The Death of Cinema pt. 94

David Bordwell on how preference for digital (along w/ hardware issues) is hastening the end of 35mm projection at festivals, etc.

http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2012/01/05/pandoras-digital-box-at-the-festival/

I was at the Tate Modern (to see the Richter) and while waiting for my friend had a look at Tacita Dean's thing and it had the whole 'cinema is dying bcz digital is killing it theme'. Problem is the film ws a real drag..

i'm bummed to have missed the dean (& richter actually) but might buy the catalogue, the essays sound p good

The Dean is around till March, don't know where you're at but there's a longer windown than the Richter, which shuts this w/end.

oh cool, actually thought the dean ended at new year, will possibly make it still

Bordwell's latest, on what the art theaters will have to do to survive:

http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2012/01/30/pandoras-digital-box-art-house-smart-house/

Bordwell: "It seems likely that digital projection has, in unintended and unexpected ways, put the history of film in jeopardy."

http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2012/02/13/pandoras-digital-box-pix-and-pixels/

good riddance

may your glottis be stopped with reels of decaying celluloid.

defenders of the analog shall have no mercy from us.

maybe you should read the fucking thing, eh

the advantage of digital is its impermanence. mistakes can be corrected and revised with little effort. we wish to apply these principles to human society.

film is finite, "organic" and beautiful. it must be destroyed.

yeah the only thing standing between us and utopia is your vinyl record collection.

I am starting to wonder if Tacita Dean's preciousness is not really helping the celluloid cause. Still like her films but interviews with her are a little insufferable at times. She used to be kind of my hero =(

Wow at that article.

yeah... I'm hearing unpleasant rumors about the future of 35mm projection at an NYC repertory mainstay, too.

the advantage of digital is its impermanence.

nope.

Yeah totally. People think their images will last forever as files? Get real

I do think that. I think you're imagining a hard drive crashing and losing everything, but there's easy methods of backup to guard against that sort of thing.

I'm imagining files that become corrupted and/or file formats that become obsolete.

More the latter, I guess

maybe there will be a generation of cyberwars in which china & america strive to delete each others' venerable cinematic histories

There was some Hollywood Reporter/Variety article recently on how cavalier people are about the potential lifespan of digital formats and how even films shot digitally are printed onto celluloid for archival purposes. I am a bit sick of this argument, but when people speak of HD as being "better quality" than film it drives me fucking bananas.

I was shooting with an Arri SR2
http://i00.i.aliimg.com/photo/105097422/Arri_SR2_S_16_Camera.jpg
in a touristy part of New Mexico and all of these 5D sunday photographers were asking disparagingly why I would bother shooting "old film" (I told them I bought it straight from the fridge at Fuji the week before) when my images would look so much better with their cameras.

I'm imagining files that become corrupted and/or file formats that become obsolete.

any "format" digital or otherwise can become corrupted or obsolete.

Of course, but there is no reason to think that digital files are more or less subject to this, or that their lifespan is anything close to other formats. At the very least, you can see an analog image so long as it isn't utterly degraded.

5D sunday photographers

ILP's 'tumblr whites'

Adam otm

File corruption is easy to prevent and doing so can be automated. File format worries are a real issue.

Obv I have a preference for analogue but I do try to be realistic. I actually deal with HD footage most days for work and the abundance of formats and how to and not to convert them is constantly an issue. I will miss 35mm projection but I did also just get HDTV and Blu Ray and it's been fantastic to see some of the digital preservation work that has been done on classic films. I was never much of a DVD-hoarder/criterion dude but Blu Ray is changing my position on all that.

Also as per corruption/backup I have had enough awful moments where I have a pretty good regimen in terms of backing up my projects, but then archiving files from old projects, transferring from drive to drive, switching on drives every couple of months to make sure they are still ticking over drives me nuts.

The biggest editing job I ever did (on someone else's films) was totally saved by the hard-drive-in-a-grocery-bag-in-the-freezer-for-a-couple-of-hours trick.

And when I say archiving files, I am not just talking about video files, but all of the other data that comes along with a finished, outputted project.

i have regular 8mm films sitting in a freezer, they've been there for months :/

exposed film or raw stock?

exposed

Apparently the last in Bordwell's series on the Big Switch. I had no idea 35mm reels were now made w/ mylar, not celluloid.

http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2012/02/28/pandoras-digital-box-from-films-to-files/

I suppose the death of cinema thread is as apt a place as any to ask if I should finally watch Auntie Mame.

Just wait for a revival of the musical at a dinner theater near you. And as I have no intention of watching Mommie Dearest anytime soon, Fight the Fag Canon.

Celluloid exceedingly flammable which is why, no? I guess I should read article.

"The Fag Canon" (and esp. Mommie Dearest) >>>>> Woody Allen's entire filmography

well, if you're including all of Fassbinder, sure. ;)

My roommate from nearly 20 years ago remembers a live Scorsese interview we saw at NYU where he talked about the switch to mylar, so there's another thing I didn't know I'd known.

more about the likely death of 35mm and the dubious 'permanence' of digital work:

"If I spend," [UCLA Film & Television Archive director Jan-Christopher] Horak says, "as we did on one restoration, $750,000 to preserve one film digitally, and then it goes into a computer somewhere and it disappears, that money's gone."

Think it doesn't happen?

It does.

Five years after the first Toy Story came out, producers wanted to release it on DVD. When they went back to the original animation files, they realized that 20 percent of the data had been corrupted and was now unusable. Granted, digital was new at the time. Surely advances have made digital storage much less problematic?

Not really.

Fast-forward to Toy Story 2, which was almost erased from history. Pixar stored the Toy Story 2 files on a Linux machine. One afternoon, someone accidentally hit the delete key sequence on the drive. The movie started disappearing. First Woody's hat went. Then his boots. Then his body. Then entire scenes.

Imagine the horror: 20 people's work for two years, erased in 20 seconds. Animators were able to reconstitute the missing elements purely by chance: Pixar's visual arts director had just had a baby, and she'd brought a copy of the movie — the only remaining copy — with her to work on at home.

In the digital realm, the archivist's mantra, "Store and ignore," fails. If you don't "refresh," or occasionally turn on a hard drive, it stops working. You can't just stick it on a shelf and forget about it. As restorationist Ross Lipman says, "You're shifting from a model focused on a physical object to data. And where the data lives will be constantly changing."

http://www.laweekly.com/2012-04-12/film-tv/35-mm-film-digital-Hollywood

> Pixar stored the Toy Story 2 files on a Linux machine.
> One afternoon, someone accidentally hit the delete key sequence on the drive.
> The movie started disappearing.
> First Woody's hat went. Then his boots. Then his body. Then entire scenes.

computers do not work like this.

should store these films as Lossless files

Koogs otm. That Pixar stuff is str8 up bullshit; even in 1999 the TS2 *original* files would be many terabytes in size, there is no fucking way that their art director would be able to "take it home". Total bollocks.

I heard they put some Pop Rocks in the disc drive and that is what caused the meltdown.

TS2 original files would just be 3d models, shaders, and the movement data. If someone was working on just animation, it's possible they'd not have the textures, so the file sizes could be reasonable.

This "omg digital film could disappear" thing is complete bullshit. I mean, unless you think banks use paper money all the time or credit cards don't actually work or that... oh hell, anything digital

and cmon, pixar probably had a pretty good backup routine in place by then. unless they were completely and totally insane.

asking my friends at ILM and Pixar about this

Jefchak works at the New Beverly, which is owned by Quentin Tarantino. A regular at the art-house cinema, Tarantino bought the place in 2007, when it was in danger of closing. The New Beverly still plays traditional reel-to-reel 35mm, and Tarantino has said that the day the cinema puts in a digital projector is the day he burns it to the ground.

I lol'd