Todd McCarthy of Variety, who's old enough to know better, writes at the end of his review of "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button":
Still, for what is designed as a rich tapestry, the picture maintains a slightly remote feel. No matter the power of the image of an old but young-looking Benjamin, slumped over a piano and depressed about his fading memory and life; it is possible that the picture might have been warmer and more emotionally accessible had it been shot on film. It has been argued that digital is a cold medium and celluloid a hot one and a case, however speculative, could be made that a story such as "Benjamin Button," with its desired cumulative emotional impact, should be shot and screened on film to be fully realized. These are intangibles, but nor are they imaginary factors; what technology gives, it can also take away.
[Don't worry -- no spoilers.]
This makes about as much sense to me as blaming the weather on Doppler radar pictures. It may be the second-most misguided thing I've read about movies all year (after Patrick Goldstein's assertion that a "dumb summer comedy" is more worthy of contempt that a dishonest or inept film that expects its ambition to be taken more seriously).
OK, let's say the movie feels "cold" to you, and you attribute this feeling to something in the film. You could acknowledge the movie's predominantly wintry settings and sepia color pallete (exemplified by the fully digital image, set in the dead of night in an empty hotel lobby in the middle of the Russian winter, above). Or contemplate the loneliness of the emotionally detached title character/observer/narrator, who is born an old man in a decrepit body and is cursed to grow physically younger while watching everyone around him age and die.
And you might very well consider the Kubrickian sensibility of the director, David Fincher ("Se7en," "Fight Club," "Zodiac"), the most deliberate and precise of filmmakers. Not known as Mr. Warm 'n' Cozy -- even when working from a Gumpian screenplay by the writer of "Forrest Gump." If the film is dark and cool in tone, it's not because Fincher chose digital technology. It's because Fincher chose to make it dark and cool. You may dislike the countless ways in which the movie emphasizes these qualities (in every composition, every cut, every performance), but don't pretend it's the video that's doing it.
Earlier in the same review McCarthy says as much himself:
This odd, epic tale of a man who ages backwards is presented in an impeccable classical manner, every detail tended to with fastidious devotion. An example of the most advanced technology placed entirely at the service of story and character, this significant change-of-pace from director David Fincher poses some daunting marketing challenges, even with Brad Pitt atop the cast. Strong critical support will be needed to swell interest in this absorbing, even moving, but emotionally cool film, which is simultaneously accessible and distinctive enough to catch on with a large public if luck and the zeitgeist are with it.
I'm not saying that certain film stocks and certain video technologies don't have their own distinct qualities. I am saying that "coldness" is not unique to all video or all film. There was a time when photographic film (24 frames per second, projected with light) and videotape (30 frames per second, interlaced, involving electrons projected inside a cathode ray tube) were instantly identifiable as different media. There were Monty Python jokes about it. For example, film was distinguished by emulsion; video, by lines of definition.
When Marshall McLuhan wrote in "Understanding Media" of movies as a "hot" medium and television as a "cool" medium, he wasn't talking about emotional temperature-metaphors:
There is a basic principle that distinguishes a hot medium like radio from a cool one like the telephone, or a hot medium like the movie from a cool one like TV. A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in "high definition." High definition is the state of being well filled with data. A photograph is, visually, "high definition." A cartoon is "low definition," simply because very little visual information is provided. Telephone is a cool medium, or one of low definition, because the ear is given a meager amount of information. And speech is a cool medium of low definition, because so little is given and so much has to be filled in by the listener. On the other hand, hot media do not leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience. Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience. Naturally, therefore, a hot medium like radio has very different effects on the user from a cool medium like the telephone.
In this sense, many of today's video games are, like print, cool media that require more activity on the part of the user than more passive hot media like movies that provide more "high definition" information to the senses and require less from the observer.
The resolution of current the high-definition digital video technology used in a film like "Benjamin Button" makes these distinctions between traditional 35mm films and "video" immaterial. The frame rate is the same, and in the case of feature films, most are still transferred to 35mm for distribution and exhibition. Digital intermediates are used to make the final color corrections before final prints are struck, whether the movie was shot digitally or on analog film. Directors, cinematographers, lab technicians can get just about any "look" -- warm or cold -- that they want. Filmmakers like Fincher or Michael Mann like to use digital video for shooting in the dark because its sensitivity to low light is more detailed, and more akin to what the human eye sees, than even the highest-speed motion picture film. But they switch between film and video during production according to their needs, and Fincher used both on "Benjamin Button." (Can you tell which shots are digital and which are film?)
Even HDTV transfers (1080 lines of horizontal resolution, compared to more than 4,520 for some films) sometimes use software to soften the image and/or introduce "grain" so that it feels more like the film many are accustomed to. But the qualities of any projected image (sharpness, warmth, etc.) ultimately come down to the circumstances under which the movie is projected -- including the projector lamp and lenses, the size of the screen, and your distance from it. (For example: An early screening of "Benjamin Button" at the Director's Guild Theater, attended by the film's DP Claudio Miranda, was cancelled about a half-hour into the showing of the film because of a faulty color channel in the digital projection system.)
Whatever its attributes, and critics have been polarized -- remote or gushy, gimmicky or heartfelt, empty or profoundly moving -- the medium is not its sole message.
That Marshall McLuhan quote is one of the most interesting things I've read in the past month.
What would you say in regards to Lynch's take on video not being something that should emulate film but should rather be expounded upon in its own virtues of smears and digitizing? Should film remain film and directors look for better excuses than its easier to shoot in the dark? From my memory I can recall countless scenes shot in the dark that looked mesmerizing and were shot on film, hell I'd even say there's great beauty to behold in shooting day for night, even as recently as Judy Berlin. I don't know, I can feel the difference, mostly its an after-effects added grain that doesn't quite sit right, it's how the light can still sometimes react, its in the cleanness of the cut. I wouldn't discount completely the effect of shooting on video-pretending-to-be-film. Not that I think it takes away from the experience of the film, but it's something that you can notice, certainly if you're watching a lot of films. If it's something noticed if can also be something that distracts, like a cell phone, a crying baby, or a fanboy.
The medium IS the message. Or more correctly the medium makes the message. Are you saying that a digital version of Casablanca would have the same effect? Or what if it were shot in color? You might say "well now you are playing me for a fool. Color is a very perceptible difference. It is factual. But shooting in the technology differences between digital, HD, and what have you, do not."
This isn't the case at all. Even in music the likes of Tom Petty and Neil Young hate the new digital recordings because they sound "cold." Though these perceptions don't equate to reality.
Having not seen CCBB I can't comment on the film itself, but anytime a movie attempts to use technology to supplant for reality it comes across as cold (this includes most special effects films and cartoons as you mentioned. I would therefore find Sky Captain incredibly cold and boring, but found A Scanner Darkly not nearly as cold). It lacks the detail and spontaneity of reality and I find it most commonly boring. That being said warmth is also displayed in the tonal color, rhythm, texture of the film and the technology used to shoot the film directly plays into all of these. I think the same argument could be make with anything man made and of artifice. I think the arctic tundra was warmer than NYC, but this maybe stretching my argument.
As long as we stay with the technique of Fincher I agree he mimics Kubrick remoteness(though I'd disagree with most other comparisons made between the two. Kubrick is perhaps my favorite director and Fincher is a different animal entirely). His works are detached because he chooses to shoot not only what he shoots, but also chooses the technology to record it. If you want warm you obviously went to the wrong movie. Try Patch Adams 2 or the next Spielberg.
Remember that when you shoot film you aren't shooting reality. What is on film is not real. Yes it is fake, but that is not why it isn't real. It is an approximation of what action plays out. The camera is not an eye, but an approximation of an eye.
Obviously McCarthy simplified his reasons for the cold to make a point, but I don't read him regularly so maybe his is always single minded. (Variety is not a place I go for intelligent discussion on the arts. Instead I look here.) Overall I think you're being a bit dismissive and I think your reaction is essentially the same as McCarthy's. The reality is in the middle (and it usually is).
I have never been tricked by digital video into thinking I was watching film.
Film and DV look different. Why? Because they SHOULD look different. Watercolor and oil-based paint do not look the same and they should not look the same. Painters use oil and water for different things.
Directors use film and DV to achieve different things, just like they use black-and-white and color, or sound and silence. Michael Mann shot "Miami Vice" on DV not because DV "looks just like film now," but because HE DIDN'T WANT IT TO LOOK LIKE FILM.
Similarly, I doubt David Fincher shot "Benjamin Button" on DV because "it looks just like film." I'm intrigued to see Fincher tell a story about aging and memory using a medium whose claim to fame is that it never ages (as opposed to film, which deteriorates) and which looks more immediate than like a memory (as opposed to film which, with its natural blur, moments of focus issues, and general sfumato looks more like a memory than something actually happening).
yossarian: My point is simply that many artistic choices create the "coldness" in "Benjamin Button" (some have praised Fincher's emotional distance for keeping the film from sliding into mawkishness). Digital video alone doesn't do it. (And different cameras and video systems do indeed have their own looks, and are chosen precisely for their individual properties that may have nothing to do with the look of film.) But if the filmmakers had wanted to make the movie look as warm as "Meet Me in St. Louis," they could have done that -- even on digital video. As for "Casablanca," I wonder how many people today have ever seen it in non-digital form. It wasn't shot on video in 1942, but digital processes have been used to restore it since then -- and, of course, DVD is a digital medium.
John Keefer: Yes, Lynch likes to shoot on standard-definition video for many reasons including the maneuverability of the small, hand-held cameras; the length of time he can go without cutting or changing a cassette; the "tweakability" of the image... He's said he does like what he can discover deep in the shadows in post-production, but not because it's "realistic." He's excited by the artistic possibilities standard-def video offers him and he says that, although he also likes the look of film, he'll never go back.
P.: Film and digital video are often chosen for those very reasons -- because they look different (or because they offer different advantages during production). I like your watercolor/oil comparison -- neither of which is, by definition, "warmer" or "colder" than the other. Just as film is not inherently "warm" or "cold" (it depends on how it is used -- stock, compositions, colors, post-production work, printing, etc.), neither is DV. I doubt most people, even pros, can sense the difference between the digital and film shots in the average feature -- especially when projected in film on the average multiplex platter system.
Jim said I doubt most people, even pros, can sense the difference between the digital and film shots in the average feature -- especially when projected in film on the average multiplex platter system.
Yeah, they can, Jim. A lot of professional crews want to appear diplomatic in the discussion of the pros and cons of both formats, but when pressed, they will often come out on the side of film, and they can tell the difference, considering the processes involved. They know what to look for; namely, grain, sharpness, color, lighting - it's all there. I know I can see it. Looking at Once Upon a Time in Mexico at the movies, I could tell right away it was shot native HD, murky color, bad lighting dropouts (insult to injury - being projected on instantly scratched-up 35mm print didn't help).
35mm should always be the format for shooting a feature film, not necessarily presentation. Digital projection is making great strides - cheaper to produce release prints, and you don't have to deal with deterioration. Directors are championing digital because they don't like dealing with such large crews on their movies. They want to run away with their cameras, make their movies (see David Lynch).
JE: OK, I don't doubt you that other people have better eyes than mine. My point is that "Benjamin Button" (with some scenes shot digitally, some on film) isn't an emotionally "cold" film just because the bulk of it was shot on digital video. It looks the way it looks because David Fincher & Co. made it look that way. If they had wanted it to look "warmer," they could have made it look warmer. But they didn't. As for "Once Upon a Time in Mexico" -- that was a low-ish budget ($29 million?) Robert Rodriguez picture released five years ago, so I have no doubt it looked as you say, but there's no comparison to the technology used on "Benjamin Button." Side note: Rodriguez edits digitally, too, and you can always tell. That's why the first part of "Grindhouse" seemed phony as a $3 bill -- the "Machete" trailer wasn't shot or cut anything like a '70s trailer, and certainly didn't have the 35mm feel (especially when viewed in 1080 HD on cable). Nothing worse than a parody/homage that doesn't understand what it's based on.
"It looks the way it looks because David Fincher & Co. made it look that way. If they had wanted it to look "warmer," they could have made it look warmer. But they didn't."
Sure, but that doesn't necessarily go against McCarthy's argument either. If Fincher had wanted to make it look warmer, maybe he would have gone with a particular stock of film instead of digital right? I do agree that the 24 fps and lighting techniques make up for a significant part of what's missing. But, I just watched Pulp Fiction and Swingers a couple days ago again. Both have a really nice film texture to them and it's undeniable that it adds something.
JE: I don't argue with that at all. Just that a film is not made "cold" or "warm" by the technology of digital video alone.
“And you might very well consider the Kubrickian sensibility of the director, David Fincher ("Se7en," "Fight Club," "Zodiac"), the most deliberate and precise of filmmakers.”
I’m not sure David Fincher of today is anywhere near the supreme intellect of Kubrick. Maybe 25 years down the line, but not now. Of all his film, I believe only Zodiac is a film that is about what it is about. Every other film of his seems to be structurally flawed. And being structurally perfect was one of the great hallmarks of every Kubrick film, save The Killing, which was more gimmicky in nature.
Let us consider Fight Club. For one the complete genius of it rests in Chuck Palahniuk. But there lay the issue of adaptation, which still needs to be done. Does Fincher adapt it perfectly? And by perfectly, I mean with respect to the difference in mediums.
Palahniuk, in most of his novels, uses the first person’s narrative as a necessary ingredient because he uses it to present an inherently defective narration. We’ve a flawed narrator, otherwise called an unreliable narrator, or an imperfect observer. When we read the words the narrator is speaking, printed on the pages of the book, that is the only reality we’re privy to. Hence, effectively, we’re standing inside him. But cinema is a different medium, a visual medium, and there’s an objective reality to it that doesn’t quite exist in case of books. When we see our narrator in the frame we’re essentially standing besides him. Fight Club is a comedy (satire may be a better word), and it could have worked if the film juxtaposed the reality against the narration, but because of its twist ending, it relies on us watching it from a third person angle. One of its tricks is for it to make us believe Tyler and the narrator are two different people. Hence, for all its expertise in the technical department, I think the film’s final act feels a gimmick, a twist in the tale, rather than the eventuality of a state of mind. What works for the book, is exactly what doesn’t for the film.
The greatest thing about Fight Club is its tone. But it isn’t the film which discovers that tone. Rather the tone is inevitable considering the riffing prose of Palahniuk. It has such manic energy to it you're hurled from page to page. His novels have great angst in them, and he wraps them in his unique style of wit and humor that help bare the truth rather than conceal it. Most writers use humor as a garb, Palahniuk uses it as a tool to bend his world and stretch it to its most deplorable limits. His protagonists represent the ultimate lows in life, and they do quite despicable stuff, yet it all is a way to discover something deeply spiritual about his work. He isn’t a great narrator, in fact he often bludgeons us with the raging commentary across his pages, but he makes it such immense fun to read it, be horrified by it and then laugh at it, all at the same time. All the lines Pitt and Norton utter are the creation of Palahniuk, and let me tell you as a person who has read the book before watching the film, they are as funny if not more on page. And no offence to either of these great actors who deliver nothing short of remarkable iconic performances. Where the film’s genius lay is that it stays faithful to the book. Of course, I wish Kubrick was alive to adapt and make a film out of it (Considering how brilliantly he structured Barry Lyndon).This feels something right up his alley.
To everyone who claims that digital cinematography HAS to look different from film cinematography, and who claims to ALWAYS be able to tell when something has been shot digitally: I don't think that you know what you're talking about. Not long ago, Panavision conducted a test of its Genesis HD camera against a 35mm camera. You can still see the test footage online here: http://tinyurl.com/4f7nbw
I dare anyone to watch that and state, in this comment thread, that you know, with absolute certainty, which clips were shot in HD and which were shot on film. It's not just that people go on and on about how different video looks from film; they also like to claim to know what video is supposed to look like and what film is supposed to look like. So if you're so sure that you can tell when given footage is digital just by looking at it, then please take Panavision's test and see how much you really know. Don't just say that you can "spot the differences"; that would hardly be surprising.
Digital cinematography technology has advanced to the point where, if it's done properly, it can look indistinguishable from film, except for the lack of some film grain, of course. And once a digital master is transferred to film for projection, then there is no visual difference at all once projected. When an HD movie has what's not-so-affectionately termed the "video look," e.g. Collateral or Miami Vice, the reason is almost certainly because the director intended that look, not because the medium is incapable of looking just like film.
Here are a few more tests for you. Watch the trailer for Steven Soderbergh's Che and tell me: Do you think that it has a "video look" or a "film look"? Watch the trailer for Ed Harris's Appaloosa and tell me: Do you think that it has a "video look" or a "film look"? Finally, go to Best Buy or a similar electronics store, and check out their selection of HDTVs. Look at the ones playing demos of recent movies that were certainly shot on film, like Batman Begins or King Kong, and tell me if you think that any of those demos somehow make the movie look like it had been shot on video instead of film.
I've seen enough things that I can no longer be sure whether a given movie was shot in HD or on film just by looking at at. I used to think that I have a good eye for these things, like all of you, but I now know that I was wrong. I've seen HD movies that I thought were film, and I've seen film movies that I thought were HD. So I no longer see the point in arguing about how different one medium looks from the other. It's simply irrelevant, and it's regressive. I'm of the opinion that holdouts (cinephiles and filmmakers) for film origination are fetishizing the qualities of film to the point of absurdity and meaninglessness. They could not be convinced that digital cinematography could be just as good as traditional film. And even when/if they are fooled into thinking that something shot digitally was shot on film, they would just make up some excuse to justify their belief in the superiority of film. They are True Believers™, and there's no reasoning with them.
All of that is my long-winded way of saying, in addition to what Jim wrote in the original post, why McCarthy was wrong and misguided.
Fei: Thank you for understanding the precise distinctions I am trying to make. There's no way to prove this under laboratory conditions (I'm passing along what I've heard some pros say), but I would like to see somebody, for example, watch a commercially projected 35mm print of "The Dark Knight" and tell me, shot by shot, which images are digital in origin, which are 35mm, which are 65mm, and which are IMAX. Then I'd like to repeat the experiment with DVD and Blu-ray transfers projected on, say, 55-inch (larger than average) HDTV LCD, DLP and plasma screens.
Jim: I have, and I can (precise distinctions) and it is incredibly simple, considering there was the shooting schedule to follow as well as the financing - the budget being a theoretical $185,000,000-to-$215,000,000, the number of extras, practical, working sets built.
Daylight interiors (for the most part) were shot 35mm - looks like a 500T with a filter, the bus coming through the wall was real, digital dust was added. The bus exiting with the other buses was real, more digital dust added.
Daylight exteriors were shot with a combination of 35mm and 65mm motion control (again with the high-speed tungsten - you can tell from the relative lack of grain, tungsten is a very clean stock, very sharp); most DPs prefer tungsten to daylight because it translates corrected daylight shots better than applying a filter to daylight stock.
Nighttime exteriors (majority of stunts and CGI work for the movie) were shot with a combination of 65mm and HD simultaneously with the motion control - you can tell if it is an exceptionally steady shot. Incidentally, it looks like the hospital blowing up scene exterior (when the Joker is fumbling with his remote) looks like it was shot 250D and HD for the CGI explosions - the most conspicuous use of the CGI. This is the only scene with 250D (at least, according to my eyes) because it doesn't visually match much of the other action, the background appears murkier than most of the other exterior day scenes. I also have to add that real explosions were mixed in with the CGI explosions.
The HD image is the working visual effects print, and then the image is simply overlayed onto the final negative, sort of like Trumbull's Icebox technique for Blade Runner, except it is all done in a tiny computer.
A brilliant system in that the HD effectively covers any photographic oversights or flaws in the answer prints, it fills in shade of color, but the post-production isn't completely dependent on it. The IMAX bit just runs the 65mm film horizontally like VistaVision cameras, just like the way the special effects were done for Star Wars. The special effects in The Dark Knight are virtually seamless, but there are "tells" (mainly when you can see grain in one part of a shot, and, oddly, no grain in another part of the same shot!
The Dark Knight was made to be projected digitally, because 35mm projection can easily pick up these flaws, wheras a digital presentation will favor both processes and the resulting product will look fantastic.
I'm of the opinion that well-done digital footage is virtually indistinguishable from film footage. Take "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead." Entirely shot on HD, but the only time I consciously thought it didn't look like film was during an overly-bright shot. Certainly, thinking back, there are minute differences that give it away, but for the most part it looks like film.
Further, why would it matter if something is shot digitally or on film? You can make either one feel "hotter" or "colder" by white-balancing the color temperature. (Of course, I mean "hot and cold" as in temperature, not as in McLuhan's mediums.)The minute differences between the two aren't enough to make either one more "remote" or "emotional."
I agree that there are a number of tools to give a movie it's atmosphere, but I'd say the use of technology to shoot and record the footage is definitely one of them. That being said each format has a range you can work within with many variables. How the images is recorded and processed affects the feel of the movie for better or worse, but you're right. It's one of many factors and in the right hands shouldn't be the dominate one.
Fei:
I just took the Panasonic test and had some interesting results. While I was correct in assigning the sample clips to consistent cameras (A,D, and E for one, B, C, and F for the other) I mixed up which was film and which was digital. This suggests the Genesis and the film have distinct looks. Seeing as it was meant to be a demonstration of how the mediums are indistinguishable, it is not surprising they had a very similar look. In fact, I'm not sure how to describe the difference, it was something I could feel.
Without a side by side comparison, I don't know which format I would have attributed to either example. Of course, I was watching a Flash video at resolution below full screen. I wonder what I would have noticed if I watched a projection in a theater.
for what it's worth, I am usually good at spotting film, video and DV but I thought Benjamin Button was film..and it seemed plenty warm to me!
>>It may be the second-most misguided thing I've read about movies all year (after Patrick Goldstein's assertion that a "dumb summer comedy" is more worthy of contempt that a dishonest or inept film that expects its ambition to be taken more seriously
So then, by this logic, Meet The Spartans could be considered a better film then American Beauty?
JE: It could be -- I haven't seen "Meet the Spartans." But a movie isn't "good" or "bad," worthy of special praise or criticism, just because of its makers' intentions or ambitions. The road to hell is paved with well-intentioned movies that thought they had something important to say. My point is that a so-called "serious" film may be worthy of harsher criticism because it messes with serious stuff -- and, in the case of "American Beauty" for example, trivializes it with cartoonish/buffoonish satire and klutzy filmmaking. (Watching it, I knew it was the work of a stage director before I knew who the director was.)
What's odd, in my mind, about McCarthy's comments is that he even mentions the digital stuff at all. Even if it's Fincher's choice to shoot in digital that has given the film it's "cold" quality, it's like complaining that "Meet Me in St. Louis" is too happy because it was shot in technicolor. The color palate of that film is only one of many reasons that it's one of the happiest movies ever made. And choosing to shoot "Leave Her to Heaven" in technicolor didn't make it a happy film at all.
Instead, McCarthy should be asking why Fincher has chosen to make a "cold" or "distant" film rather than a "warm" one. He should busy himself with analyzing how that distance works on the material presented.
Jim: This is a big side note to the digital v. film discussion, where I'm pretty much in agreement with you. However, I'm a tad confused about your use of McLuhan's distinctions between hot and cool mediums. McLuhan's words about high and low definition do, I believe, refer to the physical definition or resolution of a medium; today's TVs and broadcasts are definitely "high-def" in comparison to those of the 50s and 60s. But if that was all McLuhan was speaking about, would that not mean that TV today has morphed and become a "hot" medium? Or at the very least is in the process of becoming one? (Is a videophone "hot" for providing more information than a regular phone? Is a landline "hot" for getting better reception than a cell phone?)
It's a complicated question, because I'm sure McLuhan would have plenty to say about the size of a television vs. the size of a movie screen, for instance, or the size of one television vs. another, or the difference between broadcast and cable. (I'm not so much of a McLuhan fan to have read enough to say if he ever mentions such things.) Yet I don't think McLuhan was speaking only of the physical dimensions of the mediums, and if he was, not at the exclusion of other factors. You bring up an excellent, but also contradictory point when you mention videogames: here you mention only the participatory nature of games, without mentioning anything of the physical dimensions (unless I'm reading you wrong). Isn't it possible that the original Game Boy is a lot "cooler" than the Xbox 360? No doubt! But videogames as a whole are a cool medium no matter how high-def and "cinematic" they get (which is why, I believe, gamers rebel against Metal Gear Solid's excessive cutscenes).
So in the end, I believe that no matter how big the TV, or high-def the broadcast, there's something inherent to TV that makes it "participatory" and therefore "cool" in comparison to the medium of movies. I can't pretend to know what that is, but I think it has more to do with its reliance on schedules ("every Thursday at 9:30"), its mass audience, and its particular formal makeup, (Hitchcock called it "television style").
I would go so far as to say that watching a DVD on a TV screen is still "hot," though it may be considerably cooled in the process. And the Internet (or personal computing) is cool no matter how large your monitor is.
This whole thing is a tangent to your argument; I think McCarthy's usage of the hot and cool distinction got us a bit off track.
JE: All I can do is provide McLuhan's definitions for film and video in the late 1950s and wonder what McCarthy meant by his use of the terms. McLuhan wrote:
There only real "side-by-side" test would be to have one theater showing a DLP projection and a second theater showing a 35mm projection of the same movie, and to not know which is which.
I've seen both 35mm ("Pirates of the Caribbean") and HD movies ("Apocalypto") projected digitally and they look the same. They look like video. They don't look like film yet.
I've seen 35mm and HD movies on an HDTV. They look the same. They look like HD. They don't look like film yet. Think of "CSI: Miami" with its hyper-vivid colors and cavernous police station.
I've seen 35mm and HD movies on 35mm. The 35mm looks like film. The HD looks like it's been converted. "Miami Vice" and "INLAND EMPIRE" for instance, were shot on video and converted and look beautiful, but they don't look like film.
I confess I am both a film fetishist and a video fetishist. I love the jittery grains and swirls of film; I love the knowledge that I'm watching something age before my very eyes, like turning pages in an old book. I love the smears of video. I haven't become an HDTV fetishist yet. In shows like "CSI" everything is hyper-vivid and hyper-detailed, not for any aesthetic purpose, but just so your TV can look like a floor model at Circuit City. Also I look at a computer screen all damn day. I don't need to look at it for fun. I want to look at something that isn't ramming the virtues of newness down my throat. Real life isn't as vivid and perfectly lit as HDTV. Real life doesn't look anymore like HDTV than it looks like "Citizen Kane," in which everything as far as the eye can see is in focus.
One day DV will look like film. It'll be a sad day for film fetishists and video fetishists if we lose our grain and smears.
P: I agree. Most HD looks like HD on an HDTV, no matter what the source. And to me, Blu-ray looks less like 35 mm than DVD does. LCD Projection -- rear or front -- looks a bit less sterile to my eyes than computer-like flat-screen technologies, maybe because I'm used to it. (I learned the hard way that I can't watch DLP rear-screen TVs, because I see the irritating rainbow stroboscoping. Some folks don't.) Some Blu-ray discs are gorgeous, but are they better looking because they're sharper and/or more detailed? Not necessarily. Some of those showroom floor models you mention look crystal-clear... and awful. Like the fluorescent lighting in the store itself. It hurts to look at them. I think one's satisfaction with Blu-ray will have more to do with the set up -- projection, screen size, etc. -- and the mastering of the individual film than with the megapixels of resolution. As anybody who's comparison-shopped for a digital camera can tell you, more pixels alone don't guarantee a more satisfying image.. That's the subject of a future post, I think...
When I did my video of "Rock and Roll All Night," I added a bit of grain to break up the overly-smooth nature of my digital medium. When I watched the new version of Hairspray, I thought they should have added a bit of grain for the same reason; those too-smooth surfaces were distracting. But to say that it should have been shot on film!
Benjamin Button was very Fincher-esque... almost as good as his other stuff if not for some nagging plot holes
I'm not sure the McLuhan hot/cold dichotomy applies to the question of whether Benjamin Button suffers aesthetically from having been shot digitally rather than on traditional celluloid, and I think that the previous posts expressing the idea that film and HD have distinct looks and artistic uses are absolutely correct. That said there is no question that for me Benjamin Button would have been a far more engaging and beautiful film had it been shot entirely on 35mm. HD's compressed contrast range and relatively restricted color palette along with the need to artificially produce a limited depth of field do give the film a look that Todd McCarthy correctly recognizes as flatter, colder (though not in the sense of color temperature as commented on by several posters), and lacking in the richness of celluloid. That richness is not a product of nostalgia for traditional film but of the technical qualities of the two capture media. Benjamin Button along with Slumdog Millionaire (which to me looks pretty poor) demonstrate that the tide is shifting decisively toward HD capture for feature films, and that audiences will be seeing significantly diminished image quality in the future. Whether this matters or not is a question I am preparing to investigate (along with several of my colleagues and students at Cleveland State University) as we embark on a study in which a short film will be shot simultaneously in both formats to determine the differences (if any) in audience response. Our previous research on the efficacy of the laugh-track on television situation comedies and on audience response to pan-and-scan cropping of film images for video exhibition give me little hope that my purist's perspective will be validated.
JE: That sounds interesting. Did you see "Let the Right One In"? Even "colder" looking than "Benjamin Button" -- but shot on 35mm. I'm just saying a lot of choices go into the look of a movie beyond the choice of film vs. HD video.
Apologies if my question has been covered in previous posts, but can anyone tell me definitively what type of film/camera was used for the scene in India (letter to daughter) in CCBB? Or was it just a digital effect?
JE: Tarsem Singh, director of "The Fall" (on my ten best list for the year), is credited as a second unit director (Cambodia and India) on "Benjamin Button." Meanwhile, "The Fall" was "presented by" "BB" director David Fincher, and Spike Jonze. "The Fall" was shot on 35 mm film, so my hunch is that Tarsem's location stuff in "BB" was from all the footage he shot over several years, as he traveled around the world making commercials and music videos, for "The Fall."