"Beamering" as a subversive act

Farshad recently wrote about beamering, which apparently is a fancy media studies term for watching films at home with a projector. I think this is a really cute name that presumably comes from the german use of Beamer to mean projector, which itself comes from the english to beam.

When i was studying in beijing, a group of friends and i (half of whom were german, by the way; maybe it’s something in the water) bought our own beamer and hosted weekly or biweekly¹ film nights. In my second year of studying in Shanghai, i started living in my own flat, and bought my own projector. I was pleased to discover that projectors have become both cheaper and higher resolution in the interim, but unfortunately have also lost the ability to connect to a computer running linux. Or at least, this one has, at this particular moment in time. I’ll keep trying.

The key difference between my time in beijing and my time in shanghai is that now i have a good friend and film snob living directly above me—the aforementioned Farshad. This unmatched level of convenience has catapulted our film-watching through the roof, as i’m sure is evident from the high quantity of film posts now available on this site for your perusal.

I am not as into films as Farshad is. I am also fairly open about my dislike of cinemas, which tend to cost a bunch, smell bad, have uncomfortable or otherwise messed up chairs, and of course have a film-watching experience entirely at the whims of other members of the public, who often have very little regard for the value of the enjoyment of others. I’m not a total killjoy, and i will turn a blind eye when i head down to the local independent cinema (rip) and the old ladies’ film club in the row behind me feel the need to comment on how an aging Kenneth Branagh is still extremely eligible; but i will draw the line at taking phone calls in, watching tiktoks without headphones in, and ordering takeout to, the auditorium. Even so, i still have a preference for watching things on a big screen.

And i still have a particular taste in film, which can perhaps best be summarised as “short and camp”. There is a huge backlog of films which tick these two boxes, but unfortunately fewer and fewer films that are being released in cinemas today fit this criteria, and many of the ones released in the past are not getting a reshowing in any cinemas near me. The projector allows me to take matters into my own hands. Farshad writes:

Back in Iran, I used to start a movie on my laptop at the same time as my friend from another town, or invite others to my apartment to watch something on TV. The disparity, however, is the quality of the experience. The duo of wall and projector obviously won’t have the same screen quality as a TV or a laptop; however, beamering has a much closer feel to cinema.

I’ve also tried watching films at the same time as someone elsewhere in the past, and it’s very true that the vibes are not there. Watching a film and having fun is something that requires other people, to keep you committed to the story, to laugh at the jokes and the awkward dialogues, and so on. Latency issues mean that this generally fails when you try and watch together over the internet, as one person hears the jokes before the other, or you get hopelessly out of sync. Maybe other people have managed to make that work but it never brought me joy. And although in many areas of life, size is not everything, when it comes to watching a film, it kind of is. Bigger screen trumps higher resolution almost every time, a fact i first discovered when my dad brought a projector home for my birthday party and we played mario kart for the nintendo wii at 480p on a 120" screen. That’s why the cinema has managed to remain so almost relevant for so long, even as the cinema companies have insisted on slowly making the experience a little worse each year. Farshad also writes:

Besides, I believe people tend to pause the film during the beamering less than on TV or a laptop. This is much closer to the cinema experience, where the audience has no control over the screening.

I totally agree. Watching on a computer for whatever reason gives rise to the expectation that anyone can slap the space bar at any time to contribute some meta-commentary. I have been guilty of this more times than i’d like to admit, but it doesn’t really provide extra enjoyment to the other people. However, although using the projector discourages this behaviour, it still gives the audience some control; for example, when someone wants to go to the bathroom, we will pause the film, so they don’t miss anything, whereas in a cinema they would have to choose whether to miss a perhaps crucial part of the plot, or to sit in discomfort until the end. Farshad writes:

Again, based on recent experience, I feel this kind of watching is a much more intimate approach, and even the pre-screen and post-screen have the identical feeling to the cinema. Beamering works like a special ritual, but the TV/laptop case feels less unique.

One of the things that’s nice about hosting film nights is that it is a genuine reason for people to come, and it’s also low effort for me, as socialising isn’t the stated primary goal. Even so, i enjoy the pre-screen and post-screen times as much as the film itself, because i like talking with my friends. The film is in some ways just an excuse to have a long chat with people, and the projector is a tool to legitimise this excuse.

Throughout what i’ve written so far, i’ve been hinting at this subversion of the cinema experience. That is, when we engage in beamering at home, we are able to maintain the core benefits of the cinema: a large screen; a ritualistic viewing experience; a shared presence with the other people watching; at the same time, we can avoid the disadvantages of going to the cinema: the small selection of films; the dirt, smells, and uncomfortable seats; the lack of appropriate cinema etiquette from other audience members; the high prices; the inconvenient times and locations. I bought this projector for five hundred yuan, which is somewhere in the region of five to ten cinema tickets, depending on the popularity of the film, and we have watched many more films than that with the projector. Farshad writes:

Overall, I think beamering is one of those rare humane pleasures that Capitalism hasn’t ruined yet, and hopefully will continue as long as cinema is alive (and not fully bought by Netflix).

We can already see attempts to ruin beamering. My projector is not a dumb tool; it comes with an android layer which advertises various shows and films whenever i boot it up. These recommendations never change, because i have never connected the projector to the internet, we connect via hdmi. In this way, we are able to watch films obtained the way we like, rather than having to use a portal or app.

At the start of this post, i wrote that my projector was a very palatable price. I am aware that the reason for this is almost certainly not only due to technological advances, but also because the price of the hardware is subsidised by data collection and advertising; this has been a common strategy for cheap technology brands for years at this point. But right now, this projector still gives me the option to boot straight to the hdmi, skipping their recommendations menu. This is more than can be said for the tv in my parents’ house back in the uk, which insists on booting up a menu with panels advertising the latest on netflix, amazon prime, and youtube before letting me look at the hdmi input. Apple and google both offer alternative ways of pushing video to an output without using a cable. That’s great, except that they force you to use their ecosystem. What happens when devices no longer allow you to easily transfer your own files onto them, and don’t have the appropriate ports to connect external devices to them? Suddenly, we have no choice but to go through the particular channels that these companies choose for us.

Going to a cinema means that every time we go, our experience is dictated by the state of that cinema at that moment in time. On the other hand, buying a projector means that our experience is dictated by the state of the projector manufacturer at its date of manufacture. By buying a projector released in 2024, i get access to useful 2024 technology like a 1080p resolution and autofocus, but also to less useful technology like the android layer. If in a couple of years, projector manufacturers decide to remove hdmi ports from their products, i will still be able to buy an older model with a port. If the android layer was so annoying to me now and couldn’t be disabled, maybe i would have looked for a model from an earlier year which, although perhaps having a lower resolution, did not have a whole android inside of it. My phone and my computer are both second hand, because none of the offerings at the time of purchase seemed worth the newness tax to me. As long as none of these items break, i have no need to replace them with a newer version that works less well, because they do what they need to do well enough right now.

That is to say, i think that it will be very difficult for capitalism to ruin beamering, because we currently have all the technologies needed for it, and by owning them ourselves (or by seizing the means of production, as one might say) we have no further reliance on any capitalist enterprise.

That is, of course, a slight simplification. We have to get our films from somewhere, and most films are backed by capitalist enterprise. Luckily for us, there is no dearth of ways to acquire films these days. Many of the classics are easily available on archive.org or youtube, which has still not yet totally managed to completely block yt-dlp from working. DVDs can be bought for cheap from a variety of shops, online and offline. And as the bbc always says, other film acquisition strategies are available.

But there is one alternative film acquisition strategy in particular that i want to mention, which we first used the other night before watching nativity: that is showing films that we ourselves have made. In this case, a documentary that Farshad had made as part of a school project. While the effects will probably be worse, and the quality lower than a film from a studio, there is no reason why we as individuals or small groups cannot make things ourselves and then show them. Unfortunately the speeds of supply and demand mean that if we stick to films made just by the viewers ourselves, this is unsustainable; but if more people start to make small films, we could easily have enough content to fill us up for life.

And of course, this kind of content does exist. Modern social media platforms like tiktok rely almost exclusively on individuals producing content for other people to watch. But if you’re reading this, you’re probably capable of figuring out the difference between the kind of content i’m proposing, and the kind of content on tiktok. On youtube, the content i envision was once rampant. This days, while i’m able to find thousands of video essays on every subject and of every quality and of every degree of ai-generatedness, the amount of medium- to long- form, original, creative content seems to be getting smaller by the day. If the majority audience is vertical and very short, that’s where the people creating will go. This leaves a gap, and that’s the gap that i would most like to have filled.

Watching a film produced by a friend on a projector, replicating the cinema feel, is a great experience. It adds a veil of professionalism to the proceedings, which is of course entirely arbitrary but, as Farshad says, gives the event a ritualistic feeling. In the future, i hope to be able to watch more films produced by people i know, and i hope to watch them on the big screen, in my own home.