The Chicago Film Society was founded in 2011 just as digital cinema was permanently embedding itself in nearly every theater across the country. Aside from presenting film screenings, a lot of what we do at the Film Society is to gather, document, make lists, and somehow find space (physical, virtual, and mental) in which to put all of these things. We’ve amassed collections of film prints, film projectors, projector parts, and cameras, but also information and data. We have ongoing (often overwhelming) projects that make use of these inventories, including but not limited to, the following:

• The Analog Directory: a list of every theater and organization that still screens film prints throughout the world (though the international portion needs a little work).
• Celluloid Chicago, a weekly list of every film-on-film screening in the Chicagoland area, which we’ve published since 2011.
• Sprocket School, a public wiki serving as a collection of information for all things film-related that a projectionist might need to look up on the fly. It currently has about 150 entries on various topics. The scope of Sprocket School sometimes gives me actual nightmares. It is without end.
• Even more lists within Sprocket School, including a list of 35mm features released in 1.37 after 1953, a list of 70mm film exhibitors, a list of educational films about film handling and projection, a list of post-2000 films made without a digital intermediate, a list of films featuring projection or projectionists, and so on.
• Folders and folders of images of damaged film, film stock, film cans, theater marquees, theater signs, frame enlargements from prints we’ve handled, and from those our friends have handled, etc. We need spreadsheets to keep track of our spreadsheets. Somehow all this data feels like a barrier against this thing we care about and enjoy so much being swept away by the great wave of digital cinema that was embraced by most without protest. You can’t get rid of analog film, because it existed, and IT EXISTS, and here’s a mountain of undeniable evidence that it was once screened in every cinema around the world.

The Leader Ladies Project is a small but special part of this. On the surface, “leader ladies” (photos mostly of women appearing in the countdown leader of film reels) are just test images, tools used by film laboratories for various purposes related to film processing and printing. But they are also evidence of the labor it took to make the films, to process the films, to project the films. In response to the digital cinema that we never wanted but got anyway, we’ve turned our attention backwards. If we had the time (and the storage space) to go into all the basements of the world searching for musty Goldberg cans that sometimes contain garbage but other times reveal  treasure, we would do so, in the hopes that mountains of material evidence might help ensure the longevity of analog film, and help us remember the things that may never be made again. If people don’t know what they are, if they can’t see them, how will they know what they’ve lost? We are by no means Luddites—the Leader Ladies Project is what it is partly because of digital cameras and the Internet. The series we put together for Metrograph is virtual, in case you hadn’t noticed. Most of the early leader lady images we have were taken by a projectionist awkwardly holding an iPhone over a loupe balanced on a light box, trying desperately to focus on the film strip underneath: new technology in service of old technology. But the fact that digital cameras have made it possible to share leader ladies with the world goes hand in hand with the fact that digital cinema has made sharing them with the world necessary.