Yeah, you saw "The Artist" so you know it was a big deal when sound technology took over the movies. (Except that really you don't, because "The Artist" is only interested in the arrival of talkies as an obstacle to its love story. You'll learn more about the ramifications of the transition from film to video in pornography from P.T. Anderson's "Boogie Nights" than you will about the technological and aesthetic consequences of the shift from silents to sound in "The Artist.") David Bordwell concludes his awe-inspiring, in-depth series on "Pandora's digital box: From films to files" with some observations about the myths, realities and possibilities of digital projection (something the vast majority of moviegoers have yet to notice, I'd bet, although it's having a huge effect on distribution and exhibition) and finds a fantastic quote from "hacker historian" George Dyson:
"A Pixar movie is just a very large number, sitting idle on a disc."
That's not to diss Pixar, it's just a vivid statement of digital reality.
The ongoing switch from analog to digital movie projection is indeed a big deal, but I was struck by this observation from DB:
First, let's go fussbudget. It's not digital projection vs. celluloid projection. 35mm motion picture release prints haven't had a celluloid base for about fifteen years. Release prints are on mylar, a polyester-based medium.
Mylar was originally used for audio tape and other plastic products. For release prints of movies, it's thinner than acetate but it's a lot tougher. If it gets jammed up in a projector, it's more likely to break the equipment than be torn up. It's also more heat-resistant, and so able to take the intensity of the Xenon lamps that became common in multiplexes. (Many changes in projection technology were driven by the rise of multiplexes, which demanded that one operator, or even unskilled staff, could handle several screens at once.)
Projectionists sometimes complain that mylar images aren't as good as acetate ones. In the 1940s and 1950s, they complained about acetate too, saying that nitrate was sharper and easier to focus. In the 2000s they complained about digital intermediates too. Mostly, I tend to trust projectionists' complaints.
Me, too. And this takes me back to when I used to run a movie theater (well, I booked it -- with one of my favorite people in the whole wide world, Ann Browder, who owed the joint: the single-screen Market Theater in Seattle's historic Pike Place Market). We were adamant about employing union projectionists, even as some of the major chains were trying to get rid of them and substitute low-wage teenagers to push buttons on automated equipment.
I'd say that the creation of the multiplex was a more dramatic transformation in the way most people experienced movies than the film-to-digital revolution now under way. Theaters themselves became not only smaller, but less individualized. Instead of grand movie palaces, or neighborhood theaters that had their own personalities, the multiplex was designed to offer a set of more-or-less characterless, indistinguishable viewing boxes with a white rectangle at one end and no fancy curtain to cover it when it wasn't in use. Initially, the rectangle was bathed in light between shows, then filled with ads and movie trivia questions on slides, and is now a screen for video advertising. So much for showmanship. I used to remember where I'd seen every movie; this was the beginning of the end of that feeling of a movie being associated with a physical location or destination. (I still fondly recall one of my favorite pre-movie experiences at the Guild 45th St. cinema in my old Wallingford neighborhood in Seattle. I was there to see John Sayles' great "Lone Star" and before the show, while the gold velvet curtain was closed, the auditorium was filled with classic country-western music, including Frankie Laine, Sons of the Pioneers -- and Gene Pitney singing "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance." Talk about setting up the film and putting you in the mood!)
For all the complaints about poor projection today (especially insufficient light levels on the screen, a problem exacerbated by 3D glasses), the quality of presentation in the early multiplexes may have been the worst ever. First, you just had to accept that you were going to hear the soundtracks -- and sometimes the audience reactions -- from the movies next door. And then there was the matter of the movie in front of your face. Instead of hiring projectionists who had to stay in the booth to perform changeovers every 20 minutes or so, some chains would hire hyphenate "manager-projectionists" who would run up to the booth for as long as it took to get a show started (one button to dim the lights and start the projector, with the entire film built up as an endless loop on a platter), and then return to the lobby to sell tickets or concessions for the next movie in the next auditorium. For most of a movie's running time, there was nobody in the booth.
A single booth might have 14+ movies running simultaneously, and nobody monitoring what's actually happening in the auditoriums. When the picture would go out of focus or start fluttering (as it invariably would), or the sound would suddenly turn to moosh, people in the audience could yell at the booth all they wanted, but nobody was up there to hear. If the problem had any chance of being fixed, then somebody in the crowd had to get up and go to the lobby to inform the staff. Even then, quite often there was nobody working who knew how to correct any but the simplest glitches with the equipment. It wasn't uncommon for the chain to have just one tech on call for all the company's theaters -- somebody who'd have to drive over to one multiplex or another before problems could be resolved, and that could easily take a half-hour or more.
Of course, the most significant change of all was the one that came along just after the "overscreening of America" began, and that's the availability of movies on home video (BetaMax, VHS, RCA SelectaVision disc, DVD, etc.). It's just that the shift to digital video, marked by the success of the DVD, is now going the other direction, into theaters.
DB quotes from Geoffrey Cheshire's prescient 1999 essay, "The Death of Film / The Decay of Cinema":
People who want to watch serious movies that require concentration will do so at home, or perhaps in small, specialty theatres. People who want to hoot, holler, flip the bird and otherwise have a fun communal experience . . . will head down to the local enormoplex.
I think that's the situation most (current and former) moviegoers are in right now, unless they live in New York or some other population center with heavily subsidized institutional support for film exhibition. During last Sunday's Weinstein Awards broadcast, there was a lot of nostalgia for the theatrical experience, for seeing movies the old-fashioned way on a big screen. (We can no longer pretend, disingenuously, that the "big screen" is The Way Movies Were Meant To Be Seen, because we know that's simply not true. It can be thrilling to see something in 35 mm or 70 mm or IMAX or even IMAX Lite, but filmmakers and financiers know that the biggest audience will see their movie in some home video format. And we know they know that.)
The vaunted "theatrical experience" has been dying for decades, its demise perhaps hastened by home video. In part because people have the option to watch movies at home, but also because the other people in the theater are likely to treat public screenings as if they are watching the movie at home. You can't get the "theatrical experience" if the audience doesn't know how to behave in a theater. DB debunks some of the prevailing myths about theatrical exhibition:
First pseudo-worry: "Movies should be seen BIG." True, scale matters a lot. But (a) many people sit too far back to enjoy the big picture; and (b) in many theatres, 35mm film is projected on a very small screen. Conversely, nothing prevents digital projection from being big, especially once 4K becomes common. Indeed, one thing that delayed the finalizing of a standard was the insistence that so-called 1.3K wasn't good enough for big-screen theatrical presentation. (At least in Europe and North America: 1.3K took hold in China, India, and elsewhere, as well as on smaller or more specialized screens here.)
Second pseudo-worry: "Movies are a social experience." For some (not me), the communal experience is valuable. But nothing prevents digital screenings from being rapturous spiritual transfigurations or frenzied bacchanals. More likely, they will be just the sort of communal experiences they are now, with the usual chatting, texting, horseplay, etc.
In November 2011, Twentieth Century Fox sent a letter to exhibitors telling them that time was running out for 35 mm: "... we remind you that the date is fast approaching when Twentieth Century Fox and Fox Searchlight will adopt the digital format as the only format in which it will theatrically distribute its films. We currently expect that this date will be within the next year or two, as the costs of maintaining a dual inventory that includes 35mm prints are simply not sustainable for Fox in the long term." So, we know it's happening and it won't be long. The consequences for repertory and museum programming are murky, but DB touches on a psychological sea change that intrigues me:
Film fans point to the characteristic film shimmer, the sense that even static objects have a little bit of life to them. Roger Ebert writes:
Film carries more color and tone gradations than the eye can perceive. It has characteristics such as a nearly imperceptible jiggle that I suspect makes deep areas of my brain more active in interpreting it. Those characteristics somehow make the movie seem to be going on instead of simply existing.Watch fluffy clouds or a distant forest in a digital display, and you'll see them hang there, dead as a postcard vista. In a film, clouds and trees pulsate and shift a little. Partly the film is capturing very slight movements of them in air, or the movement of light and air around them. In addition, the film itself endows them with that "nearly imperceptible jiggle" that our visual system detects.
How? Brian McKernan points out that the fixed array of pixels in a digital camera or projector creates a stable grid of image sites. But the image sites on a film frame are the sub-microscopic crystals embedded in the emulsion and activated by exposure to light. Those crystals are scattered densely throughout the film strip at random, and their arrangement varies from frame to frame. So the finest patterns of light registration tremble ever so slightly in the course of time, creating a soft pictorial vibrato.
I have always been a fan of emulsion. I like to sit up front so that the picture fills my field of vision and I can see the texture of the image (see DB's "First pseudo-worry," above). Or I could, in a 16mm, 35mm or 70mm presentation. Digital -- not so much. In the old days, lenticular movie screens were actually coated with silver, or aluminum, tiny glass beads, mica platelets or other reflective substances. Whether they're made of fabric, vinyl or some other substance, modern movie screens have a grid of perforations that allow the sound from the speakers behind them to pass through. Most people sit back far enough that they don't notice these little dots, which in some ways resemble grid-like arrays of digital pixels.
To me, a pixellated image is something like looking out a window through an insect screen. If you're too close, you'll see the grid that overlays the view. But the individual squares themselves are always changing, even if their arrangement is not, because the world doesn't hold still even if the mesh through which you're viewing it does. I love the poetic language Roger and David use to describe the living, breathing, singing qualities of film, but I wonder how much of it is subjective and how much is objective. I've never seen any scientific evidence that watching video (even analog, interlaced cathode-ray video, where every other line of resolution changes 30 times per second, rather than every frame changing 24 times per second) actually affects the (subconscious?) human brain differently than watching film. If there is any such evidence -- particularly having to do with our responses to projected film and projected digital video -- I'd love to learn more about it.
Meanwhile, we know that some people strongly prefer one to the other, and I wonder how much our perceptions are conditioned by our expectations and what we're used to seeing, rather than the inherent trade-offs between digital and analog formats. When you sit as close as I do, you see everything in a 35mm print: the jitter (and sometimes flicker) of the film going through the shutter, the slight smearing or streaking that occurs when the equipment isn't properly "tuned" [comet tails!*], along with dirt, scratches, splices (and, depending on the print, the changeover marks and anti-piracy digital watermarks).
I have never been close enough to a 2K or 4K theatrical projection screen to see what the image looks like when you're standing right in front of it. (I used to be able to do that when I worked at a movie theater, but it would be rather rude to stand so close to the screen when there's a paying audience in the house.) At home, I watch a 55" Sony Bravia rear projection DLP HDTV (from about 2006) and, sitting 12 feet or so away from it, I can't see the pixel squares. I've looked at Samsung DPI rear projection screens (which also use lamps, so the image is still light projected on a screen, unlike computer monitors or plasma, DLP or LED monitors) and don't recall noticing any visible pixels at all, although I was susceptible to the dreaded DLP "rainbow effect." It depends on the technology used.
Above: From Wikipedia: "A pixel is generally thought of as the smallest single component of a digital image. However, the definition is highly context-sensitive. [...] A pixel does not need to be rendered as a small square. This image shows alternative ways of reconstructing an image from a set of pixel values, using dots, lines, or smooth filtering."
I will never forget (spoiler!) the death of Lillian Gish's character in Robert Altman's "A Wedding," because in her final close-up, the film grain itself stops moving. It seems poetically appropriate. Of course, it really doesn't -- there's still grain unique to each frame of film -- but the image itself is one frame printed repeatedly. Time itself stands still.
Looking at "The Walking Dead" in HD at home, I see something that, even in close ups, very much resembles little dancing particles of film emulsion. Turns out, according to the show's Wikipedia page, the series is shot entirely in 16mm, then converted to HD video. So, although grain can be digitally added to a video image after the fact as a post-production effect, in this case what we're seeing is real grain, rendered digitally. For someone like me, who grew up watching (mostly sub-par) 16mm nontheatrical prints in college film programs, the idea of an HD digital rendering of 16mm film is kind of mind-boggling -- like a pristine CD release of the gloriously filthy, lo-fi "Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols."
Left: A magnified image of the audible pocks, dust and dirt in an LP record groove. Look at anything close enough and you'll see the imperfections.
As DB notes, there are always compromises and trade-offs with any new technology. (The 24fps standard for motion pictures was itself "a concession to the just-good-enough camp.") CDs were smaller and more portable than LPs, less expensive to manufacture, and had much greater capacity -- not to mention programmability, greater dynamic range, and the elimination of so many audible imperfections that vinyl is prone to: groove distortion, rumble, swoosh, scratches, dirt and dust, static, warping and all kinds of other surface noise. On the other hand, some think CDs sound cold and sterile next to LPs (though it largely depends on mixing, equalization and mastering, and many early CDs were made from LP mixes that were not adjusted for the new technology) and that the digital sampling rate is too low.
David sums up the various positions he's heard regarding digital vs. film projection in theaters (with comparisons "assuming minimal competence of staff" handling each format):
1. They're not the same, just two different media. They're like oil painting and etching. Both can coexist as vehicles for artists' work.
2. They're not the same, and digital is significantly worse than film. This was common in the pre-DCI era.
3. They're not the same, and digital is significantly better than film. Expressed most vehemently by Robert Rodriguez and with some insistence by Michael Mann.
4. They're not the same, and digital is mostly worse, but it's good enough for certain purposes. Espoused by low-budget filmmakers the world over. Also embraced by exhibitors in developing countries, where even 1.3K is considered an improvement over what people have been getting.
5. They're the same. This is the view held by most audiences. But just because viewers can't detect differences doesn't mean that the two platforms are equally good. Digital boosters maintain that we now have very savvy moviegoers who appreciate quality in image and sound. In my experience, people don't notice when the picture is out of focus, when the lamp is too dim, when the surround channels aren't turned on, when speakers are broken, and when spill light from EXIT signs washes out edges of the picture....
I suppose I come down closest to #1 -- though my own feeling is that they're different, but each has its own advantages and disadvantages for accomplishing the same thing: projecting images onto a reflective screen with light. In that way, I guess the comparison is a lot like digital vs. analog methods for recording and playing music: CDs vs. LPs, or cassettes vs. DAT, or reel-to-reel vs. MP3 vs. FLAC vs. Ogg Vorbis vs. AAC...
How do you see it? Does it matter to you? If so, why? Is there any evidence that we respond differently to digital vs. film images? Are those differences, if they exist, aesthetic, psychological, neurological, or not logical at all?
- - - - -
* David McRae, a famous Seattle projectionist, technician -- and fellow Marketeer -- provided the term I was trying to think of when I was writing the above. He writes: "Hello Jim: In your article you are referring to a film projector being mistimed. The streaks you see are what we call comet-tails or rat-tails. This is caused when the projector shutter opens too soon or too late. The film is stopped and the shutter is supposed to open and then flick over the frame a second time to reduce the flicker on screen and create the illusion of movement. If the shutter opens while the film is being pulled down to the next frame the image streaks." Gracias, Dave!
32 Comments
Each recording and display tool has its own qualities and once you reach a certain level of quality, it's more about style than better or worse. Actually I'd argue that the bigger question is who can record and distribute what to whom and where can they do so. As a filmmaker on really low budgets, digital recording via DSLRs has allowed me to actually make films and make them look pretty good. Are they 4k or 35mm? No, but they bring that 35mm feel into reach. So digital recording has brought cinema-style filmmaking to new creators. The real question with Digital Projection is who can access these projectors, and who controls what films can be presented. We've seen the doors thrown wide open in the home video arena, but will digital cinema allow for more access or tighter controls?
I saw a digital projection of The Artist and it was CREEPY! It was weird to see a silent film that was so clean, and the lack of jitter on the title cards grossed me out. I'm serious.
My biggest problem with digital projection is that it looks awful where I like to sit, which is really close to the screen. Actually, up until a few weeks ago I thought it was just the poor quality of the projectors that caused excessive pixelation, but I recently read it is because I sit too close. Anybody have more information on this?
Sam, the "old" films when they came out were NEW, i.e. no jitter, not overexposed from reconstructions / wear & tear, no skippy motion (the skippy / sped up effect we get is because they were filmed in 17 fps and we are showing them in 24 fps nowadays). I guess your feeling is legit because you are accustomed to this from this perspective in time. however I suspect The Artist is closer to the original experience than the "oldies" you watch today.
"My biggest problem with digital projection is that it looks awful where I like to sit, which is really close to the screen. Actually, up until a few weeks ago I thought it was just the poor quality of the projectors that caused excessive pixelation, but I recently read it is because I sit too close."
I sit "too close", too. And digital projection - even the best digital projection - looks horrible. Film looks great and I enjoy an immersive experience.
The "you sit too close" argument reminds me of years ago when the first wide screen televisions were hitting the market and people said it was just like watching a movie in a theater. Didn't make a whit of sense to me until I was at a film screening and had to make a trip to the restroom (I HATE missing even a moment of a film so this is maybe a once-a-decade occurrence). Reentering the rear of the 4-500 seat theater, I realized that yes, if you sit in the back of the theater, those widescreen televisions do reproduce THAT experience. Big whoop - it's not the experience I go to a theater for.
Now that theater experience I love is going away pretty much everywhere. If the recommended solution is to back up so it's more like watching a movie at home - I'll back all the way out of the theater and watch the movie at home.
I actually welcome the switch to digital. The "early multiplex" situation you described was what was still happening in my town in almost all the theaters until recently. Slightly off-focus or under-lighted films were so common they were almost the rule. Often the film wouldn't even be properly aligned on the screen, and nothing would be done until somebody marched out to the lobby and tracked somebody down. That person was usually me, and the problem was only fixed around 50% of the time.
Over the past few months all the theaters have begun switching to digital projection and the overall quality of the movie going experience has been much improved.
Basically, if you have access to theaters who employ actual projectionists, maybe film is preferable. For 95% of us out there though, the switch to digital is going to mean a lot fewer frustrating trips to the movies.
Was thinking the exact same thing. Yes, I love the "romance" of film and its rich history etc etc etc, but I'll trade that for not having to get up and politely whine to some teenager every. single. time. I go to the movies.
hey, jim. great article, as always. as for the debate between analog and digital, i personally prefer the aesthetics of the former but feel that both can be a tool for the artist.
my main issue with digital is at home: with the newer hd televisions, and the "motion interpolation" process where they fill in the missing frames, i find that the image is "too real." some have called this the "soap opera effect," and it seems to not only make even the biggest blockbuster look like a made-for-tv b-movie, but it seems to take all the magic out of the experience too. i'm not exaggerating when i say that filling in the missing frames is just as insulting to the artists' original intent as the pan-and-scan process which first bastardized films when transferred to home video.
any thoughts?
I may be wrong but I think you might be talking about the insanely high refresh rates on newer HDTVs. 60hz is about what the human eye can process, but some people like 120hz for sports such as tennis, where it's supposedly easier to follow the ball.
But I was recently in a Best Buy watching Pulp Fiction on a TV with 240hz going, and it was so "real-looking" that it literally looked like the movie was shot on a cheap camcorder. It was the darnedest thing. And if you look at comment threads on shopping sites, people love this!
I'd like to think that if Quentin Tarantino was in the Best Buy with me, he'd be aghast.
Do not most TVs allow this feature to be switched off in favor of more cinematic settings?
Sadly, I'm not surprised that a lot of people like anything that makes the image look more in your face.
Yes, this is due to motion interpolation on 120 Hz TVs, although I am not certain the exact reason why it looks so bad. It could be simply due to having 120 unique frames per second making it look cheap. Or it could be because none of this was *shot* at 120 frames per second, and our eyes are revolting at the overly smooth motion caused by the tweening process.
My hope is that it's the latter because we're going to be getting a lot of 48P films coming to cinemas very soon, The Hobbit for instance.
P.S.
Interpolation does have its uses, generating reasonably good smooth slow-motion footage from cameras that cannot actually shoot that fast.
I believe the "smearing" you mentioned is generally referred to as "ghosting" which occurs when the shutter isn't aligned to hide the film moving into place in the gate.
And L. Marcus Williams, I know exactly what you're talking about with the "soap opera" look; fortunately that's generally an option you can disable, but why anyone would want it enabled in the first place is beyond me.
I remember a screening of Mann's "Public Enemies" which was the first time I really noticed a marked difference in quality (and not for the better) of film vs. digital. The quality of one night time scene in the woods, to my eyes, looked like a VERY shoddy of a History Channel re-enactment shot on video. It was as if the original footage was lost and had to be hastily redone...
I'm not well-versed enough to know what was truly to blame -- how the film was shot vs. the limitations of the theater's projector vs. errors made by the projectionist (or some combination of all of the above) -- but it sticks out vividly in my memory.
I noticed "problems" with some of the night scenes in "Public Enemies" as well, and I saw the movie at home on Blu-Ray. I also noticed that many of the night shots in Mann's "Miami Vice" had the same problem, which was a kind of graininess or fuzziness, like he didn't use the correct lens or setting for night shooting or something. It wouldn't have bothered me if the whole movie had looked that way, but it would switch from the grainy/fuzzy look to a clearer/sharper one from one shot to the next, within the same scene, and it was distracting. There didn't seem to be any artistic reason for it (such as using different film stocks for different moods or whatever), and if there was, it didn't work at all. It seemed arbitrary and drew attention to itself in the wrong way. I've always wondered the reason for it.
Totally agree on how the "soap opera effect" ruins films! This effect is something I only ran across recently, as I don't own an HDTV and hadn't watched any movies on one.
Having done some research on the issue and messed around with a friend's TV when he wasn't around, I found that it does help if you dig around in the TV settings and turn all the interpolation effects off. The blu-ray movie I tried (the beginning of "Tron: Legacy") still looked a bit odd during action scenes, but a regular-ray DVD of "After Hours" mostly looked rather good. (When I told my friend what I had done, he had to make sure I put all the interpolation settings back because he likes his movies to look "that way"!)
I'm in Southern Indiana, and all the theaters in my town are completely digital except for a multi-screen second-run house and the local AMC, which is a mix of analog and digital. If you had asked me a couple of years ago which I'd prefer, I'd have said analog, but for the reasons Nate states above, I would now say digital. It's much more "foolproof." The sacrifice in "warmth" is made up for by the cleanness and stability of the image. When I saw J. EDGAR on film at the second-run place, the lamp was a bit too dim and the speakers were half-shot (making the music track sound warped). On the upside, it was only $3.00. Going forward, though, if I miss a digital screening of a film, I'll be more inclined to skip it until it appears in another digital format (Blu-Ray, HD stream). This is sad, but it's what the state of exhibition these past couple of decades has led to.
I think that films are like paintings: they're meant to be seen from a certain distance. If you look at a painting too closely, you see the brush strokes. You have to stand several feet back to get the true intended effect. The same holds true for films. You can't sit in the front row and expect the effect to be perfect. Sorry to say, but that's just the way it is.
I'm going to pull a "Roger Ebert" and stubbornly suggest something he has been suggesting since 1999. Instead of Digital - which I can get at home, and 3D - which I can get at home, why not give me something I CAN'T get at home? If it's cheaper, has a 400% better picture, why are theaters so reluctant to go with Maxivision48? If you're going to charge the admissions that are being charged, at least make the EXPERIENCE worth the price of admission. Digital is convenient in that there will be no film breaks or scratches and such, but heck, IT'S SOMETHING I CAN GET AT HOME!!! Come on, theater owners, give Maxivision48 a try.......maybe THEN will theater attendance NOT drop........
Maxivision48 now holds the same place in the hearts of cinephiles that the hoverboards from BACK TO THE FUTURE II do for people who were teenagers in the 1990s. As a member of both groups, I sympathize.
Jim, great article. A note for Marcus. I totally know what you are talking about. The soap opera effect was so bad in our new Samsung LED that I was going to take it back and get a different brand or a plasma screen. Luckily I found the buried menu item that allowed me to turn off the Motion interpretation.
Look for it!
Jim,
This post, and David's, they are greatly unsettling. Before yesterday I merely preferred film (because that's what I grew up on) but never really bothered about the digital invasion, coveniently seeking consolation in my belief that technology will "surely" match the film-feel. But now you, and David have created what by my estimate are historic documents quantifying what we stand to lose. I mean, when Quentin Tarantino says he will never make a film again once digital takes over, I totally understand him.
There are a million questions bothering me, but le me start with westerns. During this decade we had five major ones - 3:10 to Yuma, Appaloosa, True Grit, The Assassination of Jesse James and The Proposition. And almost all of them used Super 35, with the Coens' film using 4K intermediate conversion for distribution. I don't know much, and what I want to understand here is whether digital will take over (eventually) the cinematographic process (shooting primarily), or whether the this film-to-digital conversion will become the norm.
And if it is the former, would you imagine a western, or even a film like Chinatown shot in digital? I don't know anything about these details (I have never been behind a film amera myself), but if David Fincher's/Michael Mann's films are the gold standard in digital filmmaking, aren't they too clean to capture a western? Does/Doesn't the digital filmaking have an inherent "bleakness" to it?
Thanks for this Jim!
Thanks everybody for introducing me to motion interpolation. I was always, always annoyed in television shops. The movie that was running this one time was Goldfinger, and it looked disgustingly cheap. I mean, I shudder at the thought of having to watch Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade there.
Having bought an LED recently, I always wondered why I never had that problem when I watched a film on cable. Has it to do with the set-top box, which is not offering digital/HD quality but the standard one? because I never knew I had the option to turn-off motionflow (I have a Sony Bravia). And I will be damned if I don't turn it off the first thing once I reach home this evening.
Mr. Emerson, your comment on the artist demonstrates complete lack of understanding of the film. The transition to talkies IS a big deal in the movie.
It has a great deal of effect on the main character that has nothing to do with his love story.
Make no mistake, things did changes.
George Valentin goes from being an actor to essentially, becoming a dancer who, as his single line makes very clear, will not be allowed to actually talk in any film.
That's what makes him The Artist as opposed to "actor".
That's not even going into the fact that he had to undergo a tremendous internal change in order to adjust. That took a huge toll on him and does represent what real actors of the era had to go to. Some of them were able to adjust with comporomises, like Valentin - othjers did not.
That forms the emitional core of this brilliant film. You can't dismiss it like that. I really think your whole dismisal is wrong.
You misunderstand what I wrote (and many -- including the filmmakers -- would challenge your interpretation of the film and George's reasons for not talking). I said it WAS a "big deal," but that the film doesn't go into it much, except as it affects George. I'm merely paraphrasing the movie's writer-director, who said he wasn't interested in presenting a historical work about the coming of talkies, but in using the changeover as an obstacle in the movie's "A Star Is Born"-type love story, as her career rises and his descends.
As always, interesting and thought provoking, but also in this case a cause of reminiscence. I remember my childhood watching mostly terrible movies in an old, long gone, movie ‘palace’ in Abergavenny, Wales. For blockbusters you had to get there early to avoid sitting behind the dreaded columns from the balcony. Most movies had intermissions – even if they probably shouldn’t have, such as Raiders of the Lost Ark - and you could by choc-ices from the vendors at this time. As a kid, all of this made things magical. Even my first movie in New York (Armageddon….) was in Times Square, with boards for seats, and a slightly ratty look. Now I take my daughter to see films and they are in generally soulless, completely interchangeable multiplexes, which I have to say now have more comfort, better sound and sometimes better pictures. I’m glad I still live where there are places with character.
In regard to the observation about the night scene in Public Enemies looking bad: My own experience of the sequence is that it's stunning, among the very best in the film. I saw the movie via an advance press screening in an auditorium where it was being shown digitally. A few days later, after the film had opened, there was a wave of complaints from people who had bought tickets to see it in theaters playing a film transfer: lotsa smeariness and visual stutter. Perhaps Dmitri caught such a show. Damn shame. Apart from several sterling performances (notably from Mann regular Stephen Lang), Dante Spinotti's cinematog(videog?)raphy was the best thing the movie had going for it.
And as long as we're talking projection variability, let me mention that the first time I saw The Artist my general enthusiasm was diminished by the fact that, overall, the film looked gray. It was as though someone had decided that that's how old movies used to look, since that's the way they did look, on TV, back in the bad old decades when broadcast technology wasn't up to showing subtly graded black and white and "TV prints" were actually prepared for telecasting. I couldn't believe Hazanavicius wanted his film to look that way ... and when I watched it again a couple months later, via a "For Your Consideration" DVD, I encountered a perfectly pleasant range of black and white and gray -- not a milestone of cinematography (as some late silents were), but not a pale shadow either.
How often, when we sit down to watch a movie at the multiplex, are we actually seeing it?
"... the idea of an HD digital rendering of 16mm film is kind of mind-boggling -- like a pristine CD release of the gloriously filthy, lo-fi "Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols.""
I dunno about that -- "Bollocks" had production that was about on a par with most professionally-recorded albums those days, and was done in a real multitrack studio. It was the legions of punk successors that came in their wake who recorded straight into $20 cassette recorders and the like.
But if it's the intention you're talking about, that's another story, yes. It seems weirdly against their intentions to listen to "Bollocks" on anything but a beat-up slice of vinyl -- but I suspect that's entirely our expectations being projected onto the work more than anything else. "Bodies" sounds no less vulgar on MP3 than it does on vinyl.
Yes, you're right. It was kind of a private joke about the punk D.I.Y. ethic. When CDs first came on the market, they were promoted as audiophile recordings "identical to the original master tapes." Nobody thought significant numbers of OLD records (like, from 1977 or before) would ever be made available on CD -- but back catalog stuff wound up becoming a HUGE and lucrative market. It was the idea of a punk record on CD instead of on vinyl (and maybe played with a safety pin) that my friends and I used to joke about.
I used to be an LP purist. I still play my vinyl records and enjoy them immensely. Eventually I figured out that I was comparing excellent LPs to mediocre CDs. When excellent CDs started to be produced I was won over by the new technology. Now I believe CDs, good CDs, are better than LPs for listening to music. With movies something similar will happen or is happening. You can argue that film carries more information than digital reproduction (is this still true?) but that is useless if the reproduction of that information is sub-standard or haphazard. We are rebuilding a small (218 seats) movie-house (it was originally constructed in 1918 and rebuilt after a fire in 1928) we chose a SONY 4K projector among other reasons for the quality of projection and flexibility of use; we can connect any number of reproduction systems to it . We expect, with the refurbished theater, to promote a movie making and appreciation culture in the region. Another consideration is the higher fire requirements of film projection vs. digital and its impact on the project's budget. Once we have the projector running I will write again to tell you of our experience with it.
I have to disagree (sort of) about how the theaters affected how movies are being seen more than the film to digital revolution: and analog (VHS, television, cassettes etc.) to digital in general. I think, with analog, the artists play off of the aesthetic of the medium, the medium itself is warm--which means you get more sound and more brightness--and this warmth affects not just the art aesthetically, but it also affects us physically and socially; we Are our technology.
So I have to disagree with you about the theaters affecting the way movies are seen more than the analog to digital revolution for the consequence of all the reasons above, (which I think is only happening now because they are trying to milk as much money again from the summer blockbuster, just as it started in the beginning with "Jaws", but now with 3D from "Avatar"; now they can re-release movies in 3d at cost/budget of only about $10 million, the lowest cost in the history of the movie business when adjusted for inflation),starting, subtlety at first, with the product itself, because, for instance, with movies in the 1940s and below, the camera and sound were more poetic and thus the movies were written, directed, acted etc. more poetically and theatrically. Then, yes, there was the home video revolution (which, as "Boogie Nights" illustrated, affected the quality of films a bit from lack of funding), but videotape is still analog and it still had that same kind of aesthetic to it (particularly with sound), which is why as long as it's been around the culture sort of had a kind of style to it; when you look at the the culture: the 60's had its style; 70's had disco; 80's had whacky styles (when all the analog, cassettes etc. was flourishing); the 90's still looked a bit dressed up but it still had some style, but now, in 2000, as soon as digital came along, all that cultural style has disappeared. But when you also look at VHS or cassettes, you notice that the artist played off of the sound too; you notice that there was a lot of synthesizer types of sounds in the 80s and such, and that was because that sound played well off of the tapes. And also, you get MORE sound and more brightness; if you look at VHS movies compared to DVDs you notice the sound is more subdued as well as the brightness of the picture. I think it has something to do with how much more physical analog is compared to digital; with digital the images are being read with a laser beam, but with analog there is direct, and thus more substantial, physical contact. This is what creates that "warmth."
Which brings me to warmth, you'll notice that with movies, such as John Hughes movies, for instance, (say what you will about them), that there was more warmth and humanity: and in the culture in general(not just John Hughes movies). Times seemed to be less cynical and humanity not denied as much, which is why I said that it seems we are our technology.
Speaking of physical warmth, to me, my preference to analog, is also physical. With digital cable I often feel like I'm going to die while watching it, it has such a bad physical feeling, but with analog, there is maybe even a kind of physical healing with it. And I think possibly the culture has gotten less warm because the digital is perhaps affecting them physically in a negative way and it makes them uncomfortable and irritable physically, thus, making them to become more in a worse mood rather than a good mood, which is probably why there is more talking and texting now than ever before; they can either be negatively physically affected or try to not think about it in other ways.
So, I think the medium affects the product and us in ways that are much worse than we think.
So, with digital what are we losing?
I think we are losing the playing off of a certain aesthetic of an analog medium, and that with it comes a certain warmth; so, with digital, I think what it SHOULD mean is that, although we won't be having synthesizers anymore or other kinds of styles as much in culture, and will have cold digital product with no/almost none aesthetic that affects us in negative ways,...I laugh as I type, it means that everything is going to have to be perfect now.
Everything is going to have to be perfect from now on (or transferred from analog).
If you want to know what perfect sounds like here is a song on my youtube account....from the only musician I think who has created perfect music. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbg1IFC3d80&feature=g-all-u&context=G273c33fFAAAAAAAABAA or here.. with his Stradivarius http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voR24WFpqCE&feature=relmfu (basically everything he has done except his second cycles of Beethoven and Bartok because he already did it perfectly the first time)
I laugh because he's about the only one I think who has created perfect music, and so it doesn't seem to me that with such a lack of it, that it will suddenly just flourish because it sort of has to; with analog, you don't have to be perfect, because you have the healing effect of the medium already helping you (on top of aesthetic contributions). With digital you are all by yourself and you'd better be perfect, or transferred from analog (which is why I'm very glad to hear "Walking Dead" is shot on film...because there is more sound and brightness and all the stuff I mentioned).
I have thousands of VHS, and I'm going to pick out and post an old random VHS. Actually I'm going to post two, because I posted this one in my earlier comment that didn't get published. But you notice that from even the corporate logo at the beginning just how much the medium affects the product...
the sound itself sounds like tape scratching...and also there's the brightness of the words "The Adventures of Ultraman" (there's more sound and more brightness than digital/DVD...the DVD would be more subdued in those two aspects)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apQe8cJOj9s
Ok, here's another example where I compare the sound of a VHS of the same movie compared to the DVD. It's a little bad at the beginning so the picture goes out, but you can still hear the sound...also,, the sound skips, because I accidentally pressed the record button: and it actually recorded! (normally they don't let you record on them)
You can click on my name, or copy and paste from here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apQe8cJOj9s
But anyway, once again, you notice at the logo how much the medium affects the art itself, and how there's more brightness (logo) and more sound (well, kind of hard to tell because the sound came out quieter than the DVD probably because VHS are much larger files, at 200mb per minute, and also DV cam analog to digital pass through only lets you have left speaker).
I've tried about 5 times to get my comment through, so maybe a short version will work.
I prefer analog because it gives you more sound and brightness from transmitting with more physical contact (thus causing "warmth"), makes me comfortable physically (as opposed to digital: which I think contributes to the unprecedented unruliness in theaters today), and because the aesthetic affects the product and the culture, giving way to producing styles in the culture: as well as more "warmth" in the culture.
Here is an example of a VHS I have (I have 1000's), where you see from the very beginning, with the coporate logo just how much the medium affects the work itself.
The sound of the music itself sounds like tape-scratching...as in the tape that analog is recorded on.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apQe8cJOj9s&feature=youtu.be
And then there's the brightness from the words "The Adventures of Ultraman."
So, I think now, with digital, we are kind of on our own (as artists) and that everything has to be perfect now (if not transferred from analog), because there's no real aesthetic and it's going to need a lot more care because of making people physically uncomfortable.
If you want an example of perfect, here at my youtube channel, is dedicated to someone who I think has created perfect music.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voR24WFpqCE
So, it's either perfection or transferred from analog (which is why I'm glad "The WAlking Dead" is shot on film...because the analog contributions are still there...although subdued because with digital you get less sound and brightness; if there were no analog, just digital, there wouldn't be any brightness to subdue).
About culture, when you look at movies in 1940s and below, the cameras and sound were more poetic and thus the movies were more poetic/theatrical and thus the culture was as well. Also, probably because of the warmth of the product, there was more warmth in the culture, (digital creates a culture of irritability).
I watched "Another Earth" last night, and it bummed me out- although not for the reasons they intended. It was a film that was up my alley, that I should have liked, but I couldn't because of how it looked. The digital video just looked terrible to me. I know the movie may never have been made were it not for DV, but films like this one — smaller, relying heavily on unstated emotional content — really require the added warmth that film brings. Something has been lost here for sure.
As a film maker I want to shoot as many takes as possible so my editor has more footage to work with. David Fincher shot the opening scene of the social network 100 times and his editors won an Oscar for that movie plus another one for dragon tattoo. Film limits how much you can shoot.
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