35mm screening of Empire of Light at the Parkway Barnsley

Published

January, 2023

Rob Younger, who owns the Parkway Barnsley, recently decided that he would like to install two Cinemeccanica Victoria 8 projectors in the original projection room so that it would look just like it did when Odeon twinned it in 1980. You can do that when you own the cinema!

He began the project in early January but was short of some parts for the second machine. In Elstree the PPT had a spare X4000 lamp house from Chris Woollard’s machine and it was decided we would loan it to Rob to get him up and running. The plan was to collect it from Elstree on 12 January. In the meantime Rob had a call saying would he like a 35mm print of Empire of Light for a special screening later in January. However, shortly afterwards he had another call to say the print was available for a screening on 17 January. There follows a photo diary of those hectic few days from 12 – 17 January.

The final still image shows the perfect error rate displayed in the Dolby Digital DA20 decoder and so it is good to see that in these digital days there is a British laboratory that can process 35mm film to this standard.