In Karachi, a dying breed of cinema projectionists and their art of celluloid

KARACHI: After a long day of work as a record keeper at a local entertainment channel, 62-year-old Sharafat Khan thought he would go see an old friend at a cinema in downtown Karachi earlier this week.

This would be his last meeting with the Westrex A-100 projector, a machine he had operated for years as a cinema projectionist before digital versions took over movie theaters across Karachi.

Now, the projector, a witness to the heyday of Pakistani cinemas and films, is headed to one of the city’s many scrapyards, as most others of its generation have over the last decade. With the switch from 35-millimeter film to digital, the analog projectors that have whirred along for decades in the megacity’s cinemas have been rendered incapable of playing modern movies.

“These machines would rule, it was their era,” Khan told Arab News at the Afshan Cinema, holding up reels of film.

“This 35-millimeter film has now turned to garbage. People don’t even know what 35mm is. Today, they are becoming garbage … It causes sorrow when these machines come out of cinemas and end up with junk dealers.”

Khan recalled the clatter of machinery and fluttering film in dark cinema houses during his years operating projectors like the Westrex A-100 with big reels of celluloid. Today, few people knew about or understood the beauty of traditional 35-millimeter films, he said, and what a “tough job” it was to play them.

Muhammad Naeem, a seasoned projectionist at the Venus, the only cinema in Karachi where a Westrex A-100 machine is still functional, proudly described the challenges of operating the old equipment.

“Running films on these machines was not within the capacity of every operator because everything needed to be accurate, from running the print to their jointing and playing,” he said. 

The process required multiple manual changeovers along with audio synchronization, which demanded a “high level of expertise,” the projectionist explained. 

Two projector machines would be simultaneously used to project visuals from 35mm film reels in a protection room onto a large screen with the assistance of a carbon box. A 2,000-feet reel lasted only 20 minutes, and the operator would skillfully execute changeovers between the two machines. Normally, there would be a total of eight changeovers: four before the interval and four from the interval until the end of the movie. 

In contrast with modern projectors, the old systems featured a separate sound head with optical lenses, releasing audio precisely 19.5 frames ahead of the visuals for seamless synchronization.

Because of the difficulty of the job, Khan said, projectionists were “highly respected.”

“The owners and the manager respected us. If we didn’t show up, the show would shut down,” he said. “The relationship between the machine and the operator was like that of a mother and son … In this computerized era, a 15-year-old child can operate the system.”

Zeeshan Sohail, a projectionist at the modern-day Atrium cinema in Karachi, said digital machines and infinitely bootable files had made the work of operators considerably easier.

“Now, everything has changed. With ease, movies are brought in USBs or hard drives,” he said. “Projectionists handle it easily. All the tension that existed before has disappeared.”

But so have the projectionists who operated those machines, with many losing their jobs and switching to other careers.

“Just like the machines have become a waste,” Khan said, “we too have transformed into junk.”

Naeem at the Venus Cinema too expressed sadness as he spoke about the love, “a very small word,” he had felt for the old projectors and his work. 

“Believe me, when I used to operate them, I would stand like this and this sound, I loved this sound,” he said, as a projector hummed next to him. 

“But when I look at them now, it feels like they are crying out in yearning, asking, ‘What happened to us?’.”