Rita Hayworth was the preferred pinup girl for the World War II soldiers and the prototype of sass, class and style for generations of women.
Madonna honors her among a slew of other screen sirens in her 1990 song, “Vogue,” in which she sings: “Rita Hayworth gave good face.”
Search Google Images for Hayworth, or peruse her movies on Netflix, and you can see just how good that face was — kind of. To get the full effect, you have to see Hayworth on film — 16 mm celluloid film.
Film provides a picture and experience that you can’t get from digital media, according to audience members and organizers at the first night of independent video rental store Video Rodeo’s classic film screening series.
Classic movies will be screened from an original film reel every Wednesday at 8 p.m. at The Wooly, 20 N. Main St., next to The Top restaurant.
The films will be projected from their original 16 mm footage, allowing viewers to experience them as their creators intended, said Roger Beebe, owner of Video Rodeo and a UF associate professor of English.
Beebe selected the movies from the approximately 1,900 16 mm films he acquired from UF, after the university decided to remove them from its archives.
“A lot of them were marked with stickers saying, ‘VHS replacement,’ indicating, ‘We don’t need these anymore, we have VHS versions of these things,’” Beebe said. “Now, that seems incredibly short-sighted. Many of these prints look as good as the day they were struck.”
The first screening was held Wednesday, June 12. About 30 people attended to watch the 1946 film, “Gilda,” starring Hayworth as an at-large femme fatale in wartime Buenos Aires.
UF student Lindsey Jones, a 21-year-old English major, had seen the movie before but said the experience of watching it on 16 mm made it more exciting.
“Seeing the film on 16 mm, on the celluloid — it’s a more organic experience, like the way the film was meant to be seen,” Jones said.
The occasionally glitchy celluloid made watching the movie feel more special, referring to moments when a frame would repeat itself, or when one reel ended and the next had to be loaded, she said.
“You don’t exactly know how it’s going to go, like moments when it cuts out. You can tell some of the film had been spliced out and repaired,” she said.
Charming as the technical limitations of 16 mm film can be, the saturated color of the images makes viewing these films a surprise for the senses, Beebe said.
Although “Gilda” was in black and white, the opening short film was one of the first color versions of Mickey Mouse.
“I didn’t know a red could be that intense,” Beebe said.
“The greatest things about watching it in 16 mm is the colors are much more vivid, much more pronounced,” said UF film and media studies alumnus Robert Edmondson.
“There’s something lost in the pixelation of an image,” he said.
Admission is $3. Proceeds from the screening will help Video Rodeo, Gainesville’s last video rental store, convert its remaining VHS tapes into DVDs and add new films to its inventory.
Movies from the film noir genre will be screened every other week, rotating the screen with science fiction films. A surprise short film will play at 8 p.m. before the main feature starts at 8:30.
Video Rodeo has started hosting film screenings to raise money for its inventory and to convert existing videos into DVDs. For more information or to contact Video Rodeo, visit www.videorodeo.net.
