The Death of Cinema pt. 94

"Old" movies to look like video forevermore....

In June, director Martin Scorsese tried to show his 1993 film The Age of Innocence at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese's editor for the past 40 years and a three-time Oscar winner, called Grover Crisp, the senior VP of asset management at Sony, for a 35mm print. But Sony not only didn't have a print, it couldn't even make one.

"He told me that they can't print it anymore because Technicolor in Los Angeles no longer prints film," Schoonmaker recalled. "Which means a film we made 20 years ago can no longer be printed, unless we move it to another lab—one of the few labs still making prints."

..."I was used to hearing, oh well, maybe films made in the '40s or '50s, but our film?" Schoonmaker said, referring to titles that have become unavailable. "And it's not the only one of our films that is in this situation. What really worries me are the lesser-known movies."

And film buffs are worried not just about the lack of digitized titles, but how they are being converted. Schoonmaker for one has been appalled by some of the digital "restorations" she's screened.

"I saw a digitized version of a film that David Lean made during World War II, and it looked just like a TV commercial that was shot yesterday," she said. "It was wrong, the balance was completely off. Originally it had a slightly muted look, and now here were all these insanely bright blues."

Schoonmaker believes that the colorists who have been trained in the last 10 or 15 years "have no idea what these movies should look like anymore."

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/11/with-35mm-film-dead-will-classic-movies-ever-look-the-same-again/265184/

I don't want the endless stream of those articles over the years to get me down, but boy do they get me down.

Countdown to the death of "the death of Cinema" articles.

Not really about the "death" of cinema, but Steven Spielberg thinks the Hollywood system is about to "implode," and everyone has some thoughts...

http://www.fandor.com/blog/daily-spielberg-lucas-and-that-imminent-implosion

just read this annoyingly-written snippet of a memoir and it seemed relevant: http://www.salon.com/2013/06/15/lynda_obst_hollywoods_completely_broken/singleton/

http://online.wsj.com/articles/kodak-movie-film-at-deaths-door-gets-a-reprieve-1406674752

I had no use for it but RIP anyway

Seitz interviews Godfrey Cheshire, 15 years after the Death of Film/Decay of Cinema articles:

http://www.rogerebert.com/mzs/death-of-filmdecay-of-cinema-at-15-a-conversation-with-godfrey-cheshire

Great dialogue there; I've always loved G.C. to death.

For starters, I definitely read Four Arguments For the Elimination of Television at the start of the '80s, maybe for a media class.

Nick Pinkerton on the ramping up of the war for 35mm Survival:

I won’t deny that there is a sentimental element to 35mm partisanship, for this is a format that will age and show wear, as we do, and finally die, as we must. For a moment, watching Deathdream in Yonkers, I even indulged in the fancy that I might be watching the same print I’d seen 14 years ago at Dayton’s Neon Movies, when Dr. Creep still crept among the living. Certainly there was nostalgia aplenty in the first round of eulogies for film which came in 2011, when the first-run theatrical changeover was already well underway and Ebert declared “my war is over, my side lost, and it’s important to consider this in the real world”—but also a fair amount of cautious optimism. I even expressed as much at the time.

My optimism has lessened in direct proportion to my practical experience of the Brave New DCP World. For all the rep calendar ballyhoo about “glorious,” “stunning” new 4K restorations, we seem to be about on par with the Victorians when they started restoring Renaissance paintings to blindingly bright palettes meant, quite inaccurately as it happens, to reflect their original splendor. (Wiseman’s National Gallery is instructive viewing on this matter, and on the matter of contextualizing exhibition.) League writes, “With digital presentation, the movie looks as good at the first screening as it does after playing for months,” but this presupposes that the movie looks good in the first place, as opposed to merely freshly scrubbed. If it doesn’t? Tough titties, you’ll be looking at it on DCP for the foreseeable future anyways, because any print is safely sealed away miles beneath the earth’s crust.

http://filmcomment.com/entry/bombast-35-stayin-alive

last 35mm lab in NYC shuts down

http://www.playboy.com/articles/last-nyc-film-processing-lab-closes-end-of-an-era

Yes, 2014 movies shot on film look amazing. But movies from the '70s, '80s, '90s, '00s, and '10s need 35mm to survive. Dean Plionis, director of operations for Colorlab, a New York City-based film company that processes 35mm in its Maryland facility while specializing in film archiving and restoration, believes that when it comes down to the scientific facts of degradation and human error, film trumps digital. Remember Zip Drives? That storage method that spiked in popularity in the late '90s? Imagine finding one today. Could you get the information off? Can you imagine mining its data in another 50 years? It's hard to imagine losing the digital files of The Avengers, but evolving encodings, algorithms, and proprietary software could make them impossible to read in 100 years.

^^^this is the biggest issue imo

It's hard to imagine losing the digital files of The Avengers

But we can all try nonetheless.

yeah the instant obsolesence of digital media and the need to keep shifting among formats and storage hardware is a major issue for archives in the present and future

whereas, you make a print, and keep it in climate-controlled storage, you're good for a century or longer

btw can i just say how much i hate the neologism "digital print"?

as in, "we're showing a restored digital print of 'jaws' next week!"

also, the debasement of the word "restored"

"i ran this movie through one of those computer things—it's restored!"

^ agreed with all that.

with film dying (or dead already), the future belongs to colorists.

put a fork in it, it's done

the future of film now depends on Jay Jay Abrams and a new Star Wars sequel. hope it's a home-run in that regard. i'm ok with digital behind the dominant method of production in the industry, but it doesn't mean film has to die completely.

Eric, best post ever

Remember Zip Drives? That storage method that spiked in popularity in the late '90s? Imagine finding one today.

This guy should come work in my office. Not that I've ever been enabled to open one.

Watched Reggio's Visitors today. Digital copy. Not good enough resolution, distracting throughout the whole film. Then went and saw The Emperors Naked Army Marches On in a 35mm print flown in from Japan. Boy, did that look amazing, even though it was old. Dunno, at times I'm a format fascist. It really isn't the same.

i like the shimmer of 35mm in projection; it's hard to recreate in digital projection even when the film was shot/post analog

hmm, i cant decide whether to see a 70mm screening of 2001 at the BFI next month, or the new digital 'restoration'. for some reason i imagine a film like 2001 might benefit from DCP. sci-fi was surely meant to be seen as pristinely as possible, no?

I'd go for 70 mm. Can't imagine the warm colours of 2001 will be helped by digital.

i want to see it the way the maker made it

Actually, I reconsider. I love digital. Saw a few digital films, Konchalovsky's The Postman's White Nights and the new one from the Harvard Ehtnography/Sensory Lab, The Iron Ministry, and I love how they look. Postman's White Nights capture a beautiful northern russian light, cold and strange, and Iron ministry has the grains, the hues, and the shakes of cheap digital almost guerilla filmmaking. I absolutely love it. On the other hand, I saw a film promotes as 4K, transcendental, overwhelming, and it just looked like a nature program on bbc. Mainstream digital, supposedly more clear, more clean, is horrible, all character removed to create smooth, vanilla, blandness. So mediocre, so dull.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/11/21/paul_schrader_interview_filmmaker_talks_dying_of_the_light_absent_friends.html

Paul Schrader:

You made a movie recently, The Canyons, which was funded through Kickstarter and released on demand, as well as in theaters. Do those new avenues make you more optimistic about the future of film?

PS: Everything’s up for grabs. It’s exciting in that way—unless you’re wedded to the 20th-century concept of a projected image in a dark room in front of a paying audience. If you’re wedded to that concept, you’re in trouble, because that concept is dead.

I’m guessing you’re not wedded to that concept. Some filmmakers seem nostalgic and very invested in 35mm projection.

PS: I’m not. It’s all revanchist claptrap. The goal of art is not to tell people what tools they want to use, but to use whatever tools are around. The tools are always changing and the artists need to change with the tools. We didn’t have movies 100 years ago, and we did quite fine without them, and now they’re going to become something else again.

http://grantland.com/features/2014-hollywood-blockbusters-franchises-box-office/
this is a good article but seriously is it completely impossible that audiences will burn out on dc/marvel/etc, leading to successively lower box office tallies and leaving executives desperate to throw money at other stuff?

What the movie industry is about, in 2014, is creating a sense of anticipation in its target audience that is so heightened, so nurtured, and so constant that moviegoers are effectively distracted from how infrequently their expectations are actually satisfied. Movies are no longer about the thing; they’re about the next thing, the tease, the Easter egg, the post-credit sequence, the promise of a future at which the moment we’re in can only hint.

this is a very salient point imo

eg. The ILX Star Wars thread will only die once the film is actually released and everyone realises that they don't even wanna go and pay money to see this piece of shit garbage film for kids.

wishful thinking but yea that is not happening

Day after it comes out there's going to be a spike of activity in the "Depression and what it's really like" thread. Guaranteed.

Not to nitpick, but that is an article on the death of Hollywood, not Cinema ;) Cinema will do just fine, prob even better if you remove all the American prestige crap. Like, when it gets to that list of films started by one billionaire or something, and that list includes American Hustle and Zero Dark Thirty, well, I'm not going to miss those things.

The thing is also, Marvel is really, amazingly good at what they do. I don't really like what they do, but you kinda have to give them credit, they did sorta reinvent the wheel, and keeps a level of basic competence, which is almost unique in the business. When I watch a Marvel Movie there is almost always up to several seconds of the film which was funny and awesome and vine-worthy. And that is probably enough to keep the businessmodel going, especially when all the competitors are so fucking useless.

i think that grantland article has some good points but it also misses a lot of nuance and it's more than a little ahistorical

david poland posted a smart response to it: http://moviecitynews.com/2014/12/the-sky-continues-not-to-fall/

good article, thanks for posting that

yeah, i mean things aren't exactly great, but i think folks can mistake cycles for permanent changes, and they can also overstate shifts that have taken place but aren't as dramatic as harris seems to think.

Like, when it gets to that list of films started by one billionaire or something, and that list includes American Hustle and Zero Dark Thirty, well, I'm not going to miss those things.

Mark H, like any writer who covers the Oscars, has far more mainstream taste than he's willing to admit.

yeah, there's kind of reflexive promotion of one type of film over one another. he seems to be implying, "well, even if you didn't /love/ this or that adult drama, you must admit it's better than /this here franchise film/." which is probably a good encapsulation of a lot of critics' tastes, but there's a complacency to it that's not particularly refreshing.

Brody takes up Frederik's argument to get Harris off the ledge

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/no-genius-system

surprised to agree w/ a lot of what brody writes there, although i can't share his enthusiasm for a lot of the "adult" pictures he names.

Kodak has finalized a deal with the major Hollywood studios that will allow film to remain alive in certain instances, at least for the near future. This marks the completion of the deal that Kodak said was near-final last summer, when negotiations began....

According to Wednesday's announcement from Kodak, the deal means that the company will continue to manufacturer camera negative, intermediate stock or postproduction, and archival and print film. It also said Kodak would pursue "new opportunities to leverage film production technologies in growth applications, such as touchscreens for smartphones and tablet computers."

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/behind-screen/kodak-inks-deals-studios-extend-770300

Really terrific FC piece on the major H'wood studios, how they finagle their annual film slate's "profits," and how they've muffed digital streaming / Blu-ray etc:

http://www.filmcomment.com/article/a-specter-is-haunting-hollywood

http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/jurassic-world-box-office-franchise-movies-hollywood/

If Jurassic World follows recent box office patterns — and with a warm reaction from first-weekend audiences, there’s no reason to think it won’t — a swift ascent to a billion-dollar worldwide gross is a foregone conclusion, and a substantially bigger number than that is well within reach. Furious 7 has now grossed $1.5 billion; Avengers: Age of Ultron is right behind it with $1.35 billion. It is not a stretch to suggest that in a matter of a few weeks, Jurassic World will join them. By Labor Day if not sooner, we could be looking at a movie universe in which three of the six highest-grossing films in history have opened since April.

Some box office analysts will say these movies represent a statistical blip, and they could be right, but here’s the thing: Events dismissed as blips change the course of history all the time. Three gigantic films have defined 2015 for some; for others, they’ve been the exceptions within an ongoing narrative about the slow death of theatrical business for movies. We won’t know whether this was an odd year or the shape of things to come until about 2018, but in practical terms, it won’t much matter, because by then, the mere idea that this kind of money can be made and then built upon will have substantially reshaped the way Hollywood studios plan their slates and define themselves. In fact, it’s happening already, and Universal, fifth in market share last year and vying for first in 2015, knows it. Twenty years ago, “blockbuster,” at its most hyperbolic, meant a franchise big enough to give you a park. Now it means a franchise big enough to give you a world.

So the Jurassic conversation, I’m guessing, will be less “What’s the next movie?” than “How do we turn this into a semi-permanent enterprise?”

a creeping suspicion

https://twitter.com/NickPinkerton/status/710139908250324992

not sure what the right post for this is, but anyway, is there any country, apart from the US, and india, where directors feel like their cinema is appreciated, or more importantly, just SEEN by their national audience?

in the new S&S (which has some good pieces on changing cinema fates), Athina Rachel Tsangari says the greek audience dont see her films. the other week i saw romanian directors at a BFI talk say the same thing about their films. im sure even british directors like clio bernard would say the same thing.

obv this doesnt apply to more mainstream directors/titles (eg in india, independent movies dont have mainstream success like bollywood titles, ditto the US, where alex ross perry isnt exactly competing with star wars, and in the UK andrea arnold isnt really likely to bother richard curtis or the inbetweeners), so i wonder why this is still a point of contention. no one anywhere is watching these films in huge numbers. and perhaps it has always been thus. BUT if no one in their own country is seeing them, where ARE they being seen? is it only festivals?

Well, that's complicated. But yeah, there's definitely an ecosystem based around film festivals. In a lot of European countries, film financing is done in collaboration with the government, and much of that money isn't being spend on what the audience wants. In Denmark, for instance, it's even split in two, a consultant/prestige bag of money, and a market bag of money, which should go to perceived popular films.

At times, it seems a bit like prestige tv series. No Romanian New Wave film will get a financial return on it's investment (I guess). Especially not in Romania, where the moviehouse infrastructure is still really bad, and many people simply won't get the chance to watch these films. But the continued artistic succes of these films paint a picture of Romania as an artistically vibrant place, so to some extent they will keep on being financed.

And then there's all the co-funding being done all over the place. France is financing much of Francophone African cinema, and did so even when there were close to no cinemas in the countries where the films were being made. The Jeonju film festival in South Korea is doing some financing of directors who has participated in the festival before, for instance Argentinian director Mattias Pineiro. Many directors from the Icelandic film boom were educated in Denmark, and there's a whole lot of Danish money involved - so why Danish film continues to be so crap is a mystery to me...

tl;dr: Arthouse economics are weird.