Grain Lover

Well, it's the end of the year and that means it's the holiday season and what better time than now for an annoying rant about the state of film. Today I would specifically address digital film/projection. I'm finding the move to the digital realm a little troubling in terms of public viewing. For me, the character of film lies in the very term, "film." That is what it is (or was, I guess), a physical object that can become a shared experience by becoming intangible. That is film's great awe, its mystery, and what creates a unique viewing experience. The grain of every strip of film is different; dirt collects differently; there are breaks and imperfect splices that are annoying, but give the presentation uniqueness or, in other words, a soul.

See, film is alive, it exists, it has mass and it ultimately deteriorates and dies. It is the physical (actors, scenery, etc) chemically recorded via intangible means in reverse (light focused through a lens onto films, developed into a negative, then printed into a positive for release to theaters), transported in a tangible state (the film), then becoming intangible again for an audience to view it (light through film and projector). Film is lightning in a bottle, light stored and shared. There is a beauty and life in this, that is absent in digital projection. The perfect nature of it removes the soul of the 'performance.'

Think of it in terms of music, phonographic LP's are a 'dirty' medium (hiss, pops, skips) but they have a life and character to themselves that compact discs cannot match. Their imperfections create a unique performance and object, it gives each LP its own life and aura (or warmth to use a more common phrase) that just cannot be found in a 'clean' medium such as the CD. Hence, you sometimes have artificial 'noise' added to songs to give them atmosphere, to create the illusion of an LP. In film we now see the same thing occurring in movies such as 300, which was artificially 'grained' to give it texture that would be otherwise missing; to give this film, produced digitally, a warmth and reality that would otherwise be missing.

There is no turning back the tide, film projectors are bound to be slowly phased out, and I would be lying if I was to say that there is no good in the move to digital (although I won't go into that now). I do feel, however, that much of the magic in film is being lost and it makes this viewer, for one, a little sad.