on sundays

18 Dec, 2025

"it’s true that fresh air is good for the body/but what about the soul/that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images"

--from frank o'hara's "ave maria"

when i was in college, I would often uber or take the uptown bus up york road to this art deco movie theatre. on sundays, they had a matinee revival, sometimes on 35mm. i used to call it “going to church.” i would sit alone on the transport and watch the actual church crowds gather in the nearby restaurants and food hall, waiting to be seated for their post-service meals.

even in broad daylight, the marquee of the senator theatre is nothing short of gorgeous. the lobby full of terrazzo and tiles make me feel like i have entered a place outside of time. every week i bought my ticket right there at the box office booth, 15 minutes before the show—no advanced reserved seating, no online ticketing fees. there was no need. tickets were $9. they still are. and i was usually one of maybe ten or so acolytes in the 900-seat theatre. 

this was during my strict no-eating-in-the-theater purist phase. i would only drink water and believed that popcorn was a sacrilegious distraction. i'd get settled in 5 minutes before the scheduled start. the main theatre has one of those huge screens. the kind where you don't have to sit in the middle of the row to feel like you're in the middle¹. i sat in the middle anyway. i placed my backpack, jacket, water bottle carefully on the floor beside me, turned off my phone, and waited for the golden curtain to open.

still from tampopo (1985)

for revivals, they didn't even play any ads or trailers. they started right at the scheduled time. and i would sit in rapture for the next 90 or so minutes. i would laugh and cry and gasp appropriately quietly, and sometimes, yes, i would be bored, but even then i would be very careful not to breathe too loudly or move my head or any other part of me too much. after the movie ended, because i had little else i wanted to do, i'd sit through all of the credits before gathering my things and emerging into the warm baltimore 4 o'clock light.

i was raised catholic until my younger sister was born. my mom is the true believer in our family and believes that god understands—having a newborn and going to mass makes the experience unholy for everybody. it doesn't matter that there's a cry room--it sucks.

when my mom was pregnant she enrolled me in the first communion class for third graders². the class culminated in a multiple choice test, which would determine if we knew enough about god to partake in the ritual consumption of the flesh of his son. days before my first communion, i stumbled through my first confession. on the big day i wore a white dress, and every one of my classmates and i lined up to eat the transubstantiated crackers. we knelt and sang and shook each other's hands. and a few weeks later, my mom gave birth. i have not gone to mass regularly since and i never sat in the confession booth again³.

me, hours before my first jesus cracker, clearly very preoccupied with something shiny in the jewelry box.

my favorite thing about catholic mass is the routine and ritual of it. everything will happen in more or less the same order it happens and has happened everywhere else. the greeting, the call and response, the kneeling and standing and sitting, the "through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault", the word of the lord, the thanks be to god, the tithes, the eucharist--it's all so physical, so tactile. you call god and all his light into the room with you.

still from buster keaton's sherlock jr.

on sundays in college (when i wasn’t at the senator or charles theatre), i was a projectionist for the film society. about once a month we would host a screening of a film on 35mm.

i had a key to the booth and would arrive early to check the print and wind the first two sections of the film from the plastic reels sent by rialto onto our projectors' large stainless steel ones. later, someone, usually jack, would order a pizza while i hunched over the rewind bench, teaching 1 or 2 freshman how to clean the film, how to check for broken sprockets, how to redo bad splices with this medieval looking contraption. I had them practice their first splices on the only film that actually belonged to us⁴, some unidentifiable porno from the 70s. we only had 2 reels of it, one of which contained an actual oral sex scene. generations of college students cutting up these lovers, trying to tape them back together exactly as they were.

from the manual for a Model C Century Projector

after inspection, we loaded the projectors. the film is threaded in according to the diagram but the projectionist must use the sprockets to keep the film flowing yet stable. when threaded correctly, the film should be elegantly loose in some places and completely flat and taut in others. projection is a practice that relies on tension. too much and the film strip could snap and you end up with a pile of film all over the floor mid-screening⁵. too loose and you get a shaky blurry image because the film isn’t being held flat in the gate, or worse, the sprockets jam and tear and get stuck and the film will burn or melt because the light we use to project the image is so powerful--the film can only last for so long under the attention of that light.

our school's projection set up utilized two separate projectors. for screenings, julia introduced the film and gave the signal to begin, then we'd start one projector and show the first reel (the first 20 minutes or so of the movie). while that was going, we would set up the second projector with the second reel (the next 20 minutes or so of the film) and wait for the cue marks⁶. the first set comes 8 seconds before the end of the reel. that's when the second projectionist would turn on the lamp of the second projector and start the motor (so the film is already rolling but not showing anything because you haven't opened the gate). Then, the two projectionists count to 7 together. They should, when they get to 7, see the second set of cue marks, 1 second before the reel ends, which means it is time to switch over the audio track, close the gate of the first projector, and open the gate of the second projector. the movie continues like this (switching from projector two with reel 2, back to projector 1 with reel 3 and so on...) until it ends.

when done well, the changeover should be seamless. no trace of anything different, no sudden and inexplicable darkness in the theatre, no interruption of sound, no random cut. the job of the projectionist is to keep the story going so you don’t even realize it’s a story.

in high school, with no more church obligations I plunged into my hobbies: taekwondo and percussion in the school band. in the summer, i volunteered at my taekwondo dojang's summer camp. my mom thought it looked good on my resume, and i was an angsty teenager who felt like taekwondo was the one place i could experience more autonomy and perhaps most importantly, could maximize my time away from my family.

one day, kai asked me what i did on sundays. kai was a 4th degree black belt, a taekwondo master. older than me but much younger than the rest of the full time staff, who all had kids my age or older. he must have been fresh out of college. that summer, the one summer he worked there, we worked together all the time, nearly every day. so it was not abnormal to want to know how i spent the one day a week we had off. still, i bristled at the question.

2007, my younger sister playing basketball at the court next to our dojang's playground.

in my experience, most koreans in the area were protestants⁷. these korean christians, even those who were my friends at school, made me deeply uncomfortable any time they wanted to talk about sundays⁸. kai, i think, could sense the tension and simply said, it's okay if you don't go to church. which of course softened my spiky teenage heart.

we were standing in the playground, cleaning up trash after recess. i told him i was catholic, but never went to church anymore--didn't think it was for me, i didn’t really believe in all that stuff. from across the giant plastic tic-tac-toe board, he regarded me with all the earnestness of a man of faith. uncomfortable with everything, not just the situation, but with my whole being, i turned away, back to picking up empty ice pop wrappers. but still, i heard him, he said it softly and without judgment:

i really hope you find something to believe in⁹

in his introductory essay in "the logic of images," wim wenders talks about how it is the responsibility of cinema "to rescue existence of things." in this case, he is strictly talking about the salvation of the things being filmed, the things preserved on film.

a few frames of a 35mm print of my neighbor totoro

i was taught that every time you project a 35mm film print, it degrades the tiniest bit. partly because of the strength of the light, partly because film is delicate, and a splice that held in one screening may not hold in the next screening and those frames may have to be taken out entirely, partly because the sprockets can get damaged in the projector, partly because film collects dust and that dust easily disturbed. what i mean to say is, that when you watch a movie on film, those exact particles will never be in that exact order again. you are having a singular experience. and in your viewing it’s not just you changing, the film too, is changed forever.

college H, in the projection booth. photo courtesy of my friend HW.

those sundays in baltimore, watching harry dean stanton and nastassja kinski from the theatre seats or anna karina and jean-paul belmondo from behind the plexiglas in the projection booth, i was changed. and still i see glimpses of it there--in the bags of popcorn, the dimming house, the flash and yearn of the screen--something to believe in.

#essay #film