Long Live Film Celluloid!
Current mood:  contemplative As much as I love George Lucas's early abstract visual 16mm movies, and as brilliant as a cameraman and editor as he is, I have to disagree with him about the digital revolution. He compares it to adding sound and color to film and makes an analogy to the Renaissance, when painters were first able to use easels and acrylic paint, and not be bound by indoor Frescoes. I think a much better analogy is the invention of still photography: painting images was not given up. Everyone understood that paint and film stills were essentially different and seperate arts/technologies. No one made the mistake of confusing them, considering photography as an innovation in painting just because it was new technology that came after it. I believe that this is precisely the mistake that Mr. Lucas is making. The same goes for other feature filmmakers Francis Coppola,Peter Greenaway, Robert Rodriguez, Michael Mann, and David Fincher. All talented directors who never abuse the film camera as a recording device and are now sadly abandoning filmmaking. If they acknowledged that film and digital moving imagery were two distinct arts that could co-exist and that they just had nothing left to say with film and were using digital imagery because they wanted to experiment and innovative with it as a new autonomous art form, I would still be disappointed but at least I would respect their reasoning for it. David Lynch is one of my favorite filmmakers and I'm depressed that he has decided to never go back to it but at least he refers to digital as a different language and sees them as distinct from each other. In the feature film arena, I'm totally in agreement with Oliver Stone, Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, PT Anderson, and Richard Kelly, among others, all of whom appreciate and understand the unique beauty and autonomy of celluloid and are sticking to it. In the arena of abstract and avant-garde underground cinema, financial restraints are a disheartening reality for 16mm filmmakers. Some great people like Jon Behrens, Alfonso Alvarez, and Chick Strand are still working with 16mm film. The great French-Canadian cameraman Jean-Claude Labrecque still loves the 35mm film image the most and only works with digital as a seperate offshoot from his true love of film. I'm also a big fan of the cinematographer Louis Schwartzberg(http://www.blacklightfilms.com/products_DVD_CTL.asp) and he still is in love with 35mm film and won't abandon it. I'm also overjoyed that the master of time-lapse and large-format photography Ron Fricke is shooting his new visual non-narrative feature "Samsara" on 70mm film! He has shot some 2nd unit digital footage for Lucas(some lava shots in Sicily and Thailand for revenge of the sith) and a digital commercial for Coppola but, as Mr. Fricke's producer on the film told me in person, "digital's still not good enough for him" - Yes! I'm commited to always shooting with film. It has so many exciting new innovations to come, like Showscan(60fps) and SDS-70(www.superdimension70.com) . These are the new steps in cinema that are comparable to adding color and sound to movies. I even wish that the more valid, innovative digital artists out there would come up with their own new terminology and not thoughtlessly apply the words "cinema", "movie" and especially "film" to their digital features and shorts. Hopefully, digital as a new and separate art form, will find daring innovators akin to the early pioneers of film such as Vertov, Kuleshov, Eisentstein, Griffith, and Murnau. While I'm interested in digital and I've enjoyed a few pieces, I've never been really that affected by anything done digitally yet. It's really a different form, like computer graphics or dance or sculpture, that while being totally valid and great, has not personally interested me or given me much pleasure or emotion. No offense to any of my good buds who work on it! :) Theoretically, it seems to me that what would be most appealing and exciting about it is the fresh possibilites inherent in the unique mechanism that makes it up: to show the world in a new visual way that film or anything else simply can't; to express emotions and moods that celluloid or other arts can't. That seems to me to be the only valid and true purpose of the digital arts. But my passion is for film. I love having shot my movie on 16mm film so far and I look forward to shooting new abstract 16mm shorts in the near future. I aspire to work on 35mm, 70mm, IMAX, and especially SDS-70 someday when I can afford them. Film is still young and fresh to me. I love experimenting with its possible forms and technologies. I'm going to continue shooting and cutting and sound designing my films, to experiment on my own, to learn more about the special language of film, to see if I can combine images in certain ways. That's the magic of film, the beauty of cinema. 6:15 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment - Edit - Remove | 
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