Prac­ti­cal Mag­ic: Six Ways to Fight for Film

Over the past decade, the alliance between phys­i­cal film and infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy has shift­ed. Dig­i­tal cap­ture and pro­jec­tion have launched full-scale inva­sions on film pro­duc­tion and exhi­bi­tion. Mean­while, cel­lu­loid film has been threat­ened with extinc­tion. Is it not pos­si­ble for pho­to­chem­i­cal and vir­tu­al moviemak­ing to live side by side?

The resis­tance to the dig­i­tal onslaught is real. Christo­pher Nolan has said that Dunkirk will be exclu­sive­ly released on 35mm, 70mm and 70mm-IMAX prints sev­er­al days before it is screened on dig­i­tal for­mats. Kodak con­tin­ues to man­u­fac­ture motion pic­ture film, and are dou­bling down by bring­ing back their dis­con­tin­ued Ektachrome stock.

In the past year alone, movies such as The Love Witch, Per­son to Per­son, Por­to, The Eyes of My Moth­er, Too Late, Bat­man V Super­man and The Lost City of Z have all had select screen­ings on 35mm along­side their dig­i­tal releas­es. But what can you do to bat­tle for film as a phys­i­cal enti­ty? Let’s band togeth­er and take heed of these six sim­ple resis­tance tactics.

“It’s got bet­ter res­o­lu­tion, bet­ter con­trast ratio, and it sees the way the eye sees with grains emu­lat­ing the dots as opposed to pix­els,” said direc­tor James Gray in an inter­view with mubi​.com. Or, as a recent Kodak pre­sen­ta­tion had it: ​“Want the film look? Shoot film.” If film­mak­ers want cel­lu­loid to remain a cre­ative option, it’s their duty to stop dream­ing about shoot­ing film and fig­ure out a way to do it. Grant­ed, it’s fran­chis­es like Mis­sion: Impos­si­ble and the lat­est iter­a­tion of Star Wars that are keep­ing film stock alive as a going indus­tri­al concern.

For inde­pen­dent moviemak­ers, film can seem intim­i­dat­ing com­pared to the cheap­ness and imme­di­a­cy of dig­i­tal video cam­eras. But there are options: if you want to shoot 35mm, Kodak’s Inde­pen­dent Pro­duc­tion Pack­age offers cut-rate plans. Or you could try 16mm by pick­ing up a Bolex on eBay for a few hun­dred pounds – there are a wealth of online tuto­ri­als to teach you how to use them, not to men­tion artist work­shops like East London’s no.w.here. The old home movie for­mats are still alive, too. Wit­ness the inven­tive, cre­ative work being done by entrants of Straight 8, a chal­lenge to shoot a short film on a sin­gle car­tridge of Super 8 with­out any post-production.

Shoot­ing film is an addic­tive, reward­ing process. You can be sat­is­fied not only by the whirring noise of the cam­era, but by being part of a spe­cial club of peo­ple who are find­ing fresh ways to use old tech­nol­o­gy. Top direc­tors like Quentin Taran­ti­no, Paul Thomas Ander­son, Kel­ly Reichardt, Wes Ander­son and Xavier Dolan work almost exclu­sive­ly on film, while Steven Spiel­berg, David Lynch and Mar­tin Scors­ese are return­ing to film after brief flir­ta­tions with digital.

The cel­lu­loid release of Dunkirk is a great oppor­tu­ni­ty to find out which cin­e­mas are on the van­guard of fight­ing for film and which have sur­ren­dered to the dig­i­tal sim­u­lacrum that Quentin Taran­ti­no calls ​“tele­vi­sion in pub­lic”. Find out where Dunkirk is play­ing on 35mm and 70mm near you. Make a trip to see it as the direc­tor intend­ed. If your near­est cin­e­ma isn’t on the list, why not? Ask them if they still have a 35mm pro­jec­tor, and if so, is it in stor­age or ready to use?

In Lon­don, BFI South­bank, The Prince Charles Cin­e­ma and Close-Up are just a few of the venues that reg­u­lar­ly show tip-top reper­to­ry prints. But while it can some­times seem like film has become a rare del­i­ca­cy served only in the cap­i­tal, there are venues nation­wide that make time for it, includ­ing Glas­gow Film The­atre, Bradford’s Nation­al Media Muse­um and Newcastle’s Star and Shad­ow (which is under­go­ing ren­o­va­tion and needs volunteers).

This is not to men­tion the mul­ti­tudes of region­al cin­e­mas that have pro­jec­tors and don’t use them. Get involved, see prints when you can, and think about start­ing your own inde­pen­dent pro­gram­ming group. We start­ed the Bad­lands Col­lec­tive with lim­it­ed expe­ri­ence in exhi­bi­tion, and we’ve gone on to screen rich, vibrant prints of gor­geous films like Jonathan Glazer’s Birth, Stan­ley Kubrick’s Bar­ry Lyn­don and Ter­ence Davies’ The Long Day Closes.

For extra cred­it: learn about the dif­fer­ence between film prints made from real pho­to­chem­i­cal neg­a­tives and those that have been print­ed onto film from a dig­i­tal ​‘film-out’ process. Many recent prints are made the lat­ter way, so even when dis­trib­u­tors and cin­e­mas tout ​‘spe­cial 35mm pre­sen­ta­tions’, they may be miss­ing out on the bil­lions of colours and deep, dimen­sion­al con­trasts that make the best film prints pop.

In 2002, Steven Spiel­berg com­mis­sioned a dig­i­tal alter­ation of E.T. to ​“put a touch of rouge on a pal­lid face.” By 2011, he’d reversed his deci­sion and re-issued the film with its orig­i­nal pup­petry intact. ​“I had robbed peo­ple who loved E.T. of their memories.”

“If it can be writ­ten, or thought, it can be filmed” was Stan­ley Kubrick’s famous dic­tum, and with CGI, this is now truer than ever. Yet while dig­i­tal worlds can be expan­sive in scale, their lack of tan­gi­ble authen­tic­i­ty can negate any human­i­ty and soul. When visu­al effects are cap­tured in cam­era, an emo­tion­al con­nec­tion is cre­at­ed – from the crafts­peo­ple, the actors and the film­mak­ers inter­act­ing with them – and that trans­mits to the audience.

Don’t we con­nect with E.T. because of the care that has gone into mak­ing him real and the way the cast embraces him? (Famous­ly, Spiel­berg kept the mechan­ics out of sight so the child actors would believe in him.) When we watch Buster Keaton rac­ing across the top of a mov­ing train, we know that he’s doing it for real. It’s elat­ing, and human, in a way that Daniel Craig’s head dig­i­tal­ly added to the body of a stunt dou­ble attached to invis­i­ble wires is not.

The great cin­e­matog­ra­phers through­out film his­to­ry have required fine judge­ment of light, shad­ows, tim­ing and fram­ing to trans­form loca­tions into emo­tion­al­ly vibrant com­po­si­tions. In the days before dig­i­tal images were instant­ly view­able on set, a cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er was in fact regard­ed as some­thing of an alchemist, whose knowl­edge of film sen­si­tiv­i­ty, lens­es and light­ing was cru­cial. In recent years, how­ev­er, the Oscar for Cin­e­matog­ra­phy has been award­ed to works like James Cameron’s Avatar, Ang Lee’s The Life of Pi and Alfon­so Cuarón’s Grav­i­ty.

It’s not that these films haven’t had excel­lent con­tri­bu­tions from their cam­era depart­ments, but that their visu­als were large­ly built by com­put­ers, long after the shoots end­ed. The Coen broth­ers changed the land­scape in 2000 with O Broth­er, Where Art Thou? when they used dig­i­tal post-pro­duc­tion to cast the whole film in sepia tones; Roger Deakins was nom­i­nat­ed for an Oscar, but how do you gauge his con­tri­bu­tion? We know that in the ana­logue days, cin­e­matog­ra­phers were heav­i­ly involved in tech­no­log­i­cal problem-solving.

When John Alcott shot Bar­ry Lyn­don, he and Stan­ley Kubrick devel­oped cam­eras and lens­es that could cap­ture scenes illu­mi­nat­ed only by can­dle­light. When Vil­mos Zsig­mond shot McCabe & Mrs Miller, he made the risky move of ​“flash­ing” the neg­a­tive (expos­ing it to light) before pro­duc­tion to achieve the film’s soft and fad­ed images. Remem­ber this her­itage. Read books like ​‘Man with a Cam­era’ by Nestor Almen­dros and ​‘Paint­ing with Light’ by John Alton. Under­stand that a key part of phys­i­cal film­mak­ing involves auda­cious choic­es by great artists who dare to push the bound­aries of their craft.

Film remains the most sta­ble medi­um with which to store and pre­serve movies. Tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ments in dig­i­tal archiv­ing can ren­der data for­mats and stor­age media obso­lete with­in years, mean­ing that dig­i­tal film files require fre­quent, expen­sive and time-con­sum­ing migra­tions. Writ­ing for The Dis­solve, Matthew Dessem used the recent James Bond films to high­light the fright­en­ing rate of tech­no­log­i­cal obso­les­cence in dig­i­tal movie archiv­ing: “[A] film that was archived to tape in 2006 using then-state-of-the-art LTO‑3 tapes can’t be read by the LTO‑6 dri­ves that are for sale today. In oth­er words, the tape dri­ve that cre­at­ed an archival copy of Sky­fall in Decem­ber 2012 wouldn’t be able to read the orig­i­nal 2006 copy of Casi­no Royale – the tech­nol­o­gy becomes obso­lete faster than James Bond is recast.”

Film, on the oth­er hand, can last for cen­turies. Speak­ing to The Wash­ing­ton­ian mag­a­zine in 2014, the Nation­al Archives’ motion pic­ture preser­va­tion spe­cial­ist Criss Kovac not­ed that if a new copy of a film is cre­at­ed, ​“We know we can come back to it in a cou­ple hun­dred years and it’s still going to be here, exact­ly the way it was when we print­ed it.” Hav­ing been suc­cess­ful­ly used for over a hun­dred years, his­to­ry proves that film is a known quan­ti­ty for the stor­age, preser­va­tion and archiv­ing of movies. As Christo­pher Nolan told a gath­er­ing of archivists at the Get­ty Research Insti­tute in 2015, ​“There’s no sta­ble dig­i­tal archiv­ing medi­um, [at least not] in the imme­di­ate future. If there is, it would need to be test­ed for decades.” He con­clud­ed that pho­to­chem­i­cal preser­va­tion was essen­tial: ​“It works and is future-proof.”

If some­one says film is an obso­lete tech­nol­o­gy, cor­rect them: it’s impor­tant to spread under­stand­ing that as long as archival film stock is being pro­duced, we are keep­ing cin­e­ma alive for future generations.

Cin­e­ma is a mag­ic trick. It’s the illu­sion of move­ment gen­er­at­ed by light hit­ting a series of still frames. The best film­mak­ers are magi­cians, achiev­ing extra­or­di­nary and some­times impos­si­ble feats in front of our eyes. It feels like a mir­a­cle, and in count­less film scenes where we see char­ac­ters going to the cin­e­ma, their eyes are always look­ing up, towards the heav­ens in a spir­i­tu­al communion.

The pro­jec­tion­ist is inte­gral to the expe­ri­ence – they are the agent of the mir­a­cle. As the movie rolls, a rela­tion­ship forms between him or her, the film and the audi­ence. Film pro­jec­tion is a craft; it involves the metic­u­lous prepa­ra­tion of prints, in which the reels are inspect­ed, laced and loaded onto the plat­ter, and requires con­stant work through­out the film. And, because the same prints are dis­trib­uted over a long time, we share the expe­ri­ence of each one with the gen­er­a­tions that have shared it before us. In this sense, each print is its own his­to­ry com­ing back to life. And if we embrace that, the mag­ic lantern show lives on.

The Bad­lands Col­lec­tive are Phil Con­can­non, Ian Mant­gani and Craig Williams. For more info, vis­it bad​lands​-col​lec​tive​.com