Splice Here: A Projected Odyssey is a recent Australian documentary exploring the rise, fall, and rebirth of projected film on screen.

The film first premiered in 2022 and wasn’t available for wider audiences in the US until 2024. I finally got around to watching the two-hour-plus documentary towards the end of March 2025. The home video release does not come with any bonus features so don’t expect to see extended versions of interviews.

In the early 2010s, it was looking like digital projection was here to stay and there’d be no going back. However, some filmmakers like Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino, and Sean Baker are firm believers in audiences being able to watch films in the way that audiences have been watching for ages: through an old-school projector.  I’ve attended a Q&A screening where the Oscar-winning Baker had said that he sees to it that all his films get a 35mm print. There’s a real difference between watching digitally and watching film. In fact, I’ve attended press screenings that had to be cancelled because of the digital print being unable to play. It’s digital–you’d think it would play correctly!

As the debate between film and digital raged on through the years, Rob Murphy set forth to ask the people who would know the answers: projectionists. It’s a community that he knows from first-hand experience. After all, they get to work up close and personal in the booth. A question of Murphy’s mind was if film had a future and how would our memories live on. What he found out about the underground projectionist community-yes, this exists–is that they were doing more than collecting film memorabilia but saving titles from going extinct.

Splice Here‘s synopsis states that “legacy cinema is facing a largely unknown digital danger.” I don’t disagree. We’ve seen how studios will bypass theaters, release films onto streaming services, and then all of a sudden, remove them at a whim. There are times when this could be for a tax write-off. Other times, streaming services will remove films and it might be a number of months before they end up anywhere else. I always tell people that if you know you want to watch something repeatedly, you need to buy it on physical media.

Could our generation have been the last generation to experience cinema as it was meant to be seen on film? Time will tell. It’s an experience to take in and while I get the want for playing films digitally, they aren’t without their flaws.

Splice Here: A Projected Odyssey pays tribute to what may potentially be a dying breed if things don’t change in the near future: projected film.

DIRECTOR: Rob Murphy
FEATURING: Douglas Trumbull, Leonard Maltin, David Strohmaier, Randy Gitsch, Pete Smith, Dennis Bartok, Rob Murphy, and Quentin Tarantino

Gravitas Ventures released Splice Here: A Projected Odyssey on VOD on June 25, 2004. Grade: 3.5/5

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