Toronto Sun: “Film is dead, long live digital.”
David Cronenberg: So, actually, you can’t process film in Toronto any more. If you shot on film in Toronto, you’d have to send it to L.A. to get it developed. And why would you ever want to shoot on film? Well, I don’t. Creatively though, what you do as a director, how you work with the actors and what the lens do and what the light does is exactly the same.”
While this is about film as media rather than format, the same applies to books. I was raised in a household where books were sacred. You only have to look at the hoard of books held by my father and my own overflowing library to see that the desire for printed paper is strong in my bloodline.
But from an outsider point of view, film and paper books occupy the same technological niche. It is bizarre that we have preserved film and books with such religious zeal. Books were hand written. They used vellum and reeds and hide. But for some reason, the modern book; mass-produced at rates of hundreds every minute, made up of card, wood pulp and cheap ink has become revered as if it represents the original works of art created by hand in bygone ages.
The assumption becomes that books will never disappear. And they may not. And maybe newspapers will never disappear. And we might be right about that. But the use will decrease and I foresee a time, not too far away in the future, that paper newspapers and books are reserved for the sort of specialist or hobbyist who demands film in their movie-making.
I guess the argument is always to do with ‘authenticity’, as if analog formats are inherently more credible than digital. While this is obviously nonsense for some media (books, comics, music) others aren’t 100% there yet. Certainly no-one is making movies digitally yet that retain the pleasing qualities of film, but it’s literally just around the corner.
What it’s gong to take though is some level of emulation/filtering to achieve – at the minute video captured via Red’s cameras, for example, is VERY clean and noise free. And as anyone who has seen a good film to blu-ray transfer will attest, clean and noise-free isn’t an accurate description. Film feels and looks handled, and it has a grain that for some reason adds a layer of verisimilitude that for some reason can feel absent in digital. It’s the same perceptual difference that leads vinyl junkies to claim that it ‘sounds better’: they actually just prefer a bit of noise in the signal, a slight distancing from 100% accurate presentation.
It’s a tough on for me, because there’s nothing quite like knowing you’re going to get a guaranteed reference standard presentation of a film in a high quality theatre like the Dundonald Omniplex, but…
I loved film showings. I miss hearing the projector behind me. I know older folks who actually miss watching films with cigarette smoke floating in front of the screen. But that’s all nostalgia.
I guess what I want is for digital to find a way to impose some sort of sense of the feeling one gets from knowing YOUR copy of Hitchhiker’s Guide has a corner missing from the back cover, or that YOUR copy of Stevie Wonder’s Songs In The Key of Life skips just after the second chorus…
Rambled a bit, but these are things I’ve been mulling over recently.