The Exhibitionist: Film Appreciation in the Digital Age

Is film really better than digital? Or vice versa? Following the news that Steven Spielberg is allegedly to blame for the slow rollout of digital projectors into cinemas, I've been thinking about the questions all week. And I have no idea. But not because siding with Spielberg, just because he's Spielberg, is difficult when he suddenly announces a new digital 3-D project (Ghost and the Shell) he'll be producing. The reality is that I'm not technologically informed enough and, more importantly, my eyesight isn't good enough for me to really make the distinction anymore.

That isn't to say I can't tell if I'm watching film or digital. I definitely can. Especially when it's digital 3-D, or when it's an incorrectly projected HD copy of The Wackness, which looks very crisp but also very dark (for the purpose of this week's column, it's not important to point a finger at the cinema responsible). What I can't tell is which format is better. And I mean better in a sort of ideological mixed with functionality context. If just going by ideals, I have to keep pledging allegiance to film, but perhaps only as a traditionalist. Yet if going by functionality, I have to swear by digital, from DVD to DLP to 4K to whatever (again, I just can't keep up tech-wise), but perhaps only as a futurist.

A long time ago, when I first went to film school at a private institution that had to make use of the pile of money we students paid them, I was taught to really appreciate film. Our studies classes featured actual film prints, supplied by an archive either owned by the school or the film history professor, and only in an extremely rare circumstance did we watch a projected Laserdisc. So, I grew to really appreciate the quality of film. Mainly because that's what we were taught with, what we were taught to appreciate, and what we were able to properly appreciate.

But that was a time before DVDs went on the market; the closest thing to digital filmmaking on campus was Hi8, which we then had to transfer to Beta in order to edit the footage, and the single videomaking class utilizing these technologies was treated as kind of a new frontier; most of us still edited our film stock on Moviolas, with special reservations (and upperclassman status) needed to get onto the Steenbeck. Maybe we'd heard of AVID, but certainly not such a thing as Final Cut Pro.

I ended up dropping out of that school after two years. And, finally, after ten more years I returned to finish my degree, this time at a public college and majoring in film studies instead of production. While I'm not sure what kind of digital filmmaking tools the production students were using these days, I did quickly notice a significant difference in the digital materials used for studies classes, which primarily consist of watching and discussing movies. At first I thought, well, this is a tax-funded city school and they probably don't have the budget for film prints, so it makes sense that we're watching projected DVDs and Laserdiscs (and in extremely rare circumstances, mostly because a lot of classic foreign films still aren't available on better formats, VHS). I'll just have to get used to the poor quality image and the feeling that I should just ask Netflix to start handing out diplomas.

But eventually I really came to appreciate the benefits of working with digital in a studies class. Mostly I learned that it's a lot easier to appreciate film, if not film, in having a means to go back and really dissect and discuss it. With projected DVDs, you can watch the movie, then afterwards return to specific scenes and shots with the use of rewind, fast forward, pause, etc., in order to spotlight things maybe not seen by students during the first run. It made me laugh coming from years of working in cinemas, where I'd constantly be asked by customers why the film couldn't be rewound if they were late -- and the only ones in the auditorium. Of course, I have no idea if projectionists are permitted to do that now with digital "prints", nor do I really know what kind of functionality digital cinema has that would parallel the employment of (appropriately named in this regard) digital versatile discs in the classroom.

This past week, amidst my contemplation of the differences between film and digital, one of my current film studies professors (no, I haven't yet finished my degree) coincidentally brought to my attention a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education by Brandeis professor Thomas Doherty entitled "Celluloid Under Siege: The Future of Film Studies After the Digital Deluge." The subject was exactly what I was already thinking about writing on for this week's column:


Doherty discusses the difficulty of studying and appreciating actual film when film studies programs are becoming more inclusively titled media studies programs and when the Society for Cinema Studies has long since (five and a half years ago) changed its name to the Society for Cinema & Media Studies. I often wonder if any of my fellow students would really care or notice if film stock were to disappear completely, especially when few of them are even conscious of the benefits of being a mere few train stops away from places like Film Forum and Anthology Film Archives, two non-profit, non-museum arthouses that will likely be among the last remnants of film appreciators when such a concept is deemed mostly a curiosity for the historically enthusiastic. Doherty offers hope in the form of a seemingly hopeless expert:


Apparently, the main saving grace for film's continuation is indeed it's "nostalgic affectation". Yet Doherty also maintains the argument that celluloid's benefits are "right before the eyes," and even references Jon Stewart's iPhone joke from this year's Academy Awards ceremony, which only somewhat celebrated the quality of ancient cinema of forty-five years ago (specifically Lawrence of Arabia) without really hailing anything so sufficiently relevant produced of late.

Meanwhile, Doherty also addresses the very benefits of digital for studies programs that I have experienced firsthand these past two years: "Wired classrooms also encourage a more relaxed, student-friendly lecture style: For the first time in media pedagogy, a film reference that comes up unbidden in discussion can be downloaded on the spot for a close textual once-over."

And finally, perhaps to be ironic, Doherty concludes by linking to the YouTube clip featuring David Lynch, whose last "film" (Inland Empire) was shot on digital video, chastising the idea of watching movies on a cell phone. The reference pretty much sums up my belief that neither film nor digital is necessarily better than the other, that we must simply accept the future while appreciating the past and hopefully the two can continue living simultaneously, in whatever sort of arena and with whatever sort of function they may do so in.

(Photo courtesty Christian Razukas, aka hellochris, from his flickr page)