An £8,000 projector ushers in future for independent cinema

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jul/08/digital-cinema

Hampered by distributors' demands and the move towards digital, indie cinemas have found an affordable solution

Light work … digital projection provides indie cinemas and film-makers with more screening options Photograph: Sunset/Rex Features

The picture on the ageing silver screen in front of us is unquestionably of theatrical quality. The independent film-makers Michael Bergmann and Doug Underdahl move around, checking from all angles. It is, as Bergmann has warned, different: not film's luminous grain nor video's harsh flatness. This digital image is thrown by a high-end Leica business projector powered by … a Macbook Pro running QuickTime Pro. Two emissaries from Leica's nearby US headquarters seem stunned. They had no idea their projector could throw a 1920x1080 image 100 feet at 24 frames per second in this quality. For comparison, Bergmann slips in an ordinary DVD. We all agree – ugh.

Bergmann's latest film, Tied to a Chair, for which Underdahl was director of photography, and which recently won the best in festival prize at the Heart of England International Film festival, is caught in two traps, like many independent films. First: the transition from film to digital. Second: shrinking distribution for independent and art films. Bergmann's movie has been digitally produced but the Washington theatre in New Jersey, which wants to show it, only has film projectors. Buying a digital projector costs $60,000 (£37,000). A good 35mm transfer about the same. Neither film-maker nor cinema can afford it.

We Leica it

It was during this impasse that Bergmann read about Leica's £8,000 Pradovit D-1200, and thought its specifications might suffice. Theatrical digital projectors are either 2K (a resolution of 2048x1080) or 4K (4096x2160).

To compensate, Bergmann and Underdahl have placed their rig in the 10th row of the audience, blocking off about 20 seats. Underdahl, who co-designed and fabricated the remote-controlled pan/tilt head for the deep-dive segment of Titanic, has built a box to hold the projector and laptop. For a commercial cineplex with a projectionist who services six or seven screens at once, it wouldn't work. But for an independent cinema or a film festival, it may change the game.

The digital cinema analyst for Screen Digest, David Hancock, believes Europe and Asia are about two years behind the US in terms of digital screens but are catching up. "At the end of 2008, we had nearly 9,000 screens," he says, talking of the large commercial exhibitors. "And then recently, a lot are going for 3D." Most US screens are either converted or signed up. We are getting close, he says, to the tipping point – "the time when you can no longer justify 35mm as a format because most screens are digital. We're not there yet."

The situation is very different for the independents, who make up 40% of UK screens and control only 20% of the box office. Largely, the problem is money: who pays for new projectors? "There is a huge problem in Europe and the US with independent cinemas who don't belong to a circuit and don't have the mass to do financial deals," Hancock says.

Venues such as the Washington theatre (which also shows first-run Hollywood films) are dying everywhere. Marco Matteo, who grew up watching movies in this 1927 theatre, wants to restore it and turn it into a multipurpose community resource that shows movies, stages concerts and gives local students hands-on facilities. That is also Hancock's vision. "I think of 35mm as a good-quality, single-bladed knife," he says. "But digital is a Swiss army knife. The options are there, and it opens up a whole new world of entertainment. You can take back what the cinema started as – a broad content entertainment medium." Before television, cinemas showed news, serials and drama. "A 35mm projector can only show what's on a reel that comes in at some expense." Digital can come from anywhere – radio, TV, satellite.

He doubts laptops are the answer. What is making digital cinema take off, he argues, is standards. "The DCI [Digital Cinema Initiatives] creates a minimum standard that people can have confidence will go forward – a single universal standard so we're not ending up in a world where there are 15 or 25 different projection systems using different coding."

You could, Hancock says, "get one distributor or producer to give you a film. But if you're a cinema and choose to go that route you're severely limiting your access to films. It still needs encryption."

Under lock and key

The studio system is tightly locked down. Not only encrypted, but supplied with a key delivery system so that the file only opens on a specific server to show on a specific projector at a specific time. The more likely approach for independents, he says, is to create a buying group large enough to negotiate better prices.

But that assumes everyone is as paranoid about protecting their copyrighted streams as Hollywood, and that may not be true. The film-maker Nina Paley, for example, explained at the Ebertfest film festival in April that she refused to agree to distributors' demands that she sign over all rights to her film, Sita Sings the Blues, for five to 10 years.

Instead, she bucked the system by putting her film on the net (sitasingstheblues.com) under a Creative Commons licence and inviting the audience to distribute it. Two distributors have picked it up, and the film is now booked at festivals in 2010. Paley has arranged a DVD release in response to audience demand.

Alongside Paley, Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, directors of the Katrina documentary Trouble the Water, said that even winning the Sundance Grand Jury prize and being nominated for an Academy award didn't help.

"We didn't self-distribute," said Deal, "but it feels like we are." Would it really be so surprising if independent theatres and independent film-makers created their own system? One they could afford?