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| The Spring of 1915 found James Hive-Maker in France, where gas warfare had begun at the Battle of Ypres. | ||||||||
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We can't keep our mind on the show; we keep glancing back at the machine, like good projectionists. This detachment is important. If you (as projectionist) watch the movie (already seen 100 times) with any emotion at all, the machine will sense it, and in sympathy begin to pay attention to the image also. Since the dead eye of the lens should either only emit or absorb, this creates a contradiction at the most basic level of the machine's being (after all, it is made by human labor guided by human thought, and so has some accidental vagueness or dual purposiveness built into it, and perhaps is even capable of random kindness/violence). This initial contradiction will eventually (in seconds) sympathetically effect other parts of its basic churning nature. The most likely victim of this new sympathy is the gearing that converts the continuous into the discontinuous (from the feed of the reel to the instant stoppage of every frame in front of the lens) Stop and start will begin to mix... the machine will try to pull the frozen strip, or stop the moving strip. Incredible strain on the substance of the celluloid. The camera is made of metal and glass... the filmstrip, however, is made of celluloid, a sort of plastic paper, a by-product of something that was once alive (soybeans). The projector won't break, but the body of the film will tear, a terrible accident (inevitable)... and then you will never get to see how the picture (which you've already seen) ends. And the audience (if you have one) will complain... |
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 02:16
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