PROJECTIONIST PLEASE FOCUS, 1989

59" x 43"

Photo silk-screened, stenciled, commercially available cotton fabrics. Machine pieced, hand appliquéd; hand and machine quilted. Photo credit: Rachael Dorr.

In 1988 I began a series of quilts that attempts to combine the workaday and creative halves of my life. Since 1976 I have earned my living as a movie projectionist" to: "Starting in 1976, for many decades I earned my living as a movie projectionist. While many people the world 'round have experienced the wonder and pleasure of the movies, my line of work has made me very conscious not only of the content of movies, but how they look and how they are made.

The leitmotif of this series is the two projectionists (my husband and yours truly) who earnestly project a 16mm film--alas, not 35mm or the really macho 70mm--through a 'contained' crazy field. While the imagery will be familiar to anyone interested in film, the fragments of words and phrases will be meaningful mainly to projectionists, and old-timers at that. This series records the sad twilight not only of a skilled craft, and the wonderful language developed by the people who used the machines to entertain so many, but perhaps of film itself: a victim, in its turn, of videotape.

An old-fashioned Academy leader with the legend PROJECTIONIST PLEASE FOCUS encircles its namesake. The images include the work of pioneering masters of the cinema, as well as familiar faces from Hollywood. Charlie Chaplin being chewed up in the gears of an assembly line; Dr. Frankenstein’s baleful monster; and the robot from “Metropolis” are but several of the filmic references to the perceived dangers of technology, to the ambivalence and sense of dislocation felt by many in the face of rapid technological change.