From the Washington Post, 2004.11.25
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 Chuh-Click. Sunset.

By Hank Stuever

The last of the Eastman Kodak slide projectors was manufactured in Upstate New
York in October, and then no more, the company has announced, after nearly seven
decades and 35 million projectors sold.

Next slide, please.

(Chuh-click-click.)

Oh yes, the party. According to the Democrat & Chronicle newspaper, the
remaining employees of the slide-projector division, along with some Kodak
brass, gathered last Thursday night at a special farewell party in the George
Eastman House in Rochester, and nice things were said about the venerable slide
projector, and the Smithsonian Institution was given a few Carousels and
Ektapros to keep for posterity, to remind us who we were, and how many slide
shows we've sat through, in how many basements and classrooms and board (bored?)
rooms.

(Chuh-click-click.)

A documentary filmmaker was there, too, from the Art Institute of Chicago, and
she has been busily working on a movie about the history of slide projectors. If
she does it right, the movie should be wonderfully boring and vividly colored
and meanderingly, redundantly narrated, and the audience will be invited to
periodically shout "Focus!" It should be five hours long, and shown only after
pie. Halfway through, it should stop, and the audience will entertain themselves
with shadow puppets while the projectionist softly curses and his
co-projectionist (also his wife) insists the slides are in backward.

Lights out. There was always that curiously intimate sensation of demi-privacy
in the crowded family room, when your father or uncle or neighbor flipped off
the light switch in the den and we were all sitting there, aware and unaware of
one another in the dark. "Let's see," he'd say, and lo, that blank frame of
white light appeared on the screen or the wall.

In the beginning there was the universe and it was nothing but white light, and
rounded at the edges of the frame.

(Chuh-click-click.)

Then we went to Pikes Peak, in 1981.

(Chuh-click-click.)

I mean, look at the aspen. They really were that color. Like nothing you've ever
seen.

(Chuh-click-click.)

Then we evolved even further, a civilized people, who had all these slides that
we never looked at, not really, not after the first time.

(Chuh-click-click.)

Digital cameras came along. People deleted the pictures where they thought they
looked fat.

(Chuh-click-click.)

PowerPoint! The 21st century, the so-called future. The less said, the better.
Decades from now, science will conclude that nobody ever learned anything from a
PowerPoint presentation, that it was, in fact, actually worse for the brain than
slide shows. That juries missed crucial evidence because of the prosecution's
determination to use PowerPoint during closing arguments. That productivity in
the American workplace, especially in middle management, hit an all-time low
because of PowerPoint, and that employees forced to watch PowerPoint considered
suicide at a rate previously unseen.

Next slide, please.

(Chuh-click-click.)

 Grandma and Grandpa. They're both dead, now. And we had to decide whether to
throw all their slides and carousels away, and so we opened the boxes and took
the slides out one by one and held them up to the window to see what was on
them, and here came the awful truth about slides . . .

Um, next slide, please.

Just hit the -- yes. There you go.

(Chuh-click-click.)

Here came the awful truth about slides: Too many mountains, too many trees, too
many prairie dogs and never enough of your grandmother wearing cat-eye
sunglasses, giving your grandfather that look she gave him when she thought he
was being a precious fool. Too many hot-air balloons or Alaskan glaciers; not
enough glum, pimply teenagers trying to look away from the camera. The lack of
intimacy is what strikes you. The camera was always pointed at the most colorful
thing, the most Kodachrome thing, the thing possessing what we all agree is
natural beauty, but it was usually the wrong thing. Here is the turkey we ate in
1978, but why didn't anybody think to take a shot of whoever took out the trash
that night?

You'd give back all those sunset slides for just one slide of your father at age 31.

But there isn't one, because he was the one looking through the lens, so it's
sunset, sunset, sunset, sunset.

(Chuh-click, chuh-click, chuh-click.)

Slides and slide projectors always had a sense about them of someone's
picture-taking hobby gone toward obsession. Who was Dad, if not the man with a
closet full of Kodak carousel boxes lovingly organized by subject and date?

Slide projectors took on this hopelessly nerdy ethos. In the '70s, people
learned to choreograph several slide projectors at once, set to music, slides
fading in and out. The AV kid in charge of the end-of-the-year graduation slide
show had night-before anxiety dreams unlike any you or I have ever experienced.

In recent years, slide projectors acquired a certain cachet, a beloved and retro
quality, like record players. They became very art school, very hipster, and so
you know they were doomed. A musician named Jason Trachtenburg started an
indie-rock band in 2000 with his 6-year-old daughter on harmonica and his wife
on the slide-show projector. They called themselves the Trachtenburg Family
Slideshow Players and wrote songs based only on the invented narrative
discovered in heaps and heaps of unwanted slide carousels they bought at flea
markets and garage sales. So the songs got random titles like "Mountain Trip to
Japan, 1959" or "Let's Not Have the Same Weight in 1978 -- Let's Have More,"
which is inspired by agenda and talking-point slides shown to McDonald's
restaurant franchisers at their annual board meeting.

Kodak is eager for you to know that it hasn't abandoned the idea of a slide
show, not at all. It will continue to make projector parts for seven more years,
at which point the fastidious upkeep of your old Carousel will fall to specialty
shops and hobbyists, who will be able to hunt down a projector bulb of almost
any sort, going back to the first projectors in the mid-1930s.

But for all the coming obsolescence, stepping aside for digital slide shows on
digital screens, Kodachrome slides demonstrated a shocking resilience to life in
closets, attics, basements, storage sheds. This, perhaps, is the Thanksgiving to
get them out, after pie. Unroll the tripod screen and plug in the Carousel
projector. In the family room, all of you. Let us look back, before looking ahead:

(Chuh-click-click.)

Sunset, sunset, sunset, sunset.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company