A film print is a physical length, measured in feet on a synchroniser, and a projector's counter turns once per foot that passes its sprocket. Our repertory print of one title measures two hundred feet longer every time it comes out of the vault, and the counter has been turning while it sat sealed on the shelf.
I am the projectionist who looks after the one 35mm machine we kept, for the repertory nights, and the vault behind it.
How a print is measured.
You wind it through a synchroniser on the bench, which is a sprocketed wheel with a counter, and it tells you the length in feet. A reel is about two thousand feet, a feature is five or six reels, and the length on the leader card is the length you measure, give or take a foot of leader.
The projector has a counter too. Once per foot through the gate.
Film does not change length. It shrinks, over decades, a fraction of a percent, and it gets shorter when it is damaged and cut. It does not get longer, because there is no way for stock to appear between the frames.
One print in the vault gains about two hundred feet between runs.
It is a title we show once a year. The print is ours, in five cans, on a shelf, and between one year's screening and the next it sits sealed.
Every year I measure it on the bench before the run. Every year reel three is about two hundred feet longer than it was.
Two hundred feet is a little over two minutes at twenty four frames.
The print's total was nine thousand four hundred and twelve feet when it came to us in 2016. It is ten thousand eight hundred and some now.
What is on the extra footage.
Nothing I can find. That is the honest answer and I have looked, on the bench, frame by frame through reel three with a loupe, for an afternoon, twice.
The film is the film. The scenes are the scenes, in order, with no splice marks and no cement lines, and the edge codes, which are printed on the stock at manufacture and date it, run continuously through the reel with no break in the sequence.
A splice shows. A different batch of stock shows in the edge code. There is neither. Reel three is one continuous piece of stock from one batch, and it is two hundred feet longer than it was, every year.
The projector counter.
I could talk myself out of the bench measurement, and I cannot get past this one. A synchroniser can slip, a counter can miscount, I could have misread.
The projector's footage counter is mechanical. It turns when film moves through the gate and at no other time. It read eleven thousand and forty feet at the end of last year's run, and I zeroed it, and the projector has run nothing since, because there are no other prints and the machine is covered.
It reads two hundred and six feet.
Film has passed through that gate, under a dust cover, in a locked booth, with the lamp cold and the motor off, and the only reel it could have been is in a can on a shelf.
What has been checked.
The counter mechanism, which is a gear off the sprocket shaft, and which cannot turn unless the shaft does, and the shaft cannot turn without the motor, and the motor has not run: it has an hour meter, and the hour meter is where I left it.
The vault. Locked, alarmed, and cold. The cans are sealed with tape and the tape is mine and it is unbroken.
Another print. The extra footage could be from another copy of the same film if it had somehow got in, and I have compared the edge codes of the extra two hundred feet against the rest of the reel, and they are the same batch, the same year, in sequence.
It is the same print, longer.
What is done about it.
The print runs once a year. It runs fine. The extra footage plays, and what plays is the film, and the audience sees a film that is two minutes longer than the last time and does not know, and neither do I, because I have watched it through with a stopwatch and cannot find the two minutes.
I have not told the archive it came from, because the letter would say that their print has grown, and I have written that letter twice and not sent it.
What I do.
I keep the vault and I run the repertory nights.
The one thing I have changed is that reel three goes on the bench with the door open.
The bench is in the booth, and the booth door shuts, and winding a reel through a synchroniser is twenty minutes of quiet with the counter ticking.
Two years ago I was winding reel three with the door shut and the counter reached the point where the extra footage begins, which I know now from the previous year's measurement, and the winding got heavier. Not a jam. Heavier, the way a reel gets when there is more film on it than there was, and I watched the take up spool fatten while the feed spool did not thin, for about two hundred feet, and then it was ordinary again.