The Projectionist (2019)

[original title: El proyeccionista]

Eliseo is an ageing man running an ageing business. He travels the Dominican Republic in his van, staging film screenings for remote communities with his mobile projector.
There is no money to be made in this line of work. Eliseo’s truck is nearly falling apart and he is constantly short on funds. He seems to own a (decaying) house, but he lives in the storage unit next door. Modernity is rolling right over him, but he refuses to change. He rejects modern projection methods like DCP, or even simply DVD. He will stick with celluloid.

What begins like a declaration of love for cinema, in the line of Cinema Paradiso or The Last Drive-In Theatre, soon reveals an unhealthy, fetishist obsession. Eliseo has lots of 8mm-reels of a younger woman, reels that show everyday scenes like eating or sewing, but also reels of an erotic nature. When Eliseo has dinner, he projects the footage of the woman having dinner onto a screen at the opposite side of the table. And before he goes to bed, he projects a reel of the woman sleeping onto the wall next to his bed.

One day, the fridge in which he stores the reels implodes and catches fire, destroying most of the footage. Eliseo desperately tries to reassemble whatever footage is left, and rummages through a lot of old boxes trying to find some additional reel that he might have overlooked. All the while, pieces of footage are flicking through his head – this is precisely the manner in which a director might portray a dying man with pictures of his life rushing through his head. Cabral uses this method to highlight Eliseo’s fear that the loss of the reels means that he will not be able to keep the memory of all the footage; that the woman in the reels is dying because of the fire.

At first you assume – naturally – that this is a woman from his past; perhaps a wife who died young. Eliseo’s despair suggests as much. Because what could be worse than losing a loved one for the second time?
But then we see him actually discovering one last reel showing this woman, and it also shows a sign at a roadside. And Eliseo immediately looks for a map in order to identify this place. Why, we ask, would he do that? The only explanation is that it was not him who shot that footage.
And while Eliseo is beginning to conduct an investigation, we not only discover what he discovers; we also will, at the same time, discover what his relationship to the footage is, and how it came to him.

We understand that Eliseo has been in love with this unknown woman his whole life, and that he has been looking for her for many years. He is reading Ovid’s Pygmalion. And just like Pygmalion’s creation finally came to life so Eliseo hopes that the picture of the woman will turn to reality once he has found her.

As Eliseo’s investigation goes on, he finds lots of reel-to-reel audio recordings. Until now he had never heard the woman’s voice before. And we understand that seeing is only half the picture, listening is just as important. At this point the film that started as Cinema Paradiso has crossed into territory covered by films such as Blow Up and Blow Out. But what really unfolds before our own eyes is a tragedy of almost Greek proportions, and not with the happy ending of Pygmalion.
Along the way, Eliseo teams up with Rubí, a young woman who is scarred and disillusioned by life but is still “functioning” better in society than Eliseo is at this point.

The performances in this film are outstanding, even in the smaller roles. Félix Germán shines in the leading role as Eliseo, and the character’s dominance in the film makes this performance all the more important for the its success. As an “easter egg”, the film The Curse of Padre Cardona is mentioned repeatedly by characters in the film. It happens to be Germán’s debut film as a director.
Cindy Galán also gives a very strong performance as Rubí. But somehow it feels like it is not Galán, but Lia Briones who is the female lead in this film. And yet, her “character” – the woman in the silent old film footage – strictly speaking does not exist as a character in the film. I am not sure if Briones’s role can be called “challenging”, but it must at least have been a very odd experience having so much footage shot – in different surroundings, with different costumes and hairstyles, all without dialogue – all the while knowing that it is just obscure, old footage within the story.

The film’s writer/director/producer, José María Cabral, was only 29 years old when he made The Projectionist. Cabral, whom Briones likened to a crazy genius, has been making films since he was 17 years old and already has many feature-length films under his belt.

Because of all of the vintage footage and retro technology in the story, Cabral had to work out how to emulate these things. And he picked whatever worked best on a technological level. According to my information, the “old” film footage of the mysterious woman was actually filmed using analogue technology, with some kind of 8mm or 16mm camera. But for the “old” audio footage, which are reel-to-reel-recordings in the story, I was told he chose to record the audio with modern technology and then “age” it in post-production, with the reel-to-reel tapes only being there “visually”, but not actually producing he sound in that scene.

The Projectionist was chosen as the Dominican Republic’s submission for the best foreign-language Oscars longlist. This came just two years after Cabral’s previous film, Woodpeckers, had been chosen for submission as well, and seven years after Cabral’s Jaque Mate had been selected for submission. Which is an absolutely remarkable footprint for a man as young as Cabral.

The Projectionist is a film where all things have fallen perfectly into place: a great story with an interesting central character, great direction, great performances, great props and locations, great cinematography (Hernan Herrera), etc. Diligent work in the technical departments (visual as well as sound) and a very accomplished musical score round off all these achievements and make this film a small masterpiece which I would rate at around 9 out of 10.

By comparison, The Watchman almost feels like a minor work; which is ludicrous, because it clearly is not. The Watchman is also a very good film, with very good writing, directing, performances, etc., etc. The feeling that it is still easily eclipsed by Cabral’s film just shows you how incredibly strong The Projectionist is.