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List of projection and projectionists in film
It's fun to see ourselves on screen!
| Title | Director | Year | Type | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kings of the Road | Wim Wenders | 1976 | Featured | One of the most beautiful films featuring film projection, Kings of the Road follows a projector repairman and his suicidal cohort as they visit various theaters in Eastern Germany. |
| Sherlock,Jr. | Buster Keaton | 1924 | Featured | Buster Keaton as a projectionist who falls asleep on the job and enters the frame himself... |
| The Projectionist | Harry Hurwitz | 1971 | Featured | |
| Cinema Paradiso | Giuseppe Tornatore | 1988 | Featured | |
| The Smallest Show on Earth | Basil Dearden | 1957 | Featured | Peter Sellers as a drunk (yet committed!) projectionist working at a struggling theater |
| Inglorious Basterds | Quentin Tarantino | 2009 | Featured | |
| Goodbye,Dragon Inn | Tsai Ming-liang | 2003 | Featured | |
| Projection Instructions | Morgan Fisher | 1976 | Featured | Morgan Fisher's Avant-garde films often touch on film as a medium and projection. A good description of some of his films can be found here |
| Night of the Comet | Thom Eberhardt | 1984 | Incidental | a high school girl shacks up in the booth with her projectionist boyfriend, leaving her as one of the sole survivors after a comet eradicates most of humanity. |
| Gremlins | Joe Dante | 1984 | Incidental | The gremlins gather in a movie theater to watch Snow White. Chaos ensues! |
| The Muppet Movie | James Frawley | 1979 | Incidental | Animal is the projectionist as the Muppets watch a cut of The Muppet Movie. Needless to say, some film frames burn. |
| Zodiac | David Fincher | 2007 | Incidental | No actual projection booth scenes, but one of the main suspects in the Zodiac murders case is a projectionist who works in a silent film house named Rick Marshall. Marshall doesn't appear in the film as a character, but there is a scene where Jake Gyllenhaal's character visits the house of a friend of Marshall's ( a silent film organist) and sees his creepy basement film collection. |
| Fight Club | David Fincher | 1999 | Incidental | One of the more well known projectionist scenes in film, Brad Pitt's character shows us how cue-marks work and how he spends his time splicing porno frames into regular films. |
| Reel Paradise | Steve James | 2005 | Incidental | |
| Cinema-Komunisto | Mila Turajlic | 2010 | Featured | A documentary about President of Yugoslavia Josip Tito as told through his personal projectionist. He claims to have screened a film for Tito every single night for over 30 years. |
| The Spirit of the Beehive | Víctor Erice | 1973 | Incidental | A traveling cinema comes to a Spanish village and screens Frankenstein |
| John Carpenter's Cigarette Burns | John Carpenter | 2005 | Featured | A film collector (and projectionist) dies a gory projector-related death! |
| The Tingler | William Castle | 1959 | Featured | Much of the film is set at a movie theater, and there's a significant scene during which a projectionist meets THE TINGLER! Also features an early depiction of LSD ingestion. |
| A Useful Life | Federico Veiroj | 2010 | Featured | |
| Maurice | Patrick Brice | 2010 | Featured | Short documentary on a Paris porno projectionist. |
| Masculin Féminin | Jean-Luc Godard | 1966 | Incidental | Jean-Pierre Leaud yells at the projectionist for messing up the aspect ratio! |
| She Was An Acrobat's Daughter | Friz Freleng | 1937 | Incidental | A duck projectionist has some technical issues. |
| Stella Days | Thaddeus O'Sullivan | 2011 | Featured | An Irish priest starts a community cinema and feels conflicted. |
| Targets | Peter Bogdanovich | 1968 | Incidental | A drive-in movie theater projectionist is shot by a sniper through the projection port! |
| Bulletproof Monk | Paul Hunter | 2003 | Featured | |
| Hellzapoppin' | H. C. Potter | 1941 | Incidental | |
| Clash By Night | Fritz Lang | 1951 | ||
| Luke's Movie Muddle | Hal Roach | 1916 | ||
| Daddy Longlegs | Josh & Bennie Safdie | 2009 | Featured | A man struggles to watch his two young sons while working as a projectionist in New York City. |
| Hugo | Martin Scorsese | 2011 | Featured | |
| Contempt | Jean-Luc Godard | 1963 | Incidental | Watch an angry Jack Palance smack a pile of film cans out of the hands of a very dejected looking projectionist. |
| Mother Goose | Ray Harryhausen | 1946 | Featured | A goose projectionist! |
| Persona | Ingmar Bergman | 1966 | Incidental | Film opens with beautiful images of film running through a projector. See here |
| A Muslim Childhood | Moumen Smihi | 2005 | Incidental | The cinema plays a formative role in the life of a teenage boy growing up in Tangier. One brief shot of a projectionist (and turret). |
| Cléo from 5 to 7 | Agnès Varda | 1962 | Featured | Cléo and her friend Dorothée deliver a print to Dorothée's boyfriend Raoul. They all watch a short film (starring Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina) from the booth |