Fifteen Questions: John Quackenbush on the Art of Film Projection

John R. Quackenbush is the projectionist for the Art, Film, and Visual Studies Department and the former head projectionist at the Harvard Film Archive. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

FM: How did you initially decide you wanted to go into projection? Was it a conscious choice, or did you fall into the career?

JRQ: I’d like to think that I knew all along because I started making films myself as a kid with Super 8 film and projecting them. But really, I probably fell into it. I went to MassArt to study and learned to be a filmmaker — that was the goal — but my first job out of college was for the National Center for Jewish film, where I worked for 12 years in the film archive. Processing prints on the bench was one of my jobs, inspecting, preparing them to be distributed.

The archive was located at Brandeis University, and they installed an archival 35 mm system, and they needed a projectionist. I got trained for that and I was doing that as a side hustle, but I enjoyed it very much, and got involved in doing occasional film festivals. The first Film Festival I did was Nantucket, and then I got offered a job at the IFC Center in New York when they first opened, and I was their head projectionist the first couple years. And then that was it, I was a projectionist. I was a professional projectionist. From that I got involved in film festivals — Sundance and the Dubai Film Festival are probably the ones you’ve heard of — but I’ve worked with many. Read more.