‘Feel the film’: Film projectionists and professional memory

Abstract

Deploying concepts of professional memory and communities of practice, this article draws on interviews with two generations of film projectionists in Brno in the Czech Republic to investigate the profession of film projectionist as a phenomenon at the boundaries of memory studies, sociology, social anthropology and film history. From this standpoint, a study of cinema employees’ professional memory revises and refines the concept of cinema memory as examined from the cinemagoer’s perspective. The article sets out the key tropes of projectionists’ memories and discusses them in the context of the legal background, professional status, standards of good practice and relationships within the professional community. Analysing the conditions under which the professional identity of film projectionist has been formed, it takes into account the current obsolescence of traditional screening techniques and analyses the significance of film screening quality and the related perception of the projectionist as a creator of a screening as significant motifs in projectionists’ memories.

Filmic memory texts: Seeing America’s archeological turn from salvage to conservation in Spadework for History

“…It is a memory text whose inclusion in those future archeological analyses will be generative and revealing. Studies of professional practice using audiovisual-evidence lenses can prompt a deeper reading of positionalities, materialism, and embodiments (Česálková, 2017; Nardi, 1996: 7; Lee, 2021). Spadework for History , created by an archeologist, reveals the perspective of one such professional from inside the field.…”