Arts & Culture
Walt Disney’s ‘love affair’ with Australia
16mm films should be experienced, not just seen
Forget streaming and YouTube, 16mm films are ready to relive their moment in the spotlight … of a projector
Published 30 December 2024
Scattered across the University of Melbourne are more than one hundred 16mm film prints – many of them stored away, gathering dust.
Some of these prints, like Nathaniel Dorsky’s 1983 experimental film, Ariel, are extremely rare and one of only a few remaining in the entire world.
It is time to bring more of them back in front of a projector lamp and let the world see them the way they were intended.
Is film the new vinyl?
While analogue film is yet to have the retro-futurist appeal of ‘outdated’ media like vinyl records, over the past decade, it has experienced a re-emergence of global interest.
This interest is in part because film has become a trademark format for award-winning directors like Christopher Nolan, Kelly Reichardt, and Miguel Gomes.
Last year, people travelled huge distances to see Nolan’s latest movie, Oppenheimer, where it was being specially projected from a 70mm IMAX film print (rather than digitally projected, which is now the norm in most cinemas).
Kelly Reichardt shot her 2016 film Certain Women entirely on 16mm film.
Celebrated Portuguese director Miguel Gomes still uses 16mm in his films, including his latest, Grand Tour (2024).
First released in 1923 by US company, Eastman Kodak, the 16mm format is now over 100 years old, having reached its greatest popularity in the decades after the Second World War – mainly due to its mix of portability and fine-grained quality.
16mm refers to the width of the film (other standard formats include 8mm, 35mm and 70mm). For many resourceful filmmakers, 16mm sits in the sweet spot between quality, portability and cost.
Today 16mm film maintains a niche allure despite the arrival (and now dominance) of video streaming services.
However, there are now cinemas like the Revival House in Perth making a virtue of screening a range of cult and classic movies on 16mm, 35mm and 70mm film.
A rare privilege
Unlike the University of Melbourne’s Special Collections, which are housed in the Baillieu Library and overseen by specialist curatorial staff, the University’s film collection has suffered as it's not considered a Special Collection or held in any central collection.
Instead, the films are dispersed across faculties, student services and campuses.
Some prints can even be borrowed off the shelf by anyone with a library card, and access to a 16mm projector to play them.
Similarly, the Prints and Drawings Collection, established in 1959 by a gift of 4,000 European ‘old-master’ prints from Dr Orde Poynton, is overseen by a curator and exists for staff and students from across faculties to access for object-based learning, research and exhibitions.
It is a rare privilege to have film prints in their original form – rather than in digital copies.
A great example of a rare and significant 16mm print in the University’s collections is Morning Procession in Yangchow (1978-1981), a film shot initially on 8mm film and finished on 16mm.
American filmmaker Daniel Barnett was on a sponsored visit to China in 1978 (shortly after the death of Chairman Mao) with a delegation of educators when he recorded the footage that would become the basis for his series of films on China.
Morning Procession in Yangchow reveals details of a funeral procession that the filmmaker witnessed in the street one morning.
But rather than the typical documentary that you might expect, Barnett uses frame-by-frame, repeating shots and slows down some images using a process called step-printing, to dignify and abstract the otherwise objectifying gaze of his foreign camera lens.
None of this would make much sense to digital natives, normalised to a world of abundant surveillance and Premiere Pro – who might never have encountered a roll of analogue film before.
Here the individual frames of the physical film determine the final sequence of the finished work.
It is an excellent illustration of the importance of showing film through a film projector to truly experience and understand the work.
Presenting this film is a learning experience for students that cannot be replicated with a digital reproduction.
The majority of the 16mm film prints owned by the University were made in the era of independent and artist-filmmaking that grew out of the expanded arts of the 1960s.
Arts & Culture
Bringing a living archive to life
The most recent 16mm film in the collection was made by the Australian experimental and avant-garde filmmakers, Arthur and Corinne Cantrill, in 1996.
The oldest 16mm film in the collection has it's origins from exactly a century earlier, in 1896.
This 1896 reel collects a ground-breaking program of short films that were shown together in London’s Leicester Square on 20 February 1896 – produced by the French inventors of the Cinématographe, August and Louis Lumière.
The Lumière Program was first presented by their British agent, magician and performer, Felicien Trewey, to an audience unaware of the impact moving images would have in the next century.
Louis Lumière supposedly remarked at the time that the cinema is “an invention without a future”.
In 1956, the British Film Institute (BFI) re-released this program of Lumière films as a 16mm print, edited and updated for modern conventions.
This included the likes of the 24-frames-per-second standard of the modern projection apparatus established for the cinema in the 1920s, and still used by directors like Christopher Nolan.
Dusting off the canisters and loading the projector
The question of projecting of these 16mm films has been the focus of a recent project by our team of researchers and teachers at the School of Culture and Communication.
When possible, we think film students should see films in their original format.
In the classroom or small cinema, 16mm film projection introduces students in Screen Studies and Art History to a richer history of media.
Focusing their learning experience not just on the film, but also on the apparatus used for its delivery, the 16mm film projector, makes it as important as the film itself.
The Lumière films are easily seen today on video streaming sites like YouTube.
But the 16mm projector – of which there is only one currently in service at the University – is perhaps the closest students can get to experiencing the original conditions and environment for the presentation of these films.
Allowing students to access and begin to research these films, in the original medium, opens exciting new avenues that might lead us back to the future.
A future where, despite Louis Lumière's pessimism, films like Nolan's Oppenheimer, which was shot (and released) on film in 2023, can win seven Oscars.