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Topic: Reel devotion: Digital may have won the war, but the desire and love for film remains
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 01-29-2017 07:12 PM
quote: Alexandre Pereira (my emphasis)
My theatre - The Kingsway - an independent still runs film - whenever I can get a print...
This is not intended as a personal attack, but this absolutism is one way in which the film vs. digital debate conducted on an absolutist level infuriates me. If you have the choice of playing both, surely the rational thing to do is choose the screening medium that represents the best way of showing the movie, defined however you like (e.g. director's intent, how the original audience would have experienced it, etc. etc.), but at least taking care to define it some way.
Example: on Thursday night I projected 35mm prints of two arthouse classics, To Be or Not to Be and The 39 Steps. Both were very poor. To Be... was nice photographically: an Agfa triacetate print from 1981 that was nice and sharp, good midtones and gamma, and not too dupey. However, it was dirty and scratched to death, damaged perfs on two reels causing the picture to wobble about, so many frames missing from the reel ends that clean changeovers were impossible (especially the changeovers on a fade out > fade in), etc. etc. The 39 Steps was in good physical condition, but photographically it was abysmal. This was a polyester print on 2302 stock, made in 2005; physically it was not at all bad, but the image was so shallow, fuzzy and dupey that it was like watching Super 8 projected on a 30-foot across screen. I have actually seen 16mm prints of that title with more detail in the image.
In both cases, a 2K DCP made by transferring a decent preservation element (e.g. two generations at most from the o-neg) carefully and doing some light touch digital cleanup would have given the audience a far better impression of what these films were supposed to look like.
The following day, my co-worker played a 4K DCP of The Great Escape that looked like it had been transferred one-light from a release print. So anamorphic artifacts, digital noise, crushed midtones and all the other defects you'd expect in such a digital copy were all there to compromise the viewing experience.
Neither a "film is better" nor a "digital is better" attitude will allow you to make the best choice in situations like these.
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Frank Angel
Film God
Posts: 5305
From: Brooklyn NY USA
Registered: Dec 1999
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posted 01-30-2017 11:02 AM
Years ago at the beginning of the digital conversion, there were these never-ending pronouncements and press releases from the segments of the industry that seemed to me at least were going to benefit financially from the digital conversion -- TI, the studios, the hardware manufacturers and the big chains. The intent of this media barrage was to belittle and denigrate film as a medium that, if you could believe the nonsense hype, comes from the lab covered with dirt and scratches and its color dyes fade a few days after being run threw a projector, as if all these anomalies were inherent in film itself. These pronouncements always ended lauding digital as superior because it comes with none of these problems and falsely concluding that digital was, well, perfect.
I hard all this hype and went to see one of the earliest digital presentations -- JURASSIC PARK 2 -- it was the worse presentation I'd ever seen -- dimly lit, terrible contrast, so much missing detail that hair on the actors looked like gobs of black paint on their top of their heads. Still, there were these pronouncements continually being advanced proclaiming the wonders of digital projection. I remember thinking, are these people blind....or crazy? Or are they just pushing a technology that would make them lots of money?
From that point on, I was vehemently against digital as it was AT THAT TIME. For me, it certainly was not ready for the "roll-out" that they kept pushing. I saw digital as 10 steps backwards for exhibition if that was the level of quality it would present. And there was the fear, if theatres invested the large amount of money necessary for the conversion, we would be locked into all the shortcomings of that early digital technology. Would exhibitors continue to pour more money into the improvement? History tells us that exhibitors go into the night raging at event the suggestion of spending money on improvements. Who is going to junk a $100,000 projector to get the next generation? Seemed like were going to be saddled with the first rollout hardware for a long, long time.
Here's the thing, my position always was that I was NOT against digital -- and I am sure I voiced this sentiment here on FT -- I was never anti-digital technology. My goal has always been to be able to give my audience the best presentation of the classics films that is most true to the filmmaker's vision and intent. I said on these pages that, if a digital projector in my booth can put an image on the screen identical to what I experienced when I first watched LAWRENCE OF ARABIA in 70mm, I would be the first in line. But digital certainly hadn't come anywhere near that goal back then and so yes, I was against a roll-out of a technology that I saw as not nearly as good as film, but also carried with it a new philosophy you could detect in the minds of many industry big wigs who would say out loud that the early digital was "good enough," even if it was so obviously inferior to film to anyone who had eyes. Anyone who said that digital back then was as good as film, in my mind, had downed a gallon of the digital cool-aid.
The technology is never the issue -- the question is, does a technology advance the art of film-making and quality presentation or doesn't it. The problem has been, economics and greed impact what we wind up with on the screen.
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