Film, video, schools

I have no idea what the economics of this are or anything about it at all, really, but, just as digital video has made movie cameras (the ones that use film) dirt cheap and digital SLRs have made once-expensive film cameras affordable, we ought to be able to open a few art house theaters using regular movie projectors and 35mm and 16mm film. It might cost more in the long run, but video projectors cost a fortune.

I haven't been to a movie in years, but don't 35mm and 16mm prints still exist?

Filmmakers are still shooting in 16 and 36mm for various reasons.

I remember being slightly surprised that schools switched to photocopiers and stopped using ditto machines (spirit duplicators, called a Banda machine in the UK or Roneo in Australia, France and South Africa). Now they just wheel TVs into classrooms instead of showing 16mm films.

I was just in on the earliest phase of this. In junior high school, you could pitch in a quarter and they'd rent a 16mm print of some movie they'd show in the library during lunch. The only ones I remember them showing were Bullitt and the old Casino Royale with Peter Sellers. I never watched any. They always collected the quarter (equal to $1.10 today) at the end of the week when I was out of money, so I'd sit around in the hallway annoyed that I couldn't use the library while they showed the movies.

A teacher taught a class called Star Trek. We would watch an episode the teacher recorded using the school's massive reel-to-reel Video Tape Recorder. The recordings were in black and white.

Another teacher's wife gave him a VCR for Christmas so he videotaped The Holocaust mini series and showed it in class. He said that if it was a copyright violation, they would sue the maker of the VCR, not him.

Then...then...it was high school.

Back then, there were hardly any movies available on VHS but an English teacher still taught a film class. We watched Battleship Potemkin on 16mm but almost everything else on video. We had to watch movies that had little place in film history, like The Lawman with Burt Lancaster (1971).

The Lawman was made around the time Hollywood discovered how to make people fly backward several feet when they got shot. We thought it was so much more realistic than the old days when people didn't fly backward. It looks stupid now.

It was a little like Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy. The Lawman's hobby was playing the flute.

A kid in class wasn't hip to the new, realistic westerns. He thought the Lawman should have shot the guns out of the bad guys' hands instead of killing them.

Then we all had to get permission to watch an R-rated movie. I was 18 and got to sign my own permission slip. It was a grimly serious class called Death & Dying about death in modern society. We watched The End with Burt Reynolds. Burt learns he has a fatal blood disease and decides to kill himself. He ends up in a mental hospital with Dom DeLuise.

Last I heard, and this was over 25 years ago, they watch movies in class all the time. They would end each segment with a movie sometimes vaguely related to the subject matter of the class. They would reward the children by showing them a movie, although video is everywhere now and it doesn't seem like much of a reward.