HK17/600

HK17/600 35 mm film projector, made in Russia. The projector has two incandescent lamps and plays optical sound from the film. The projector was easy to maintain and was considered to be well-designed, lightweight, and portable, and was often called a travel projector. The projector is one of two that were used to show films in the theater of MÍR (Icelandic-Soviet Cultural Association) at Vitastíg 3. The association used the projectors to show Soviet cultural films, such as War and Peace. The projector was always housed at MÍR and was the last projection machine used by MÍR in that auditorium. When MÍR moved from there to Hverfisgata, the organization gave the projectors, along with other equipment, movie theater seats, and a spare parts inventory, to the Film Archive in 2006. Similar machines were in the Russian embassy, but the museum also owns those machines. A significant amount of propaganda material from the Soviet Union was dubbed into Icelandic. It was remarkable that the material was dubbed by a Russian man who spoke Icelandic fluently, despite never having been to Iceland. The film archive has a significant amount of material from MIR, but the largest single film collection in the archive comes from there.