour negative, then by multi-layered colour emulsions which faded with time, and later by ones that didn't. Now we are witnessing the demise of this 19th-century invention. I hear directors and cameramen much younger than me weeping for the end of film. In fact, it has already happened. Most movies shot on film today are digitally graded. That is, they are digitalised, edited, then scanned back on to film for distribution. Find me a cameraman who would forgo the scope and possibilities of digital grading. Digital projection in theatres is growing by the year. Film is finished.
So, Projections Online will not have the formal pieces that made up the 14 volumes which sit on my bookshelf. Instead, we encourage movie practitioners to post their experiences on this website, and to build together a Wikipedia of the movie process.
Reading this over, I have to admit to a twinge of nostalgia for holding a book and a piece of film in my hands. But let's move on and not look back.