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12/5/12 How Digital Is Changing the Nature of Movies - NYTimes.com
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THE NEW SEASON
Film Is Dead? Long Live MoviesHow Digital Is Changing the Nature of Movies
Weinstein Company
“The Master,” with Joaquin Phoenix, and Philip Seymour Hoffman, was shot in 70 millimeter.
By MANOHLA DARGIS and A. O. SCOTTPublished: September 6, 2012
IN the beginning there was light that hit a strip of flexible film
mechanically running through a camera. For most of movie history
this is how moving pictures were created: light reflected off people
and things would filter through a camera and physically transform
emulsion. After processing, that lightkissed emulsion would reveal
Humphrey Bogart chasing the Maltese Falcon in shimmering black
and white.
More and more, though, movies are
either partly or entirely digital
constructions that are created with
computers and eventually retrieved
from drives at your local multiplex or
streamed to the large and small screens of your choice.
Right before our eyes, motion pictures are undergoing a
revolution that may have more far reaching, fundamental
impact than the introduction of sound, color or television.
Whether these changes are scarcely visible or
overwhelmingly obvious, digital technology is transforming
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12/5/12 How Digital Is Changing the Nature of Movies - NYTimes.com
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Enlarge This Image
Wellspring/Photofest
Alexander Sokurov’s “Russian Ark”(2002), with Sergey Dreiden, has a90minute Steadicam shot.
Enlarge This Image
Rhythm & Hues/20th Century Fox
Suraj Sharma in Ang Lee’s forthcoming“Life of Pi,” has special digital effects.
Enlarge This Image
Associated Press
Gregg Toland, cinematographer,behind the camera with the directorOrson Welles on “Citizen Kane.”
how we look at movies and what movies look like, frommodestly budgeted movies shot with digital still cameras to
blockbusters laden with computergenerated imagery. The
chief film (and digital cinema) critics of The New York
Times, Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott, look at the stuff
dreams are increasingly made of.
A. O. SCOTT In JeanLuc Godard’s 1986 movie “Keep UpYour Right” a movie director (played by Mr. Godard)
declares that “the toughest thing in movies is carrying the
cans.” Those onceubiquitous, now increasingly quaint
metal boxes contained the reels of exposed celluloid stock
that were the physical substance of the art form. But
nowadays the easiest thing in digital movies might be
carrying the hard drive or uploading the data onto the
server. Those heavy, bulky canisters belong to the
mechanical past, along with the whir of the projectors and
the shudder of the sprockets locking into their holes.
Should we mourn, celebrate or shrug? Predigital artifacts —
typewriters and record players, maybe also books and
newspapers — are often beautiful, but their charm will not
save them from obsolescence. And the new gizmos have
their own appeal, to artists as well as consumers. Leading
manufacturers are phasing out the production of 35
millimeter cameras. Within the next few years digital
projection will reign not only at the multiplexes, but at
revival and art houses too. According to an emerging
conventional wisdom, film is over. If that is the case, can
directors still be called filmmakers? Or will that title be
reserved for a few holdouts, like Paul Thomas Anderson,
whose new film, “The Master,” was shot in 70 millimeter?
It’s not as if our job has ever been to review the coils of
celluloid nestled in their cans; we write about the stories
and the pictures recorded on that stock. But the shift from
photochemical to digital is not simply technical or
semantic. Something very big is going on.
MANOHLA DARGIS Film isn’t dead yet, despite the rushto bury it, particularly by the big studios. Film does not
have to disappear. Film isn’t broken — it works wonderfully
well and has done so for a century. There is nothing
inevitable or natural about the end of film, no matter how
seductive the digital technologies and gadgets that are
transforming cinema. A 16millimeter film camera is plenty
cool. A 35millimeter film image can look sublime. There’s
an underexamined technological determinism that shapes
discussions about the end of film and obscures that the
material is being phased out not because digital is superior,
but because this transition suits the bottom line.
The end of film isn’t a just a technological imperative; it’s
also about economics (including digital rights
management). In 2002 seven major studios formed the
Digital Cinema Initiatives (one later dropped out), the
purpose of which was “to establish and document voluntary specifications for an open
architecture for digital cinema that ensures a uniform and high level of technical
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performance, reliability and quality control.” What these initiatives effectively did was
outline the technological parameters that everyone who wants to do business with the
studios — from software developers to hardware manufacturers — must follow. As the
theorist David Bordwell writes, “Theaters’ conversion from 35millemeter film to digital
presentation was designed by and for an industry that deals in mass output, saturation
releases and quick turnover.” He adds, “Given this shockandawe business plan, movies
on film stock look wasteful.”
SCOTT Let me play devil’s advocate, though I hope that doesn’t make me an advocate forthe corporate interests of the Hollywood studios. If there is a topdown capitalist
imperative governing the shift to digital exhibition in theaters, there is at the same time a
bottomup tendency driving the emergence of digital filmmaking.
Throughout history artists have used whatever tools served their purposes and have
adapted new technologies to their own creative ends. The history of painting, as the art
critic James Elkins suggests in his book “What Painting Is,” is in part a history of the
changing chemical composition of paint. It does not take a determinist to point out that
artistic innovations in cinema often have a technological component. It takes nothing
away from the genius of Gregg Toland, the cinematographer on “Citizen Kane,” to note
that the astonishing deepfocus compositions in that film were made possible by new
lenses. And the arrival of relatively lightweight, shouldermounted cameras in the late
1950s made it possible for cinéma vérité documentarians and New Wave auteurs to
capture the immediacy of life on the fly.
Long before digital seemed like a viable delivery system for theatrical exhibition, it was an
alluring paintbox for adventurous and impecunious cinéastes. To name just one: Anthony
Dod Mantle, who shot many of the Dogma 95 movies and Danny Boyle’s zombie shocker
“28 Days Later,” found poetry in the limitations of the medium. In the right hands, its
smeary, blurry colors could be haunting, and the smaller, lighter cameras could produce a
mood of queasy, jolting intimacy.
Image quality improved rapidly, and the last decade has seen some striking examples of
filmmakers exploring and exploiting digital to aesthetic advantage. The single 90minute
Steadicam shot through the Hermitage Museum that makes up Alexander Sokurov’s
“Russian Ark” is a specifically digital artifact. So is the Los Angeles nightscape in Michael
Mann’s “Collateral” and the rugged guerrilla battlefield of Steven Soderbergh’s “Che,” a
movie that would not exist without the light, mobile and relatively inexpensive Red
camera.
Digital special effects, meanwhile, are turning up this season not only in phantasmagorical
places like “Cloud Atlas” and “Life of Pi,” but also in movies that emphasize naturalism. To
my eyes the most amazing bit of digital magic this year is probably the removal of Marion
Cotillard’s legs — including in scenes in which she wears a bathing suit or nothing at all —
in Jacques Audiard’s gritty “Rust and Bone.” While movie artists of various stripes
gravitate toward the speed, portability and cheapness of digital, which offers lower
processing and equipment costs and less cumbersome editing procedures, consumers, for
their part, are suckers for convenience, sometimes — but not always — at the expense of
quality.
I love the grain and luster of film, which has a range of colors and tones as yet unmatched
by digital. There is nothing better than seeing a clean print projected on a big screen, with
good sound and a strong enough bulb in the projector. But reality has rarely lived up to
that ideal. I spent my cinephile adolescence watching classic movies on spliced, scratched,
faded prints with blownout soundtracks, or else on VHS — and also not seeing lots of
stuff that bypassed the local repertory house or video store. I’d rather look at a high
quality digital transfers available on TCM or from the Criterion Collection, and more
recently (very recently) at a revival theater like Film Forum in New York. Like anyone else
of a certain age I have fond memories of the way things used to be, but I also think that in
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many respects the way things are is better.
DARGIS We’re not talking about the disappearance of one material — oil, watercolor,
acrylic or gouache — we’re talking about deep ontological and phenomenological shifts
that are transforming a medium. You can create a picture with oil paint or watercolor. For
most of their history, by contrast, movies were only made from photographic film strips
(originally celluloid) that mechanically ran through a camera, were chemically processed
and made into film prints that were projected in theaters in front of audiences solely at the
discretion of the distributors (and exhibitors). With cameras and projectors the flexible
filmstrip was one foundation of modern cinema: it is part of what turned photograph
images into moving photographic images. Over the past decade digital technologies have
changed how movies are produced, distributed and consumed; the end of film stock is just
one part of a much larger transformation.
I’m not antidigital, even if I prefer film: I love grain and the visual texture of film, and
even nottoobattered film prints can be preferable to digital. Yes, digital can look amazing
if the director — Mr. Soderbergh, Mr. Mann, Mr. Godard, David Fincher and David Lynch
come to mind — and the projectionist have a clue. (I’ve seen plenty of glitches with digital
projection, like the image freezing or pixelating.) I hate the unknowingly ugly visualquality of many digital movies, including those that try to mimic the look of film. We’re
awash in ugly digital because of cost cutting and a steep learning curve made steeper by
rapidly changing technologies. (The rapidity of those changes is one reason film, which is
very stable, has become the preferred medium for archiving movies shot both on film and
in digital.)
We’re seeing too many movies that look thin, smeared, pixelated or too sharply outlined
and don’t have the luxurious density of film and often the color. I am sick of gray and
putty skin tones. The effects of digital cinema can also be seen in the ubiquity of handheld
camerawork that’s at least partly a function of the equipment’s relative portability.
Meanwhile digital postproduction and editing have led to a measurable increase in the
number of dissolves. Dissolves used to be made inside the camera or with an optical
printer, but today all you need is editing software and a click of the mouse. This is
changing the integrity of the shot, and it’s also changing montage, which, in Eisenstein’s
language, is a collision of shots. Much remains the same in how directors narrate stories
(unfortunately!), yet these are major changes.
SCOTT I agree that digital has introduced new visual clichés and new ways for movies tolook crummy. But there have always been a lot of dumb, badlooking movies, and it’s a
given that most filmmakers (like most musicians, artists, writers and humans in whatever
line of work) will use emerging technologies to perpetuate mediocrity. A few, however, will
discover fresh aesthetic possibilities and point the way forward for a young art form.
An interesting philosophical question is whether, or to what extent, it will be the same art
form. Will digitally made and distributed movingpicture narratives diverge so radically
from what we know as “films” that we no longer recognize a genetic relationship? Will the
new digital cinema absorb its precursor entirely, or will they continue to coexist? As
dramatic as this revolution has been, we are nonetheless still very much in the early stages.
DARGIS The history of cinema is also a history of technological innovations and stylisticvariations. New equipment and narrative techniques are introduced that can transform
the ways movies look and sound and can inspire further changes. Does taking film out of
the moving image change what movies are? We don’t know. And it may be that the greater
shift — in terms of what movies were and what they are — may have started in 1938, when
Paramount Pictures invested in a pioneering television firm. By the late 1950s Americans
were used to watching Hollywood movies on their TVs. They were already hooked on a
convenience that — as decades of lousylooking home video confirmed — has consistently
mattered more to them than an image’s size or any of its other properties.
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A version of this article appeared in print on September 9, 2012, on page AR41 of the New York edition with the headline:Film Is Dead? Long Live Movies.
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From there it’s just a technological hop, skip and jump to watching movies on an iPad.
That’s convenient, certainly, but isn’t the same as going to a movie palace to watch, as an
audience, a luminous, largerthanlife work that was made by human hands. To an extent
we are asking the same question we’ve been asking since movies began: What is cinema?
“The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent,” the philosopher Roland
Barthes wrote. “From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately
touch me, who am here.” A film image is created by light that leaves a material trace of
something that exists — existed — in real time and space. It’s in this sense that film
becomes a witness to our existence.
Then again, I learned from the great avantgarde artist Ken Jacobs — who projects
moving images that he creates with shutters, lenses, shadows and his hands — that cinema
doesn’t have to be film; it has to be magic.
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