Introduction
Summary
There can be no doubt that we are in an age in which the cinema as we know it has been transformed. The era of film is ending and the era of digital cinema is already hard upon us. While some movies are still shot on actual film, the vast majority of “movies” are created with digital cameras and hard drives, so much so that one of the industry's largest equipment suppliers, Birns and Sawyer, recently sold off their entire collection of cameras simply because no one was renting them. There are a few holdouts in the area of actual film production: Steven Spielberg remains a traditionalist, in more ways than one, and no less a figure than Christopher Nolan, who also embraces film over digital media and whose reboot of the Batman series proved incredibly influential. As Nolan noted in a recent interview with Jeffrey Ressner in the DGA Quarterly,
For the last 10 years, I've felt increasing pressure to stop shooting film and start shooting video, but I've never understood why. It's cheaper to work on film, it's far better looking, it's the technology that's been known and understood for a hundred years, and it's extremely reliable. I think, truthfully, it boils down to the economic interest of manufacturers and [a production] industry that makes more money through change rather than through maintaining the status quo. We save a lot of money shooting on film and projecting film and not doing digital intermediates.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Cinema at the Margins , pp. xi - xviiiPublisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2013