One of the sites where I spend a lot of time reading is the AV Club, which I got hooked onto many years ago via the hilariously funny, satirical newspaper The Onion. Back in 2015, they did a special series about the year 1995 with one of the articles being about the demise of the DVD. Being the DVD patron that I am I took some interest in this article and I should point out that while I don't consider the format to be completely dead, I'm also not in love with it enough to be considered a fetishist, to borrow a word from the article.
One idea that really wasn't directly mentioned in the article is the notion that storing a film onto a tangible object, whether it’d be a cassette or a disc, brought with it the concept that a film was something that could be owned and kept. When one pays money to see a film in a theater they are essentially purchasing the permission to see it one time, displayed on a gigantic screen with a world class sound system. Apart from the images and moments that remain lodged within one’s memories, nothing is retained by the consumer. With movies encoded into hard copy media however, suddenly films could sit on a shelf in someone's home and they could be watched over and over again in a completely obsessive manner. The rise of hard copy formats commodified films to a degree that they were considered a product of value to be bought and sold. I agree with the main thrust of this article that the DVD essentially transcended the previous hard copy formats by including additional features that, as the author correctly points out, were a necessity of the times in which the DVD existed. But all of this only worked to enhance the idea of films as a 'product' and not as an experience. To keep a copy of a film in the cloud, or on your C drive may erode the idea of a film as an object that you can hold in your hand, but it still maintains the notion of ownership and of films as an item of value, which I don't consider to be that big of a leap conceptually. Certainly not a big enough of one to lead to the immediate death of all hard copy formats, weather that’d be DVDs, Blue-Rays, or whatever else. While the hard copy concept has made a plethora of older and hard to find films more accessible for cinephiles to watch (which is certainly one of the best things to ever happen to film culture), giving birth to the notion of films as a product is not necessarily a positive development for the film industry. I find discomfort in the author's analogy of a DVD bonus feature to that of a Happy Meal toy, one that arises not because I find it to be inaccurate but rather in the idea that if this analogy was carried further, a film would then be comparable to a McDonald's hamburger. This is a scenario that suggests the addendum as having more intrinsic value than the item at the heart of the transaction.
Another interesting thought though is that while hard copy formats introduced the notion of films as a product, it didn't entirely embrace the idea. The video rental store is one place where films are a tangible object, but yet still purchased to be experienced, not kept. My exposure to films growing up was primarily through rentals from a variety of stores and chains (a lot of them had the tendency to come and go very quickly), and to this day the concept of purchasing films to own is something that has never really fully registered in my mind. I think where one encounters films and the context in which one accesses them has a huge impact on how one views a film and this can overcome the effects that a certain medium can have. And today a library might be one of the more unique places to access films. Not only does a library destroy the idea of a film as a commodity to be sold, but a library is a place where culture is maintained, preserved, and to some degree curated. A film at a library is more of a cultural artifact waiting to be discovered than a product. A library also continues the rental store construct where one obtains a film to experience and then return at a later time. To see a DVD of a film at a retail outlet, where it's wrapped in cellophane with a price sticker affixed, and to see it on a shelf of a library is to approach a film from two completely different mindsets. It's the latter perspective that leads me into all of my critiques including my next selection.
Side by Side
The cover dispels any conception that I might have accidently grabbed a documentary about the Collingwood Magpies football club. Instead I see one the dullest covers yet. If I was to rank all the covers in terms of their artistry, this one would be dead last. It shows a blue to dark green gradient color scheme that serves as the backdrop for simple white text in various fonts. This text includes a film critic quote in the top left hand corner, and the names of 7 directors taking up most of the space in the center of the cover. They are James Cameron, David Fincher, George Lucas, David Lynch, Robert Rodriguez, Martin Scorsese, and Steven Soderbergh. Below this is the producer credit (belonging to Keanu Reeves of all people), the film's title, and the tagline "Can Film Survive Our Digital Future?" Well let's dig in and find out.
The movie starts seemingly at cinema’s early beginnings as we see a 19th century era filmstrip of a man riding a horse. The proceeding film clips move progressively further towards the present, while the narrator spins the standard plug about the adulatory glory that is cinema. The narrator ends his piece by introducing a new character into this tradition, a digital computer chip; a technological development that is threatening to replace the film standard that has been used for over a century. After this narration ends the movie transitions into its primary format, that being a stream of talking head interview clips with cinematographers, directors, actors, producers, editors, VFX experts, colorists, and corporate managers. Actor Keanu Reeves, displaying various stages of facial hair growth, shepherds all of these discussions which are often intersected with clips from a variety of different movies.
What’s interesting to note during the first wave of interviews is that the directors, (which includes David Lynch, Martin Scorsese, the Wachowskis, George Lucas and others) are the ones who seemed to have already resigned themselves to the notion that film is dead, while it is the cinematographers (or DPs) who are still fighting to preserve the older format. The movie sheds some light on this by discussing the role of DPs in filmmaking, a role that requires a very specific technical expertise which was not always fully understood by the directors they worked with. In the days of film, the directors had to place a great deal of faith in the work of cinematographers due to the fact that film magazines would take a day to be developed and printed, with no one really knowing what had been shot until the next day when viewed during a screening session known as dailies. The practice of dailies did not suit directors very well, since they were kept in the dark about what had been captured and were further kept in suspense overnight.
The movie does an excellent job of being informative by including a couple of short animated sequences that discuss the basic techniques of each medium. With filmstrips the cameras capture images onto frames, a process that includes coating the strip with silver halide crystals resulting in a somewhat grainy look. A digital camera meanwhile captures light into pixels stored on a sensor or chip. While a digital image may lack the granularity and texture of a film image, it can still achieve a greater sharpness and precision in the image quality. One of the better advantages of the digital process was that it allowed for the camera to be connected to a monitor allowing the director to see exactly what was being recorded as it was shot, eliminating the need for dailies, which some DPs actually did perceive to be an advantage. Ironically however, some directors still insisted on the practice of dailies just to see the images in a more theatrical setting. Nonetheless the use of digital imagery removed much of the mystique of cinematography work.
Despite some advantages to using digital equipment, the use of them in moviemaking started slowly. The movie gives a rather tepid, possibly incomplete history of digital moviemaking, starting with the members of the Dogma 95 collective who were some of the first filmmakers to embrace this new technology. The first of these movies, The Celebration, had very fluid, frantic camera movements, albeit the image quality was still pretty substandard when compared to film. American moviemakers soon after started to embrace digital cameras and such devices were used in movies like Personal Velocity and Tadpole. Even with the success of these movies, it still carried the marker of being an indie tactic, done primarily to save money or to achieve a certain production aesthetic. Acceptance within the mainstream industry gained a foothold when George Lucas shot his 2002 movie Attack of the Clones entirely with digital cameras.
To further explore the debate between film and digital technology, the movie delves into some of the idiosyncrasies of each medium. With film cameras, a director could only shoot for 10 minutes at a time before running out of film in the magazine, which was problematic for more theater ingrained actors used to longer, more continuous performances. Conversely other actors talk about the whir of an operating film camera and how it was capable of creating a sharper focus for the actors and crew, signaling a greater sense of importance to each take. Director Danny Boyle though dismisses any effect on the actors and reinforces the biggest advantage with digital cameras, their cheapness. With the film 28 Days Later, he mentions how they used 10 different cameras for a certain sequence allowing the actor to perform the part in a more fluid, natural manner. While such an approach provided an almost effortless continuity from the actor, it created far greater work for the editors who had to pore through hours of footage.
From this, the movie gracefully segues into a discussion of the various aspects of film production and shows that the digital revolution occurred in piecemeal bursts. Editing systems were the first to go digital. After this computers were soon adopted in a more creative mode with the development of CGI images. Through these applications another advantage of digital imagery came to light with the fact that there was less degradation when compared to the older process of compressing layers of film together. Other processes like color timing were also digitized, which offered a greater level of control over the look of a film. Even the projection process in movie theaters became digitized, which resulted in a huge increase in the quality and consistency of how films were presented. This particular aspect has gained the admiration of even the most skeptical of critics when it comes to digital technology. The only disadvantage to digital technology that we encounter is in the archival process, due to the all numerous different formats that have been created. Here the simplicity that film only needs light to be projected offers more assurances of a movie’s continued accessibility.
Strangely one of the last aspects of moviemaking to transition into the digital world were the cameras. Because of this many movies required a conversion from film to digital imagery in order to be displayed in a theater, which ended up serving as the impetus for Lucas to abandon film entirely. The final third of the movie discusses the digital cameras that have been developed during this transformation, and ends with a pseudo-eulogy for film. Even if film doesn’t completely die, its days as the most dominant medium of moviemaking are clearly numbered.
The movie provided some excellent coverage of the issue, showing a willingness to shine light on a lot of the detailed nuances of this argument. However there wasn’t any real in-depth discussion of the ideas that floated throughout the movie, which at times was very thought-provoking. One idea is that the newer technologies are making too many things possible when it comes to making movies. That while the expansion of these possibilities may be seductive in concept, they end up being far more troublesome in practice. Producer Lorenzo Di Bonaventura taps into this idea when he mentions that some movies have been manipulated to death. Behind this perhaps is the notion that technology is not necessarily progressive, that it creates both solutions and problems. It adds new capabilities, while abetting the deterioration of older talents and skills, as editor Craig Wood subtly hints at.
Another idea that got tossed around was the notion that a great deal of moviemaking is all of a sudden taking place on a computer, and not through a camera lens. James Cameron is one director who seems to have fully embraced this methodology. In his discussion of the film Avatar, he talks about honing in on a “mathematically perfect model for creating reality…”. Even though he admits some futility in this, his approach comes across more scientific than artistic. Art is about much more than the precision of a craft. Doesn’t an artist sometimes purposely do things others consider wrong in order to achieve an aesthetic?
I also consider the notion of “creating reality” to be an oxymoron. The idea of creating anything implies an explicit artificiality. Cameron’s defense to the charges that his films are unrealistic was pretty weak. Granted I do agree that there is a level of artificiality in the process of how all films are made (even documentaries), but there is an additional nuance here that Cameron appears to be ignoring. What happens in front of the camera may be artificial, but what passes through the lens is reality. Photography has long been associated with cinema, and in photography pictures are often taken more than they are created. It is in this process of ‘taking’ where reality exists, and reality is something that is far better captured than created. When I saw the clips from Avatar, I didn’t see any photography only animation, and if directors become less dependent on photography as the main conduit for their art, then there’s going to be less reality involved. Also instead of viewing reality in a purely binomial manner, we could consider reality as existing in various degrees. A filmmaker like Andrew Bujalski will capture far greater levels of reality in his movies than Cameron will ever create in his, even with the most sophisticated of mathematical models.
Another idea is that since digitalization is far less expensive to implement, this has enabled a lot more people to achieve their dream of making a movie. In one segment David Lynch invokes the spirit of Sturgeon’s Law when he argues that this will be to the detriment of cinema. To be fair, there were plenty of awful films made in the old days and Theodore Sturgeon’s idea was just as applicable to cinema then as it is now. However the movie does hint at the notion that having less barriers of entry into an art form will only increase the volume and proportion of work that falls into (for the lack of a better phrase) ‘Sturgeon’s Majority’.
The overall effectiveness of the movie was middling at best. One thing I wished the movie would have done more of is to show the visual differences between film and digital imagery. I have no doubt that an industry insider can tell the difference, but I don’t know if the average moviegoer can. To offer more insight into what to look for could have made the movie more engaging. One thing the movie did do successfully though is to show the evolution of digital imagery. The images from The Celebration really looked cheap and tawdry, but one can really see the improvement in the image quality as clips from more recent movies are shown.
Reeves’s interview style was not always that great. He didn’t seem to get the most out of some of his interview subjects and at times he doesn’t probe or challenge them enough. The presentation of the debate was a bit unfocused and meandering, bouncing back and forth between a lot of the same ideas. While the movie gathered an excellent range of opinions and thoughts from a wide array of people in the industry (albeit even this was limited to Hollywood and European filmmakers), it never really came to a satisfactory conclusion about the direction forward.
Strangely I think this might actually be the movie’s hidden strength, and what may ultimately prove to be the greatest source of hope for the future of moviemaking, that there is no true agreement on where the art form is headed. In any art there contains a measure of health when there is no consensus on how to approach its creation, and this movie shows a remarkably diverse and firmly divided landscape with stubborn diehards in each camp. Still this movie isn’t so much a discussion about art as it is about technique. Much of the debate over which movie cameras or tools one should use is a bit analogous to painters arguing over which paintbrushes to use. There is little discussion of the desired output, or as Steven Soderbergh puts it “the get”, and how this can vary drastically from director to director. Ultimately shouldn’t the image that an artist wants to craft determine the tools to be used? Subsequently should there ever be any one way to make a movie?
Even with digital equipment there might still be some variety in the tools being used. The movie shows a real strong contrast between Vince Pace’s Fusion camera system; a massive convoluted blob of cables, monitors, box shaped computers, mirrors, cameras, dials, and screws; and Anthony Dod Mantle’s rather simple and much more mobile SI-2K camera. Still the great fear I suspect with the loss of film is that it may usher in a more uniform approach to the way in which movies are made. It threatens to inject a notion of objectivity when there should be some relativism, to place a science where there should be an art. And there seems to be a bittersweet recognition among even the most reluctant that digitalization is the wave of the future. There is also a capitulation to the future in the fact that Side By Side was shot on a digital camera, as one can see in the behavior of two of its interview subjects (Danny Boyle more expressively). The movie that ponders film’s future was itself not shot on film. Nothing may answer the question posed on the DVD cover with a more resounding “no” than this. Then again, if there’s any wisdom to be taken from the movie, its Geoff Boyle’s final comment that everything we create has an expiration date on it. If nothing is forever, then why should film be any different?
Movie Comparison. Another thing that I wished Side By Side had done was to establish some historical perspective regarding the current transition. Movies have gone through a number of technical modifications throughout the years and have hardly been a static art form. Some might argue that the inclusion of sound was a more profound and seismic shift in movie culture than the current switch to digital. Adding sound completely altered the conception of what a film was, swiftly destroying a definitive artistic style that had been in place for decades, and despite this film managed to thrive. For my comparison I really wanted to find a documentary that looked at the impact of sound in cinema, but really couldn't find much. As an alternative I'll consider the paradigm shift mentioned in my intro, the rise and fall of video.
Josh Johnson's 2013 documentary Rewind This! starts in the most appropriate place possible, a flea market. Here an obsessive video collector is browsing by tents selling all sundry of kitsch, looking for movies that he can add to his collection. He makes a habit of mocking the ubiquity of the 2-tape version of James Cameron's Titanic, before purchasing titles like Shakedown and The Adventures of Timmy the Tooth. Rewind This! sticks to the talking head format and doesn't quite have the same breadth when discussing its subject matter as Side By Side. It briefly mentions the history of videotape (an invention that was developed in Japan in the 1970s), the domination of VHS over Betamax, the growth of video stores and rental places, the impact that home consumption had where the pause and rewind buttons suddenly allowed a cinephile to study a film in ways they never could have before, and the issues that currently exist with video preservation. A lot of the early video stores all seemed to have one common characteristic that they desperately needed to fill their shelf space and without much help from the major production studios, this meant finding awful, third rate movies that literally could not be found anywhere else. The production value of video is also given a short segment, and I think Rewind This! trumps Side By Side by suggesting that non-film based moviemaking really began on video, with Dave 'The Rock' Nelson being its most charismatic of auteurs. Rewind This! though is a weaker movie since its structured more as a love letter than as an actual debate, and thus is nowhere near as intellectually engaging. The movie spends most of its time as an expose for this colorful sub-culture that is being propagated by collectors, and video store owners. This ends up casting Rewind This! as the flip side to the current selection in that it focuses more on the consumer end of movie culture. If there was any overriding theme of the movie it was that videotape culture has put the power of choice and accessibility literally into the hands of people who consume cinema, albeit with some less than desirable consequences such as piracy. The movie ends on a bit of somber note as it casts a future where production studios attempt to grab some of this power back. If the two movies have any one thing in common, it's that there is a meta-recognition of the demise that it foretells. Rewind This! can currently be purchased from their website, ironically only as a stream or download.