7. 35mm Film Is "Better" Than Digital Image Acquisition
You will be aware that there is something of a battle in the film making world at the moment between capturing images via celluloid or via digital technologies, such as the RED series of cameras. I seek to point out that I was not original in using the word 'battle', but merely borrowing it from Thelma Schoonmaker, Martin Scorsese's editor and muse. When asked why Scorsese was shooting his current project The Wolf of Wall Street digitally, Schoonmaker replied: "It would appear that we've lost the battle. I think Marty just feels it's unfortunately over, and there's been no bigger champion of film than him." There is no denying that filmmakers are currently under bombardment from studios to adopt digital image acquisition, however, there are those standing firm in the face of the advance of the digital takeover; step forward Christopher Nolan. Nolan has been frank and militant about his love of film, famously inviting many of Hollywoods A-list directors - Edgar Wright, Michael Bay, Eli Roth, Bryan Singer et al - to a screening of footage from The Dark Knight Rises which doubled as a plea for 35mm. And he seems to be having success; IMAX and 65mm are being used more and more after Nolan set his example with the Dark Knight trilogy, and most cinema enthusiasts, among whom Nolan is an idol, will proclaim their love of 35mm over digital. However, a small yet invidious assumption has managed to pass the guards by hiding inside this Trojan horse. I am not accusing Nolan of being responsible for this idea, but rather those who read or watch interviews in which he espouses the qualities of film which he prefers to digital, and then translating Nolan's love of film over digital into the idea that film is "better" than digital. This is a reductionist, junk idea. I do not seek to dispute the claim that the available camera equipment is not yet capable of the resolution of 35mm or IMAX. But there is a dangerous assumption here which confuses high resolutions with 'better' quality, and this is simply not the case. You may have recently seen the documentary Side by Side, produced and narrated by Keanu Reeves, where he spoke to several filmmakers about the digital revolution and the death of film. Christopher Nolan was there, of course, as was his DOP Wally Pfister. But one of the more interesting interviews is with David Lynch. Lynch discusses, as most digital filmmakers do, the apparent economic benefits of digital over film, namely concerning the inability of a 35mm magazine to do takes longer than 10 minutes (this is not quite accurate, but never mind). This is where the debate too often takes place, and much of it takes place within Side by Side, debates concerning resolution and efficiency. But there is a more interesting point to be made, and Lynch made it years before when speaking to the AFI concerning the filming of Inland Empire. Lynch shot that film entirely on DV tape, which is an SD format - to give you an idea of what SD is like compared to 35mm, if you were to do an IMAX blowup on an SD image, it would look as though you had shot the footage with a toaster. But Lynch was talking not about the efficiency of digital, but the texture of the image: "Film is so beautiful, but it used to be in the '30s, less quality, and this DV that I was shooting reminded me of that. And so, some information is lost and it made me feel like there was more room to dream." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjtnOCfuPVQ This is the key to understanding why film is not necessarily "better" to Digital Image Acquisition; they are different formats with very different textures. One does not, in talking of paintings, say that oils are "better" than watercolours; one may prefer one or the other, but accepts that both are valid instruments upon the palette. Danny Boyle, though also espousing the efficiency of digital, talks about the colour saturation of digital images, and you can see what he is talking about if you watch Slumdog Millionaire, Trance or even 28 Days Later, also largely shot in SD. Christopher Nolan understands this, and speaks about the superior image quality in resolution terms, but he does not go so far, as a lot of bloggers do, to write digital off as a format. He argues that film should be available to those who wish to use it just as digital should be available to David Fincher and Steven Soderbergh and whoever. And although he is not at pains to point this out, I feel that Nolan would agree with me that digital is a separate and interesting format which has been used to create some extraordinary cinema.