The End of Celluloid?

Several years ago a war was underway, one for the hearts and minds of home movie watchers.  On the one side was the media giant Blockbuster Videos, who didn't want its employees to have to explain to customers why the videos they rented didn't fill up their TV screens; they wanted videos to be in full screen format.  On the other side were cinema artistes who wanted their films seen as they intended, in wide-screen format with an aspect ratio that required blank spaces at the top and bottom of a square-shaped TV screen.  Even before the advent of wide-screen TVs the artistes won the day, and the inevitable decline of Blockbuster had begun.

A slightly different war is going on now, and I’m not so sure the good guys are winning.  On January 17^th the Los Angeles Times reported that Paramount Pictures announced it would be the first studio to distribute all of its films digitally instead of on 35 mm film.  This could very well be the tipping point for the end of celluloid distribution of movies.

A 2012 documentary called Side by Side recounted the evolution of the use of digital technology in movie making (if it is all digital can it still be called “film” making?  I guess people still use the term “album” in an era of digital downloads).  The film contained interviews with old school filmmakers who preferred celluloid (Christopher Nolan) and new-era technocrats who embraced digital (George Lucas, Robert Rodriquez).  I’ll deal with production issues in another blog, but for now I want to talk about the projection issue.

When you watch a movie on celluloid in a theater, you are not watching moving images; you are watching 24 still photos per second flickering through a projector.  The illusion of motion is due to a phenomenon called “persistence of vision.”  Your brain is actively engaged in creating what seem to be moving images on a screen.  As editor Walter Murch points out in a deleted scene from Side by Side, when you are in a theater half of the time the theater was completely dark when the projector shutter was closed between frames, but your brain had to actively “edit out” that darkness to create seamless movement.

Digital projection creates no such illusion, as what you are watching is literal movement.  The brain is not engaged and the visual experience is more passive.  Roger Ebert wrote that studies have shown that watching a celluloid movie causes the brain to produce alpha waves, indicating interaction, while watching a digital image produces passive beta waves.  Celluloid draws you in, digital projection puts you to sleep.  I've noticed that films I found fascinating in a theater are less than captivating when I re-watch them on my TV at home.

Those touting digital projection makes points about how it is cheaper than producing hundreds of reels for movie distribution, how digital presentations have less variability or degradation, and how the images are crisper and sharper.  Most of the pro-digital proponents are more interested in how many spaceships they can put into a scene rather than whether they are engaging the audience (face it, if George Lucas cared at all about narrative he would have had someone else re-write Star Wars Episodes 1-3).

One of the interesting counter-arguments comes from James Cameron, who in an additional interview says that he believes digital three-D actually tricks the brain into thinking it is watching a “real” image causing more neurons to fire, and thus is more engaging.  First, anyone who thought the 3-D images from Avatar were realistic needs to find an alternate reality to live in; second, Cameron complained that he couldn't get scientists to investigate his claim unless they could get a $2 million grant.  How much did Cameron earn on Titanic and Avatar?  I think he could afford to shell out a couple of mill to prove his point.

Filmmakers with a noted knack for anticipating audience psychology, such as Steven Spielberg and Christopher Nolan, have endorsed celluloid, claiming it has an ineffable influence on theater audiences.  Technology-driven directors such as George Lucas and Stephen Soderbergh advocate for digital distribution, citing cost and clarity.  While several people interviewed for Side by Side maintained that film would never go away (mainly as a storage medium), the cost factors are swinging the contest toward digital projection.  Will some intangible connection between audiences and the films they love be lost?  Only time will tell.