Side by Side (4/5 Stars)

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.