“Ways of Knowing” Episode 7: Glitches

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Ways of Knowing

 

The World According to Sound

 

Season 2, Episode 7

 

Glitches

 

[sound of projector]

 

[20th Century Studios movie intro music plays]

 

Sam Harnett: It’s easy to take for granted all the machinery required for you to watch a movie — until something goes wrong.

 

[projector sounds and music stutter and skip]

 

SH: The projector jams. The sound gets out of sync. The frame becomes misaligned. Or if you’re at home: Your internet connection drops, your laptop dies, the movie’s buffering, the image freezes. 

 

Mal Ahern: When you experience that glitch, what you’re being reminded of is that there is this whole physical infrastructure that is supporting what we think of as this immateriality, we think of as this magic.

 

SH: Mal Ahern, professor of cinema and media studies at the University of Washington. For her, glitches are not something to be ignored, but studied. They’re clues that can help us uncover the inner workings of what is around us, lead us to new perspectives and hidden stories.

 

[sound of projector]

 

SH: Mal has spent years studying glitches in everything from printers to projectors. She’s traced the errors in movie projection, particularly in theaters. Over time, these errors tell a story of automation, labor and changing attitudes about quality and consistency. They show how we have come to accept a viewing experience on our digital devices that movie watchers in the past would have never tolerated. 

 

[sound of projector]

 

[cartoon music plays]

 

SH: Back in the 1940s, there were always two projectionists in a film booth: a lead projectionist, and the assistant, who was constantly watching to head off any errors before they happened. It was dangerous work. If you messed up, the film could even catch on fire.

 

MA: Film could even get stuck in the gate and melt right before the audience’s eyes.

 

SH: A two-person team wasn’t just necessary to prevent disasters, but for quality control. The pair could make sure the film stayed aligned, in focus, and lined up with the sound. A major part of the job was making sure that there was a seamless transition from one film reel to the next.

 

[sound of projector]

 

[cartoon music plays]

 

MA: If you talk to projectionists, even today, they’ll tell you a lot of their job is anticipating that kind of error before it happens. And a lot of them say it’s actually very sonic. They hear that something is about to go wrong before they see it, right? They hear some weird clicking or some weird lag, and they realize, “Oh, I’ve slipped a sprocket or the tension is off.”

 

[sound of projector]

 

SH: In the 1950s, the movie industry developed a variety of film that was far less flammable than nitrate. Once fires were less of a risk, theaters started cutting down from two projectionists to one.

 

MA: Fewer people are in the booth. And at first, projectionists really resisted this because they said it was going to compromise the quality of their projecting because there was somebody — the second projectionist — just watching the image on the screen the entire time while the lead projectionist was threading up the next projector.

 

[sound of projector threading]

 

SH: Despite resistance from projectionists, theaters continued to remove people from the booth. The reduction from two-person teams to one was just the beginning.

 

MA: That was a relatively minor change to what came later with the automation of projection booths.

 

[instrumental music plays]

 

SH: In the 1960s and ‘70s, theaters developed machinery and techniques to do things like automate switching reels and interlock projectors so one print could be shown on multiple screens. Theaters started growing from one screen to many: multiplexes.

 

MA: When you get to the multiplex, you have one projectionist often running, you know, five, six, eight, booths. Running from booth to booth. And that’s why film times are staggered the way they are in multiplexes — so that the projectionist can be there for the changeovers if they need to be, right? Or to load and unload the platters.

 

SH: With the switch to automation in multiplexes, there was a surge of errors — the kind of mistakes that any good projectionist would have caught.

 

MA: The exact same kind of thing ended up happening that projectionists warned of in their own publications in the 60s and 70s, which is that if you bring these automated technologies in, you’re going to see more of these errors. Out of focus, big jumps in volume, a jumpy transition, maybe a few seconds — or even a split section is noticeable enough — of just nothing, blank screen. I have a whole folder of local news reports, mostly in the 1980s actually, of people complaining about projectionist errors and poor film projection at multiplexes. A lot of local film critics in Long Island and suburban Michigan will say, “I went to see this movie and it was impossible to even follow it because the projection was so bad, not like in my day….” etc., etc. 

 

SH: Moviegoers were being subjected to the kinds of projection mishaps that an earlier audience would not have accepted — blurry pictures, misaligned frames, the image out of sync with the sound. These were the kind errors a good projectionist would head off before they ever happen.

 

MA: A lot of what they’re doing is trying to anticipate and correct machine errors. And if they’re not there, you see tons of errors on the screen, right? So those errors kind of tell us something about the changing working conditions of people who are working in movie theaters. They tell us about the changing technology of movie theaters. They tell us about the move from a single screen to a multiplex. And they tell us about what labor theorists call deskilling.

 

SH: The increasing amount of automation turned projectionists from more hands-on, skilled workers to machine minders.

 

[instrumental music plays]

 

SH: These errors also tell a story about the audience. Over time, viewers have accepted less and less agency over their experience at the theater. Because what choice did they have if there was a problem? Most likely now, there was no one in the booth. 

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MA: If something goes wrong, people can’t just yell, “Focus!” They have to go out, go to the manager’s office, go to the teenager selling popcorn at the counter, and say, “This film image is messed up, the film’s stuck in the projector, the changeover never happened, the frame lines is in the middle of the screen, the volume is off, the focus is off.” You know, there’s a real delay in the capacity of somebody to go and take care of those issues.

 

SH: Before all the automation, there was always at least one if not two people up in the booth. But with the multiplexes, there was often no one behind the projector. You were at the mercy of the machine and subjected to whatever errors it happened to produce.

 

MA: And then it gets to the point probably where if the issues are minor enough, you don’t really think to complain. You just kind of look through them and get used to a different kind of image quality.

 

SH: This adjustment to lesser quality has continued. Now most people stream movies at home instead of going to the theaters to watch them. And at home, you are subject to a whole host of new errors and glitches — problems with your internet connection, streaming device, laptop, projector. Not to mention that we are watching films on much smaller screens with much poorer audio quality. If you do encounter some problem with your movie — it won’t load, your bandwidth suddenly can’t support decent quality, the picture gets out of sync with the sound, your operating system won’t run the streaming service — well, then, you are even farther from a human who could help you resolve this error. It’s now all just part of your movie-watching experience.

 

[sound of video glitching]

 

SH: Laptops, phones, televisions, home projectors, wireless routers, modems — these are just a fraction of the increasing amount of machinery and electronics that surround us.

 

[sound of video glitching]

 

SH: Much of it is deliberately designed to keep us from thinking about the way it works, to direct our focus on only what it produces or allows us to do. Mistakes are a way to see through that. 

 

[sound of projector glitching]

 

MA: When you see a little error, when you see a flaw in something, it almost feels more material. It reminds you that this is a made thing. 

 

SH: Because whenever something goes wrong — whenever we encounter an error or a glitch — it doesn’t come out of nowhere. There’s always a reason. It’s happening because of something real, something material and physical.

 

[sound of static]

 

SH: There’s a mechanical failure in a movie projector, an error typed in the code, a misaligned plate in a printing press, an electrical disturbance in a radio broadcast.

 

[computer sounds] 

 

SH: When you encounter an error, ask yourself: What does this tell me about how the machine works? How it’s designed? Who builds and operates it? What kind of content it encourages or discourages? What biases are inherent in its form? How is it influencing our perception of what we’re seeing, reading and hearing?

 

MA: That’s the kind of thing that you start thinking about when you see errors ‘cause you start thinking, why did that happen and also what wasn’t happening for that error to have taken place? And it also sometimes reveals how the machine works, right? Because it’s the human’s job to hide how the machine works. It’s the human’s job to make the machine look smart.

 

[sound of projector starting, stalling and restarting]

 

SH: It is especially easy today to forget the material nature of what surrounds us. The internet, smartphone apps, streaming movies, generative artificial intelligence. They might all seem like magic. But all these digital things are all dependent on physical stuff, made by humans, which can go wrong. 

 

[sound of stalled printer]

 

SH: And really, whenever we have a seamless experience with something produced by a machine, it isn’t because machines are perfect. Machines have errors all the time. It’s because humans are there to fix the mistake before anyone else sees it. They realign the plates of the printing press, service the engine of the automobile, tweak the algorithms of the generative AI program, adjust the focus of the projector. 

 

MA: The humans are always necessary to finish the machine labor.

 

SH: So really, with an error, you are not just getting a glimpse into the inner workings of a machine. You are also seeing the ways that humans have been automated out the process, leaving us to contend with the machine and its errors all on our own.

 

MA: What you’re seeing with the errors is you’re seeing human absence, which is a funny thing to see. 

[sound of projector whirring and crashing]

 

[sound of static]

 

[instrumental music plays]

 

SH: Whenever something goes wrong, there’s always a reason. Errors, mistakes, glitches — these are all sites for inquiry. Learning how to spot and analyze these kinds of aberrations can help us understand the inner workings of what is around us and also how humans have been removed from a process by automation. This kind of analysis is especially vital in the digital age, a time where the material nature of things is increasingly hidden from us. 

 

[instrumental music plays]

 

SH: Here are five sources that will help you learn more about analyzing glitches, and the history of film projection. 

 

“Glitch” by Sean Cubitt

 

SH: This essay is a great theoretical primer on glitches and their significance.

 

“The Glitch Moment(um)” by Rosa Menkman

 

SH: Artists like Rosa Menkmanhave made glitches the center of their work. This book is not only an introduction to glitch art, but also has theory behind the aesthetic nature of glitches.

 

“The Dying of the Light” by Peter Flynn

 

SH: A documentary film about the automation and digitization of film projection, and its consequences for projectionists and film quality.

 

“Cinema’s Automatisms and Industrial Automation” by Mal Ahern 

 

SH: In this essay, Mal lays out her research on automated media and error as evidence in pre-digital media.

 

“Duck Amuck” 

 

SH: This cartoon from the 1950s is a classic short that revolves entirely around film mishaps.

 

CREDITS

 

Ways of Knowing is a production of The World According to Sound. This season is about the different interpretative and analytical methods in the humanities. It was made in collaboration with the University of Washington and its College of Arts & Sciences. All the interviews with UW faculty were conducted on campus in Seattle. Music provided by Ketsa, Human Gazpacho, Graffiti Mechanism, Serge Quadrado, Bio Unit, and our friends, Matmos.

 

The World According to Sound is made by Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett.

 

END