35mm v Digital: The Cinematheque’s Jim Sinclair talks Economics, Nostalgia and Tarkovsky

On at least one occasion last year, before a screening of Don Coscarelli’s Bubba Ho Tep at the Rio Theatre, programmer Rachel Fox, by way of introducing the film, took a show of hands to ask if it made any difference at all to the people in attendance, when it came to coming out to such shows, if they were being projected on 35mm or digitally. Of course, she was asking the wrong people — she needed to poll the people who hadn’t come to the cinema that night, to see if they’d stayed home because it was a Blu-Ray projection. Alas, polling the absent is understandably difficult to do.