A Quiet Revolution in Movies
Pretentious cineastes like to use the word “Film.” You take a class in
“film” studies. You are a “film” critic. You understand and appreciate serious
“film.” Contrast that with going to the “movies,” blogging about “movies,” or
even watching a dirty “movie.” Nobody ever sees a dirty “film.” The word is
high class and reserved for those who treat the medium in a certain artistic je ne sais quoi.
“Side by Side,” is a marvelously educational documentary (shot
digitally) about how all of that is changing. With the onset of more and more
sophisticated digital cameras, the word “film” is becoming more and more of a
misnomer. You can’t call the latest movies by such cinema stalwarts as Martin
Scorsese (“Hugo”), David Fincher (“The Social Network”) and James Cameron
(“Avatar”) films. They aren’t films. Film refers to a type of medium that
records the sights and sounds of the moving picture and these movies did not
use that type of medium. These movies were recorded digitally. So “The
Social Network” is a serious “movie” not a serious “film.”
So what does that mean for us moviegoers beyond a conversational
defense mechanism against predatory semantic Nazis. Well, the demise of the word “film” actually is correlated with the
demise of the pretentiousness that goes along with it. Digital movie making is a
democratic revolution. It is cheaper. It is faster. It is easier to shoot and
edit. It takes the process of putting images onto a screen less of a mystery
and hands more control and power over the artistic vision to writers and directors. The losers in the revolution are
cinematographers and studios. With the expertise and financial backing no longer
needed to produce a film print, you don't need technical experts and corporations. As Lena Dunham, the writer/director of
HBO’s GIRLS, wisely notes “I don't think without digital video, I don’t think I would be
making movies because I always felt that you had to have a certain kind of knowledge. Basically you had to be a dude who knows how to operate machines.”
So what is different about the process? This documentary pulls no
punches is getting technical and does a wonderful job of plenty of interviews with
some truly big names in cinema. (Here are a few: Christopher Nolan, Martin
Scorsese, James Cameron, Danny Boyle, George Lucas, Robert Rodriguez, David
Lynch, Steven Soderbergh, David Fincher, and the Wachowskis. Plus there is a bunch
of great cinematographers and editors whose names I did not know, but whose
work I recognized.)
First of all, digital will allow you to immediately see a take on the
set of a movie. With film you had to develop the picture overnight and watch it for the first time the next morning. David Fincher expressed the difference the most candidly. When
working with film, he would ask the cinematographer, did we get the shot? What
about the details in the corner? Did we get those? Will we be able to see those
details in the finished product? And the cinematographer would go, yes we got
it, take my word for it, you will see tomorrow. Sometimes the cinematographer
would be correct and you would be amazed at what he captured (Seven) and other times you would be
looking at the dailies the next day and go, “What the F***!” With digital, you
can rest assured that you actually accomplished something during the day of
shooting it and that you won’t have to come back to it.
Second, digital will allow you to run the camera for far longer takes
than you could with film. After about ten minutes of shooting film you would
have to change the reels, but digital filmmaking can go on basically forever.
Some actors like John Malkovich, a theatrically trained actor, talk of why not stopping is better for momentum
purposes. On the other side is an
anecdote about Robert Downey Jr. on
the set of Iron Man 2. Apparently he got so fed
up with the digital process and started taking pisses in mason jars and
leaving the urine around the movie set in protest of never having a stop in
production where he could go to his trailer, rest up, and get his shit together
for the next couple of takes.
Then there is the greatest argument of all and that is which medium had
the better picture quality. The documentary takes us on a grand tour of all the
advances of digital moviemaking in the last thirty years starting from the
first digital character, a stained glass character in a Spielberg/Lucas
production of Young Sherlock Holmes,
the first movies shot entirely on digital, the Star Wars prequels, the earliest indie movies made on extremely low
budgets made possible only on digital, Chuck
and Buck, to the new camera used for Michael Mann’s Collateral,
to the first movie shot on digital to win an Oscar for Best Cinematography,
Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, and
ending of course the ultimate digital movie, the 3D colossus Avatar. As Cameron frankly admits, “You
can’t shoot film in 3D, so film has been dead in my heart for the last ten
years.”
Today it seems that the pictures produced by both digital and film are almost indistinguishable. (To the very trained eye this is not completely so. Take a look at Fincher's Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The snow would look colder if shot on film.) With digital, however, you can do far more with the picture in
post-production, the best examples being the Roger Deakins use of
color-correction in “O Brother, Where Art
Thou?” and Robert Rodriguez’s comic book classic, Sin City, two movies that achieved looks that are impossible with
film.
Of course film has its defenders, the biggest and most admirable being
Christopher Nolan, who has shot all of his movies, most notably the Dark Knight
series, on film. He enjoys the process, trusts his cinematographer (interviewed
as well and memorably dismissing 3D as an upsetting distracting scam), and
defends the picture quality as being superior to digital. Anyone who has seen
his movies knows he has a point. Film is still a very good way to make movies.
But for those who are not blockbuster directors with access to studios willing to indulge their aesthetic choices, digital opens a door that had been kept
closed for not just movie history but for all of human history. There is a reason why Shakespeare mostly wrote about kings and
it is not because kings are inherently more interesting than the
rest of us. The reason is because kings were the ones paying for the plays. When movies are so expensive that decisions for who gets to make what movies
are kept to bigwig studio heads of corporate conglomerates what you get is a off kilter proportion of movies made about the upper classes. Anyone who lives in NYC knows this. How many times have you seen a movie where the characters are living in gigantic apartments and they don't seem to be aware of how outrageously way too expensive the apartment must be. I say, the rest of us who live in normal sized apartments are interesting too, but these stories won’t be told until we can afford to make movies too. Digital cameras gives us that ability.
There are plenty of film lovers in this movie that speak some truth about how just adding more people into the ranks of moviemakers is not going to automatically equate better movies in the
marketplace. They look at the Sundance Film Festival and its growing amount of inferior
submissions each year. Yeah, but they still produce great indie movies on a consistent basis as well. In any case, the British Parliament said a similar thing about democracy in
America. Digital moviemaking is unambiguously a good thing.
Side by Side Official Trailer (2012) from Company Films on Vimeo.
