The Death of Film

And, digital would've gotten away with it, too, if weren't for that meddling Christopher Nolan and his pals getting Hollywood studios to bail out Kodak, with their hanging-by-a-thread default monopoly on celluloid. Back in 2012, when Keanu Reeves got his big-name director friends and their cinematographers and a few other crew members to discuss on (digital) camera their plans to murder photochemical film in "Side by Side," both formats still occupied roughly half the market--albeit from a rapid decline of film's former dominance. The writing was very much on the wall. Last year, according to Vadim Rizov's count, there were "25-ish" 35mm releases. Well over 90% of movies are now digital, and that's been increasingly the case for the last few years.

An even higher percentage it seems of theatres employ digital projection, which means even that latest Nolan (and I keep bringing up Nolan because he's apparently the only big-name filmmaker who Reeves got to defend the century-plus-old medium) film will be digitally photographed to be projected from a hard drive at your local cinema, or read by a laser from a disc and fed through cables to your TV screen, or streamed onto your phone. And, this is after that film may've already been copied in-and-out of digital processes for editing, VFX and color grading. Point is, it raises the question that if nobody watches film, does it even much matter if anyone records on emulsion? And, aside from the pandemic this past year that resulted in a resounding "no" to the question, does a larger screen justify seeing movies in a theatrical venue? Well, that's been long on the decline, too--even before digital (and I refer you to the case of attempted murder of film by TV, as well as VCRs).

Interesting that "Side by Side" begins with images of Eadweard Muybridge horses galloping, because Muybridge didn't photograph any of that on celluloid. It hadn't been invented yet. He shot successive shots on multiple cameras with wet collodion on glass plates. As others did, too, when he projected motion from still images, as with his Zoopraxiscope, he did so from discs, like a Phenakistiscope plate, and by the light of a magic lantern. Celluloid wasn't the material of the first motion-picture projectors and isn't the last. But, I digress, as "Side by Side" hardly explores such historical ramifications--as in what's already history--caused by the digital revolution.

What this expository documentary with its talking heads does offer is a decent rundown of early digital cinema history and a lopsided debate on the merits of celluloid versus digital. So, we get the story of digital from Bell Labs and Sony, to the Dogma 95 movement, George Lucas and his Jar Jar Binks terrorism, early adoption for visual effects and editing, color correction in "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" (2000), the turning of movies into comic books with "Sin City" (2005) and, finally, James Cameron buying in real hard to that 3D fad with "Avatar" (2009). There's also a good discussion over how the fact that film reels no longer need be changed that the built-in breaks on movie sets are gone and so the powers that be may exhaust their cast and crews for longer stretches of time--something that on the set of "Zodiac" (2007) drove Robert Downey Jr. mad to the point of filling containers with urine like an abused Amazon warehouse worker. That the director and company have "immediatelies" instead of dailies now adds to this. Although, I mean, really, if filmmakers are watching their movies on TV screens, why expect us to go to a cinema to see them?

Anyways, besides the obvious benefit of mobility with digital cameras, another good point regarding the benefits of digital has to do with the lack of degradation. Ones and zeroes remain ones and zeroes no matter how many times you copy a digital movie, whereas there was always a loss in quality in all the printing and reprinting involved with the photochemical processes. The hubris, though, when it comes to the preservation of digital movies is laughable. Lena Wachowskis's optimism that we'll invent our way out of our mass digital hoarding especially so. That makes about as much sense as crypto-anarchists protecting their money from collapse of a dollar-based economy by mining more electricity than used by most countries in the world to keep track of every transaction. It's a fantasy.

I recently read "Scratches and Glitches" by film preservationist Jurij Meden, and he mentions the same irony that Martin Scorsese does here, that digital movies are being preserved on film (a further irony being that many older films are simultaneously being "preserved" digitally). That's because microchips and hard drives don't last, as I'm sure most computer and electronics owners know very well. Even when they do, the technology to retrieve them doesn't. And we're not talking about the decades to more than a century that it takes for celluloid to decompose. We're talking about a matter of a few years. So, really, you're confident that your digital movie is going to be around in a hundred years? Sure, and let me just go fire up a copy of "London After Midnight" (1927) to watch... and it's gone. OK, forget inflammable nitrate, how about the original release cut of the 1954 "A Star is Born"? ...And it's gone. OK, forget celluloid, how about the original hard drive for "Who Killed Captain Alex?" (2010). Yup, that's gone, too. When there's a planned obsolescence in the technology responsible for creating and exhibiting your work, don't expect that work not to become obsolete as well. Indeed, everything and everyone dies, but often times we speed up the process. Tell me I'm wrong if and when Letterboxd is still around in a few decades.