An Antidote to Sterile Cinema — BFI Film on Film Festival

Barely five minutes have passed the scheduled start time of the opening night gala for the inaugural BFI Film on Film Festival (9-11 June) and NFT1, the iconic main screen at the BFI, is already awash with rumours. One person whispers that the rare nitrate print of Mildred Pierce (1945) is damaged beyond repair, as another quietly suggests the famously unstable format has already caught flames. When Robin Baker, Head Curator of the BFI National Archive, steps on stage there's an uncharacteristic but palpable tension. Due to issues with the projector's fire suppression system, he explains, the screening can't go ahead as planned, so high is the potential risk of death by fireball. Somewhere within that unexpected drama lies the beauty of film projection.

Over the course of a particularly balmy weekend in June, Film on Film saw the BFI play home to screenings of classics new and old, every single one of them projected on film, be it tempestuous nitrate, grainy 16mm, or gloriously rich technicolor 35mm. Even twenty years ago such an undertaking would have been relatively pedestrian—after all, the first ever digital film premiere, the otherwise unnoteworthy Jurassic Park III, only took place on July 17th 2001. And yet now, with new releases distributed near exclusively through DCPs (Digital Cinema Packages), Film on Film sticks out as a wondrous celebration of film as a medium in addition to film as an art form.

Part of the reason digital has become so dominant is its relative ease of use and standardisation—a person watching Tom Cruise beat up bad guys on the big screen in Singapore is likely having a one-for-one theatre experience with their simultaneously seated counterpart in Germany. But, as Baker explains during his short speech before Mildred Pierce, there's a tangible quality to the projection of film that makes each theatre experience akin to an individual performance, never to be replicated again. The slight sliding movement of the images as the reel turns in its place; the flickering of the shutter opening and closing at twenty-four frames-per-second; the sound of the projector itself, if you're sat close enough to the projectionist's booth. Even just the knowledge that there's someone behind the scenes working tirelessly to keep the movie in motion adds a new quality to each screening.

No-one knows that better than Cornish filmmaker Mark Jenkin, director of Bait (2019) and Enys Men (2022). It's his new short A Dog Called Discord (2023) that actually opens the festival, shortly after Baker's reveal that—shock!—the BFI had of course foreseen the potential nitrate issues and prepared an alternate 35mm stock of Mildred Pierce. Commissioned by the BFI especially to mark the festival, Discord finds Jenkin on reflective but effusive form, chronicling his own experiences with shooting and processing film. The narrative, what little of it there is, follows Jenkin as he develops an old reel donated to his collection by an unknown party and finds a lolloping dog bounding across the frame, long dead but trapped in the negative till that very moment. It's a dorky but charming look at the personal nature of celluloid, each frame irreplaceable by its transient nature.

A more straightforward review of the rest of the weekend's films—a multi-decade, multi-discipline offering ranging from Charlie Shackleton's eulogy to 35mm film decay The Afterlight (2019) to the vintage dual-strip 3D presentation of Alfred Hitchcock's iconic stereoscopic thriller Dial M for Murder (1954) and a rare original nitrate print of Blood and Sand (1941)—would perhaps be beside the point. Nearly 50 years on, it's unlikely that anyone is unfamiliar with the virtues of Jaws (1975), the festival's closing gala. Instead, what Film on Film illustrates is how drastically different the experience of projecting film is from digital, and certainly from the often-frustrating compression of home streaming.

That difference was felt particularly keenly during a Technicolor screening of Frank Perry's cult classic The Swimmer (1968), one of hundreds of misplaced and forgotten prints the BFI acquired from an air freight service company working out of Heathrow. Most known for its use in major productions from the classic Hollywood era—think the shining brilliance of the yellow brick road in The Wizard of Oz or the hard panel lighting of Douglas Sirk's melodramas—the three colour process employed by Technicolor lends The Swimmer an otherworldly hue, the bronzed barrel chest of Burt Lancaster threatening to burst out of the screen at any moment. Where another Eastern Color print of the same feature had supposedly long since faded, the Technicolor reels (labelled simply with “good colour” when it was found) have readily held their own—or at least, they had. Due to print shrinkage, it's likely the last time that specific dye-transfer print will ever be screened, casting an added air of finality over an already strange and melancholy feature.

Film on Film also serves as a reminder of the essential difference a measurable resource like celluloid has on the creative process. As a result of its limited length and shelf life it comes to have an intrinsic value; as Jenkin observes in Discord, “It should be treated as finite. If a frame has a cost, a frame has value.” At a screening of seminal turn-of-the-millennium drama Morvern Callar (2002)—itself subject to hushed murmurings after the new 35mm print wasn't ready in time for showing, fortunately traded out for a gorgeously pristine archive version—director Lynne Ramsay, actress Samantha Morton, and producer Robyn Slovo discussed shooting on film as part of a pre-film panel. As Morton observed, digital filmmaking has partially led to a loss of confidence in human process; every take checked on monitors by a coterie of suits, every shot considered for its potential coverage rather than its individual merit. Without an opportunity for errors or happy accidents, some of the life of film is lost.

If there's one running theme at Film on Film, it's that essential liveliness. Each screening crackles with the variable nature of celluloid projection; the grain and blooming colours on screen reflected in the changing sea of faces before it. Perhaps it's for that reason that the audience responds as they would at a theatre rather than with the disinterested chatter of a multiplex. When Mildred slaps her awful daughter in Mildred Pierce, an unrestrained cheer from the back row elicits waves of laughter. The few seconds of black and low dull tone of a reel error during Morvern Callar is somehow more titillating than most action sequences. And each time that the credits appear and the curtains begin to twitch, the outburst of applause feels completely fitting—for that exact version of that film will never be screened in that exact fashion to those exact people ever again, each screening a little death. You might know what film you're seated for at Film on Film, but what comes next there's truly no predicting, in what amounts to a welcome antidote to sterile screening experiences everywhere.

BFI Film on Film Festival was at BFI Southbank from 8-11 June www.bfi.org.uk/film-on-film