Beautiful Frauds

WCP Blog Post: Landmark Goes Digital

If you were at the AFI this weekend to catch Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, you were witness to a dying bit of cinema history.

It’s not the 70mm film format that Anderson used to shoot his “Scientology movie”; given that The Master is the first narrative feature shot in that large, gloriously detailed format in more than a decade-and-a-half, that choice was a fleeting resurrection of the already dead. Rather, the patient on life support is the quickly disappearing practice of shining light through pieces of celluloid, as D.C.’s film projectors—like those nationwide—quickly disappear from projection booths.

The latest casualty to the binary-booted march of progress: Landmark’s E Street and Bethesda Row theaters, both of which went “all-digital” on Sept. 7.

Continue reading the rest of my post over at the City Paper Arts Desk.