Peter Bradshaw 

The Last Projectionist – review

Tom Lawes's film about the cinema he restored – Birmingham's Electric – is an entertaining trip down memory lane, says Peter Bradshaw
  
  

The Last Projectionist
Britain's oldest working cinema … The Last Projectionist. Photograph: PR

Tom Lawes's film is a labour of love about a labour of love. In 2004, Lawes bought the crumbling Electric Cinema in Birmingham and restored it. The Electric is the oldest working cinema in Britain; it opened to show silent movies in 1909, became a newsreel cinema in the second world war, and then in the 1970s a sleazy but profitable porn-fleapit when British cinema production and exhibition was going through an all-time low. Lawes interviews the various owners and projectionists of the Electric and sits them down for a lively debate about the relative merits of digital projection versus 35mm film. Does digital lack soul? Maybe; maybe not. This film occasionally looks like a sentimental in-house video, but it's an entertaining trip down cinema's memory lane.

 

Leave a Comment

Required fields are marked *

*

*