Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

death of the slide projector

The Washington Post’s Hank Stuever had a good story yesterday about the demise of the slide projector and its place in pop culture. I love the way it’s written, as a kind of slideshow narrative. (“Chuh-Click. Sunset.” - 11/25/04)

The last of the Eastman Kodak slide projectors was manufactured in Upstate New York in October, and then no more, the company has announced, after nearly seven decades and 35 million projectors sold.

Next slide, please…

(Chuh-click-click.)

A documentary filmmaker was there, too, from the Art Institute of Chicago, and she has been busily working on a movie about the history of slide projectors. If she does it right, the movie should be wonderfully boring and vividly colored and meanderingly, redundantly narrated, and the audience will be invited to periodically shout “Focus!” It should be five hours long, and shown only after pie. Halfway through, it should stop, and the audience will entertain themselves with shadow puppets while the projectionist softly curses and his co-projectionist (also his wife) insists the slides are in backward…

(Chuh-click-click.)

Here came the awful truth about slides: Too many mountains, too many trees, too many prairie dogs and never enough of your grandmother wearing cat-eye sunglasses, giving your grandfather that look she gave him when she thought he was being a precious fool…

You’d give back all those sunset slides for just one slide of your father at age 31.

But there isn’t one, because he was the one looking through the lens, so it’s sunset, sunset, sunset, sunset.