The Eastman Kodak slide projector, the company’s most successful product ever, that magical box of light and lens that turned snapshots into tools of family bonding, passed into history one September night in Rochester, NY back in 2004. It was 67 years old. The slide projector disappeared for good and still no one seems to mourn its passing.
That fateful day marked the end of an era. The 35mm slide, destined to become a technological relic—just like the magic lantern slide or the floppy disc—and the traditional slide library has been replaced by dislocated virtual image collections.
After seeing Paige Sarlin’s THE LAST SLIDE PROJECTOR in Rotterdam, I considered bringing it to screen as part of our quarterly Search and Rescue program, a series dedicated to presenting and preserving discarded media. It seemed like a perfect fit. A record of the passing of an entire medium not just the media. Later that month I was also approached about possibly presenting a program in conjunction with Home Movie Day. Seeing as the growth of the medium depended on households assembling the inevitable family vacation show, I booked the film as a memorial to this household medium. Slides and slide projectors always had a sense about them of someone’s picture-taking hobby gone toward obsession. Who was Dad, if not the man with a closet full of Kodak carousel boxes lovingly organized by subject and date?
Kodak is eager for you to know that it hasn’t abandoned the idea of a slide show, not at all. It will continue to make projector parts for seven more years, at which point the fastidious upkeep of your old Carousel will fall to specialty shops and hobbyists, who will be able to hunt down a projector bulb of almost any sort, going back to the first projectors in the mid-1930s.
But for all the coming obsolescence, stepping aside for digital slide shows on digital screens, Kodachrome slides demonstrated a shocking resilience to life in closets, attics, basements, storage sheds. The smell of dust on the projector, the chuh-click-click sound as the next photo moved forward. Let us look back, before looking ahead. This Saturday at 3pm, on Home Movie Day, we memorialize that wonderful machine, The Slide Projector on what would have been its 70′th year of life.
