By: Barry Germansky
Celluloid is a dying giant soon to hitch a corporate-sponsored night train to the “big adios”. The honchos at the helm of the three major manufacturers of motion picture film cameras – Aaton, ARRI, and Panavision – have decided to lower their curtain of dollar bills on the assembly line producing cinema’s wonderful tools of magic and mysticism at the end of this year. Instead, the company brass will be hopping on the ugly band wagon of HD slickness in the artificial realm of all things digital; it is a realm they have foolishly created to help replace the original inventions that made them famous. Both the film camera, invented in 1888 by Louis Augustin Le Prince, and the celluloid that sensuously slides through it to create photochemical images of miraculous light, will be buried together in the same grave. As a final insult, the power players at these doomsday companies will no doubt pick out the cheapest tomb stone in the lot.
The greatest tragedy stemming from this double homicide is that the tactile, imperfect look of film will never be seen again. Shooting on film is a chemical process that ironically lends a reality to the unreal expressionism it fosters. And a profound irony it is! Life is dreamy on celluloid, and light often blurs, burns, and brightens the captured images due to the emulsion process. Digital is too perfect, eliminating any semblance of mystery from the films and – dare I say it? – life itself. This is ludicrous, for if there were no mystery in the world, then humankind would never have felt the need to create films in the first place (or the arts as a whole). Then, there is that absurd craze of digital intermediates and color correction that further cheapens the authenticity of the artificially “perfect” images. The few remaining films shot on celluloid today are contradictorily “digitalized” to remove any visual creativity that might have found its way into the proceedings.
The conversion from celluloid to digital is also emblematic of the desire for short-term gratification that has been imposed on the masses by the corporations who control the arts without compromise. The HD slickness is there to transform films into video games, merging this lucrative recreational market and cinema together as a single entity. Along these video game lines, a filmmaker’s once coveted penchant for visual composition gives way to overkill editing in the attempt to create substance-less momentum for momentum’s sake. After all, if a picture says a thousand words, then a film comprised of seemingly countless pictures says that much more. All of this wisdom of old has been sublimated by one-note aesthetic sensibilities, for unlike previous stylistic movements like German Expressionism and Film Noir that used film as their proverbial canvas, the digital hullabaloo has no intellectual merit. For example, German Expressionism was spawned in the 1910’s-20’s to create a distorted, exaggerated view of reality that would mirror the psychological desperation and madness of modern society.
One need only compare the soulless digital revolution to one of cinema’s most artistically fertile decades, the 1950s. Poetry and expressionism could creep into any story and do wonders. Director Nicholas Ray and cinematographer Ernest Haller’s vibrant celluloid colour scheme in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) provides a microcosm of how each artist could develop their own style to fit their personality and the specific project at hand. The photochemical process of celluloid accentuates Jim Stark’s (James Dean) fiery red jacket, symbolically representing the conflict between his youthful sensitivity and the superficiality of the adult world overrun with capitalist bureaucracy.
In order for cinema to avoid sinking deeper into the societal Dark Age currently plaguing the 21st Century, the standard for visual excellence must be set back to celluloid gold, obliterating the computerized dribble that currently sets the trends. When film is once again embraced, we will not only arrive back at a genuine starting point to make further genuine artistic progress, but we will allow the medium to live up to its name.
