Vintage Cars

There's something so damned familiar about "Gran Torino" - and that seems to be the main source of pleasure in it. Not least of which we get to see Clint Eastwood in the not-too-subtle familiar mode of his heyday, the laconic aging hardass that won him an Oscar for "Unforgiven" and that stretches all the way back to the "Dirty Harry" era.

Eastwood has struggled with this persona his entire career. The spaghetti westerns in the '60s were themselves responses against what was considered a used-up and tired genre, given new life (he claims by his own hand) by the world-weary "Squint." When he began directing himself, the films he seemed to have his heart in were closer to Bertrand Tavernier than to Don Siegel. But Eastwood knew to remain a good studio asset, and mixed the personal films with the action ones over the years.

In retrospect it seems that Eastwood has always been conscious of his legacy as time passes. The "Dirty Harry" films get more progressive in theme as they go along (even as the filmmaking technique regresses (but a meta-nod to "The Dead Pool," which seems to be about being Clint Eastwood)). He made sure to be in charge of his own fate, and tried constantly to retool his persona rather than retread it (vide "Tightrope" or "Every Which Way You Can"). There was a bad fallow middle period during the 1990s (from "The Rookie" to about "Blood Work") in which his own worst impulses resulted in flaccid and sloppy films having little to do with his previous urgency as an icon. But he began to return to (or develop a refined) form with "Mystic River," then "Million Dollar Baby," and finally the 2 Iwo Jima films of 2006.

I don't consider any of these particularly great, but they are well-regarded. He has outlasted his critics, and keeps doing what he knows how to do. Now it seems there is always a Clint Eastwood film around Christmas time (2 this year), and they're never the big, grand epics other directors strive for. Even "Sands..." a war picture, didn't feel epic. Eastwood's technique is disarmingly simple, and practically nonchalant. His blocking and direction of actors often seems rushed and uninvolved.

Yet sometimes it's perfect for his theme. I think "Mystic River"'s award-winning performances stood out exactly because the film surrounding them was so slipshod. But the overly-relaxed "Honkytonk Man" and "Bronco Billy" (neither of which delivers on any kind of '70s-style Eastwood-esque "moments") are brilliant examples of restraint and sensitivity.

These smaller productions also means he can make more films. Such previous prolific stalwarts as Coppola and Gilliam struggle to get each film funded and finished (and that's without any stars dying). Even Brett Ratner, god help us, has priced himself out of regular commissions now that he got himself attached to X-Men-sized projects.

Eastwood apparently isn't interested in going that route. He might not be capable of it. As a wise man once said, the man knows his limitations.

There's a humility to Eastwood's direction that is unassuming, undemanding, and seems stuck in the past. It would be easy to catch "Gran Torino" on cable in a year and not be entirely sure it was 1, 5 or 20 years old. By not being of the moment, it approaches a kind of timelessness.

Eastwood is working with similar material here as in "Unforgiven," the out-of-time warrior unable to find his place in a changing world. The sense of outrage has been replaced by one of stubborn inevitability. Is Eastwood considering his own mortality, one film at a time?

Our knowledge of his previous career only helps. And with the resonances to other roles, from the haunted agent in "In The Line Of Fire" to the widower in "Bridges of Madison County," "Gran Torino" feels solid as a well-kept automobile.

Girls on Film

We are the ultimate voyeurs when watching films. We are allowed to watch whatever is shown, completely anonymously, and we're safe to enjoy what is revealed.

It is passive, yet some would accuse the gaze of being an aggressive act. The ultimate site of our visual pleasure is glamour, either embodied by stars, Hollywood artifice and spectacle, or extra-textural context. We enjoy and yet have no culpability in watching and dreaming.

Fantasizing and yearning. The people up on screen do not know they are being watched. Those on display are being objectified.

We give ourselves over to the storytellers. Camera placement, and every edit was decided by someone else, and presents us with images, information, and anticipation as the film unspools in a specific manner. We are in thrall, yet powerless.

At least, so the more adventurous and experimental filmmakers would have us be.

If we leave the theatre, or the room, the film continues and we miss something as it continues. It's unaware and uncaring that the observer has left. The film exists on its own, regardless of who regards it. Running in its own endless forward movement. With the rise of video, and the internet, not only can the viewer now pause, or even rewind scenes, they can interact with the story.

The film is now at the mercy of the observer, who can negotiate the experience themselves. Not just decode it. But write it. Branch like a videogame from scene to scene, or change the configuration of the elements. Zoom in or edit. Move heads. This interaction is no longer spectatorship. It is participation.

We don't respond to moving images in the same way when they're in our control. We have the urge to manipulate, and change, just to see what might happen if a color is added, or the music is changed, or sped up. Or a scene from one show is put into or on top of another.

We consume it as we find convenient, rather than as how it was intended. The constantly changed and reconfigured art piece is no longer a film but a performance object. The feedback loop is for our own feedback. Evidence of our presence and actions upon the piece.

Instead of looking anonymously at the figures up on the screen, presented to us - as common cultural currency, presented by personal or industrial configurations that have sociological meaning - we are now looking directly at ourselves.

It puts ego back into the process. And it makes impossible the surrender to the caress of cinema.

Elvis Lives and Breathes. Apparently.

You may know about the new "Elvis Duets" CD (released November '08), that features duets with Elvis and current artists created in the studio by using digital tools (when Bono sang with Sinatra in 1995 without ever meeting in the same studio it was news). Martina MacBride has gone one better, and offers this "remix" of Elvis's performance of "Blue Christmas" from his '68 "comeback" special.



This is problematic. I don't call myself the biggest Elvis fan, but the integrity of this footage has been profoundly changed in order to sell us a new singer. This isn't just cutting to (or into) archival scenes, it's intrusion into historical documentation. People familiar with this televised concert knows it has a historical and cultural context outside the mere depiction of Elvis singing a couple songs. His nervousness, the intentional staging in close quarters with his fans, the general status of his career previous to this, and band members who were positioned as equals rather than mere backup, all say volumes about what gave this event and the footage its power.

His performance and demeanor are irrevocably altered by the intrusion of a singer standing next to him who was not there (or here on earth) 40 years ago. This is a step closer to the "bringing Humphrey Bogart back to life" future that James Cameron is salivating for.

I understand that new generations have a different relationship to this footage than people who actually lived through it. They may have similar concerns in 40 years when someone is painting a digital moustache on their cultural icons in 2048.

Or, they may not. Because their cultural icons may not exist in some original pristine and culturally specific state. Their meaning may be in flux through the stream of culture and of time, and any additions or deletions will be considered acceptable and expected wear (let's call it patina) as new generations and technology reappropriate old material to make it new.

Well, not new. But different. In a way, Elvis did the same thing back in 1955 with blues music.

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A shorter version of this post appeared on the AMIA Students of Westwood site: http://amiastudentsofwestwood.blogspot.com/).

The Real and the True

Realistic modes of representation are being subsumed by the age of digital. By this I don't mean that digital is "less realistic" (although I feel it is); I mean that Hollywood films are no longer interested is showing us what actually exists in the world.

The magic and the lure of cinema from the early days, and through its history, has been to show audiences something they can't otherwise see, whether it's a train pulling into a station in Paris, a flight to the moon, or a dinosaur attacking its own creators (whether he's a scientist or an animator). And the very artifice of film is constructed by photographic units captured in order and manipulated into pieces of story, that's told sequentially piecemeal, to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Many intangible elements go into film's power to persuade us, to move us to laugh, cry, fall in love or to stomp out. To fall into a dream state, either through dreamy rapture or droning boredom.

Businessmen have always attempted to offer more spectacle when audiences were swayed to other forms of entertainment. The Roman emperors offered bread and circuses to the plebeians who might otherwise riot if not for those distractions. 3-D and Cinemascope were born of desperation in the '50s when audiences moved away from the downtown centers and discovered television did pretty much what the movies could do.

The new technology of digital image making is creating worlds, people, and devices that can't possibly exist in the real world. We revel at such sophisticated constructions as the aging Brad Pitt, the shuffling Jar-Jar Binks, or the orcs fighting Harry Potter. We regard the sheer craft and consider the computing power, and walk out confounded, thinking "How did they ever do that?"

(Coppola had the same problem in the '70s. How did he get that blood to shoot out that way?)

Yet we know it is not real. It is the spectacle of arrogance. It defies us to believe it all, and no matter how seamlessly integrated, there is an uncanny feeling that your pocket is being picked.

The dichotomy between the quest for hyperrealist special effects and the aesthetics of old-school techniques of classic Hollywood is unchallenged. To do so seems downright retrograde and luddite. Isn't a hyperreality better? Why settle for that clear sky when a clouded one works so much better for the mise-en-scene?

The obvious artifice of films, with extreme musical cues and impossible camera shifts, from extreme lighting to randomly occurring rainstorms, is the texture of the stories being told. They're fake, told with and by artifices. Even the mistakes are meaningful. From mis-matched inserts to cover unseen action (Benazeraf) to guileless stop-motion animation (Karel Zeman), there's a hand-made and mediated construction that's closer to a story-teller stumbling over his words and regaining his thought than a film running off the gears. It's human and humane. And it's more endearing.

Audiences have an innate ability to get what the film is trying to get at. Eisenstein used to situate his close-ups in a defiantly non-continuous space. He wanted you to know what the film was doing - no "invisible editing" for him. Hitchcock insisted on those faded rear-projection scenes well into the '60s, when techniques were advanced far beyond that 40-year-old method.

Now scholars have finally decided there's method to his madness. Was Hitchcock being lazy or did he know something we don't?

Realism isn't all that audiences are demanding. Perfection is overrated (and unobtainable). We do like watching people (actors or not), in real sets, or carefully constructed ones. But it's the way those building blocks are used that give us pleasure. The handmade aspect of film is its own performance art. The extravagant spectacle of the old Hollywood Roman epics are beloved exactly because they are from Hollywood. The senators talk with British accents, and the streets aren't covered with dog shit. There's pleasure and comfort in the way Hollywood creates these alternate worlds, that we pay 50c a matinee for.

The puppets in "Nightmare Before Christmas" are fake. The giant ants in "Them" are clearly constructs (manipulated from just off-screen by 2x4s). Yet they exist, like the egg-yolk monsters in Ridley Scott's "Alien." The fact that the creature is a live human, on the set (in a costume), creates a photo-chemical reality (on film) CGI can never convincingly portray. Jar-Jar Binks was ever only 60 or 70% realistic, in spite of any photo-realistic surface. Because it's outside of reality, only a visual trick; a piece of math, not a piece of meat, not actual analog material.

On material (that is, film).

No one's going to be talking about Jackson's $300+million remake of "King Kong" in 70 years beyond the footnote that it ultimately is. It is a magic trick, a prestidigitation. With all the shaky push-ins, painted plates, and swimming fur from the fingers of the animators, the original ape (only this tall in real life) still moves us to tears.

It's not very real. But it feels true.

Ruins

The preservation and appreciation of old films is specifically tied to the concept of what's been forgotten. This is not just a nostalgic attempt to regain, or at least relive, some fading past that has been discarded by the modern Now. There seems to be a fetish to discover (sometimes literally unearth) some old or bitched-up reels of cast-aside films that were forgotten, discarded or abused. The more bitched up the better.

Physical decay asserts itself upon each showing of a film. Each run through a projector harms and leaves its traces on a print, subtly or catastrophically. These remnants of having lived a full projected life, these battle scars, are the marks of a survivor.

These ruined traces are evidence of films having been released and shipped to theatres, shown 3 or 6 times a day for who knows how many dozens or hundreds of patrons. These young and impressionable (perhaps) audience members will remember the films decades later when they encounter them on late night t.v. in their retirement. They may even remember a jarring cut, when two pieces had to be spliced together to repair an unknown previous break.

That edit will become part of the cultural memory. The analog remnant of that print's misfortune becomes encoded in hundreds of people for the next 50 years.

The age of new media has turned away from visible and unpredictable wear on its moving images. Spots and blemishes are erased and replaced by computerized tonal modularities (unless a retro-hip director wants to re-create an "old film" look by putting digital scratches on his music video). The suturing of image cut to image, the artifice creating a narrative foreground text and background texture, is more seamless than ever. Now we don't see the construction (or deconstruction) of the artifact before us - the dinosaurs and fake Humphreys are so believable we stop and mediate on the amazingness of the non-real materials ("materiel"). The virtual suture.

The "perfection" creates a cognitive dissonance more jarring and uncanny than any Hitchcock rear-projection or Eisenstein montage edit. There's something to be said for all the errors and scratches, the physical plasticness of film. It's mechanically produced and reproduced. The embodiment of realism defies its very nature.

It does not stand in witness to actual dinosaurs, poised for le plan americain. Film's an index to reality, not reality itself. The information contained between (yes between) the cut from long shot to close says more than Fincher's perfectly rendered 360 teacup-zooms.

A new (ironically) aesthetic has reappropriated the analog plastic surface of film in all its imperfections. Tarantino's and Rodriquez's "Grindhouse" not only embraces the low-tech production techniques of a fading industrial-corporate business model, it actually physically mars the surface of the film as a reverential remnant homage to the physicality of the prints as they took on wear and damage on their way to ruin.

Tarantino reportedly took his interpositive out to the parking lot and ran it behind a motorcycle. Rodriquez used the latest digital tools to create his damage.

The film as artistic object is what creates a transcendence. Films are artifacts from the past. Remainders. Further philosophical manifestations (or do I mean "physical mediations"?) of the decay of film are seen in Bill Morrison's "Decasia" (2002) and Peter Delpeut's "Lyrical Nitrate" (1991), two full-length compilations that take pieces of old decaying nitrate film and edit them together to create a new, aggressively atrophied narrative of ghost images related only by the sheer beauty of their photo-chemical deterioration of images, right before our eyes.

The ruin is fading evidence of another time, lost forever but suggested by broken and crumbling artifacts. Run through a machine that is in itself becoming obsolete. For an aging audience that will one day also be ruined and dust.

Art Vs. Artifice

Looking without seeing. This academic-sounding exploration of genre is not necessarily backed up by deep insight; it's inspired by the fact that half the time I'm not sure if what I just saw was intended....
_ _ _

We respond to films (and most art in general) by what we're familiar with. Genres allow us to categorize certain works easily, to expect what is likely to happen, and to be pleased and comforted by what comes to pass in the plot.

For example, westerns use as their standard thematic landscape moral tales of forces of right and wrong, of tension between progress, morality, and historical tradition (or more pointedly, nostalgia). Science fiction films place their plots in an alternate world, either in the future or past, or in some other realm in which a different use and/or sense of scientific inquiry is at work, in order to investigate man's place in a hyper-facilitated environment (often at the expense of the human spirit; otherwise why set them in a science-itized (not a word) future?).

These thematic artifices serve to allow the genres - and their inherent strengths - to address effectively (and serves also to let us anticipate and appreciate) the rhetorical arguments the films intend to be engaged in. The plot machinations delight us as they unfold, and may even surprise us. But only to a degree.

We don't like to be too surprised. We want a musical to have singing. If it's a Superman movie, we want to see him fly. Pornography has naked people, and violent movies have the color red.

Yet we should resist being fooled into thinking a work of art is meaningful merely because an expected depiction of an element is appropriate. In an age of increasingly self-reflexive art, it's increasingly easy to identify - and "cooly" accept of the Haskell Wexler sort - something that is little more than artifice. Window dressing. Visual name-dropping. Is putting a red plastic nose on the man in a nightclub identify him as the entertainer?

The whiz-bang surfaces of films today stun and narcotize (a word), and in the process may bypass deeper thematic meaning - if there is one. The thrill comes at the expense of permitting or expecting us to mediate upon the artifices. The props by which we categorize and codify a work of art aren't enough to simply be represented.

They must represent.

They must be exploited, through story, through use as texture (background or characteristic iconography) or as symbol or thematic talisman. Sometimes the tools fail the filmmakers when they're so overwhelmed by a virtuoso ability to create craven images available to them nowadays.

The power of film is that generic tropes, tricks, and devices that make up a detective film or a musical represent specific subtextural outlooks. They're not arbitrary. They're constructs which are (must be) planned. There are schedules, lights and microphone wires that have to be hidden. Actors that must recite scripts, while a camera records. Film must be developed, transferred and edited in an appropriate way. Music is added. The images are manipulated with effects to create narrative and pacing.

All this is artifice, in service (we presume) of the artistic statement to be made.

The post-modern surface of films, and of "film" in general, now more foregrounded than ever with behind-the-scenes, cable-channel exposes, and outtakes over the credits, may prevent us from reflecting back to ourselves what the artistic thrust of any work of art may be trying to show us.

Are we merely responding to the cultural cues, rather than a deeper resonant meaning?

The how of the thing is getting in the way of the why.

The shiny surface of something - the pretty glamour gimcracks and fuzzy dice - may disguise the fact that some of these entertaining articulated robots have no souls.

30 Frames A Second

Digital cinema uses as its source a computer-based file that is comprised of bits, a(n often) rather massive file for all the information that photographic films carry in each frame. It's been estimated that each frame of 35mm film, frames that are "this" (see how close together my fingers are) small, have the equivalent of 40 mg of information - multiply that by 24 frames a second, then 60 seconds per minute, 120+ minutes per film, and you the the idea of the burden of projecting such a file smoothly without hiccups.

Of course the beauty (and curse) of computer files is that they are compressed where detailed information doesn't need to (or can't) be captured. Digital cinema projects at a higher rate as well, 30 frames or even 60 frames a second (the new 3-d processes double this, with the smart glasses to address each eye).

Digital images can capture an amazing amount of the information from a photo-chemical original, but something happens when it's transferred to a higher-rate of presentation. Everything, including scratches, shutter movement, grain and the "slow" flicker can be scanned out. Color tones notwithstanding, the sheer "perfect" evenness of it is uncannily unlike film.

Cinema has unique qualities - it's a physical carrier with pigments, light-absorbing (and light-enhancing) molecules by which a bright light (carbon arc or xenon-based bulb) shines through onto a large reflective screen. It jerks through the projector 24 times a second, and the unique qualities of each frame, often visible by the grain in skies or even unmoving fields are distinguishable by the eye, even if just below the conscious level, as well as the discrete details of the action, captured by the original camera, which also ran at 24 frames a second, grabbing only a fraction of the activity in front of it, serially but incomplete. The actors kept moving as the shutter closed for a split second and reopened, to take another photograph, a moment later, millimeters shifted, and even blurred as the shutter opened again, closed, opened.

The mechanical reproduction of action, tied to the methodical re-presentation of it in a theatrical environment, creates the magic of a transcendental conveyance of the original experience. The art of good editing is famously about what to leave out, and those gaps between frames are like discreet and elliptical question marks. The frames are montage, images juxtaposed in Eisenstein-ian collision, 24 visible frames per second.

We respond to film, projected as such, in a different way than the 30-frames-per-second even-stream (I'm coining a word) of digital projection. I've seen digital restorations of old films (originally film) projected digitally - for example the recent high-end restoration of "Cool Hand Luke" and was surprised to discover it had a haunting lack of "filminess." This isn't a question of image quality - the actual look was clean and clear (I'm still not sure about the blacks) - but of the lack of fluttering juxtaposition of images in a determined perceptible and mechanical rhythm.

The quality of actual film projected creates some sense of urgency. Our gaze is excited and drawn forward in an active way - the gaps are in a way as important as the images in sequence themselves.

It is not a passive medium, like television and its visual drone of perfect even-stream, as first documented in the '60s.

Some of this may have to do as well with being in a large dark room, looking up at the flickering screen, being presented with pieces of a story we put together on a literal as well as symbolic level. The experience is akin to the tribal shaman in ancient times telling the myths of the people in front of the fire at night. There's the flicker, the dark, and your imagination filling in the gaps.

I began thinking about this issue when I saw Pixar's "Wall-E" this year, both digitally and "photo-chemically" projected 2 different times days apart. The source is originally digital of course, and has no "grain" or visual imperfections (intentional lens flares notwithstanding) but was manipulated to recreate movement as film would capture it. (95% of all theatres worldwide do still project film.)

The digital presentation was brighter, more even, and the color palette was declarative to the point of arrogance. The film presentation was darker, demonstrated grain... but seemed somehow "warmer" and more engaging.

Was it just because of the flicker? A story about a robot surrounded by failing technology seemed to benefit from an analog aesthetic that engaged a cognitive sense of perception, not just in its creation, but in its subsequent presentation. My impression of the analog "Wall-E" proves my impression of the digital "Cool Hand Luke." Digital is too concerned with the shiny and perfectly rendered surface.

Not with what the audience may make of it. It's a failure to communicate.

Forget it, Jake

I spent a certain amount of my time about 15 years ago defending Robert Towne's and Roman Polanski's "Chinatown." It had become the new "Citizen Kane," newly familiar to an increasingly savvy and curious film-geek community who had read all the get-rich-quick-screenwriting books and would rent it on VHS or DVD, wondering what all the fuss was about.

It's hard to put your finger on. It's slow, and too confusing. Nicholson is in that post-Five Easy Pieces/pre-Witches of Eastwick period where he's still poised between being the new Marlon Brando and the pre-Jim Carrey he became in the '80s. It's a period piece, overly slavish to authentic detail, and who cares about LA's water? And who's idea was it to cast John Huston, who can't read a line properly?

What the last 3 generations don't understand, can never again understand, is that it's a movie theatre movie. It's the last breath of the old system, embracing all the beautiful and hard things that films used to do. It exploits, and even depends upon your confusion as it unravels. You listen and it doesn't talk much, in spite of its reputation as the most "writerly" of mid '70s screenplays. The dialogue, sets, cars, and clothes are high fashion, as if from the MGM studio era. Nothing is dirty or looks lived in. Even Faye Dunaway comes across as a starlet, groomed and modeled to be the site of our visual desire (indeed she was, having come off such films as "Bonnie and Clyde" and "The Thomas Crown Affair" in that mode). Even Huston is an echo back to Bogart (by way of "The Big Sleep" and "Treasure of Sierra Madre", which we in 1974 would have still known).

The film doesn't explode. It seethes. Audiences nowadays laugh at the "She's my daughter and my sister" bit, and don't laugh at Burt Young, a tension-reliever and breather as I remember the first time I saw it (in a rep theatre). The dialogue is full of exposition that doesn't sound or feel like it - you're getting information by osmosis. The central metaphor of the film, that dark heart of Gittes' past that will eventually and painfully have to be revisited, is as powerful as "Apocalypse Now"'s, but not nearly as flamboyant.

How do you convince someone that something so underwhelming is overwhelming in the sum of its parts? The film seems to me to be pitch perfect, and full of nuance that is too subtle, strangely and refreshingly European in tone, which makes sense considering Polanski was at the height of his power and game at this point. The film has a million details, but barely a set-piece or action sequence. Water comes out of a stormdrain. He walks around with a bandage on his nose for the 2nd half.

What today's generation also won't understand is that this is a Watergate movie. No doubt developed before those events came to light, it still captures a mood building in the country and culture. It's about corruption, and feeling like you're in over your head, and that nothing you can do matters. It's the opposite of "Casablanca," which is about the same things, but at the end of that Rick does to the right thing, and even preserves his own broken heart (a personal possession he values and probably can't live without). In "Chinatown," which both celebrates and eulogizes what LA has become and what it gave up to be that way, Polanski, Towne, and Robert Evans illuminate the last traces of possible decency, while demonstrating the highest level of craft that Hollywood was capable of.

It's a last gasp, in a dustbowl of despair, and came out the same year as "The Godfather II" and "Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia." Something was going on then. And audiences today can't see it.

I Love LA

In Thom Anderson's fascinating (and illegal) documentary "Los Angeles Plays Itself," he compiles hundreds of film clips that show Los Angeles, and builds a philosophy of how the city in which the vast majority of entertainment imagery and stories comes out of portrays itself.

Most of the subtext these films generate - from corrupt cops to smoggy flatlands to evil and unaffordable modernist houses up on the hills - isn't intentionally misleading or malicious. The films are motivated first by the need to be picturesque, then in reflecting the modes and means of production, easy to access or manage (financially or physically). The cheaper films will be set near Venice or the forgotten hills of deep LA downtown (Bunker Hill in the '20s and '30s).

Films with bigger budgets will position their villians on the hills overlooking the hills of Hollywood. And their heroes in a fashionable beachhouse - both no doubt for rent far beyond the pay their characters would afford, even in real life.

In Anderson's glorious cacaphony of appropriated clips - which is a self-created gordian's legal knot, no doubt not likely ever to be untangled or released - we are overwhelmed by what we recognize, what we don't, how much landscape, landmarks, fixtures and real life are in the periphery of every film ever made.

That LA (stubbornly "Los Angeles" to Anderson) is so memorable and recognizable is a testament to the unity in its apparent promiscuous appropriations of styles and fashions. There's a nostalgia infused in all of Los Angeles, with public works, bridge embankments, and neon signs high above 100-year-old hotels to remind us of previous times, glories, and periods that are, for one, not that far off. (Los Angeles and Hollywood are actually less than 100 years old - you may see old Chaplin films from the late teens and see that Sunset Blvd, the monster strip of today, was still a muddy street without curbs then.)

For two, its previous glories are documented. Well. We know the Roosevelt Hotel, and Bunker Hill, and the Santa Monica pier, and the Bradbury Building. The remnants remain, and are sometimes boarded up but not necessarily levelled. But then that leaves its own traces.

"Los Angeles Plays Itself" ends up documenting LA's combination of old nostalgic charm and misguided progress, gently and not maliciously butted up against each other, in conflict as the dramas of the day (whether it's paranoid class struggle in the '60s or corporate anxiety in the '90s). Much of it, although photographed well, isn't particularly photogenic - it's not gussied up to look as good as possible, because maybe it already has the power to provoke without it.

My main complaint with Anderson's collection, running at over 2 hours 45 minutes, is that it - wait for it - isn't long enough. He seems to begin in the late '30s and the vast majority of his clips are from the '80s and '90s. No death of material, but I would have liked to see how LA looked in the silent era, to really get a sense of how it built itself, and became the character before it eventually became, as Anderson demonstrates, the actual subject of much of these films.

The continuum continues. "Lakeview Terrace," "Collateral;" I can only imagine when someone tries to do this for New York. Or Chicago. Our relationship to a place has a lot to do with what others say about it. Los Angeles, with its history of outsiders coming in to comment on it, seems to be a good place to start.

I love LA - or, at least, what they show me of it in the movies.

Back Up

The long-reported and slow-in-coming massive digital roll-out in actual movie theatres has moved one important step closer this month. Five Hollywood studios have agreed to help defray the costs of installing digital projectors in as many as 20,000 movie theatres across the nation in the next couple of years.

(Story as reported by LA Times is at http://www.latimes.com/technology/la-fi-studios2-2008oct02,0,1993700.story, and also here.)

That's about half the screens out there. The costs will reach $1 billion. That's only one of the reasons that theatres weren't willing to jump from 35mm film to digital technology.

The studios love this. If 20,000 screens receive solely digital content, it can save the industry as much as $3 billion. A year. It costs money to make and ship all those prints of films. Especially when they only last in theatres a week or two.

A long time ago, before video, DVD, and the Internet, popular films would play a year or more in theatres. "Star Wars" in 1977 played an average of 10 months in theatres. "Revenge of the Sith," 30 years later, earned 75% of its $380m gross in 2 weeks, and was off 90% of its screens in 8 weeks.

The large theatre chains seem fine with all this - they'll receive a per-print fee of about $800 each to defray costs - presumably about as much as it costs the studios to develop, dupe, and ship a physical print the old-fashioned way.

This is a lie. It costs at least $3000 per print, by current insider estimates - the studios are short-changing the exhibitors.

(No word on how much it costs to create, duplicate, beam/upload, and manage a digital print, but presumably it's a lot cheaper. We "presume" only because there are no physical elements to create. The management of these prints will create new challenges however, as they are complicated digital assets that aren't created or behave like physical stable objects, including being more prone to electricity and magnetic fields, and allowing themselves to be duplicated for "free" if not properly protected.)

So the more digital you book the closer you are to paying for your d-projectors. And you won't have to pay that last 19-year-old kid to run the booth anymore, or make up and break down films. There won't be any more scratches on prints (assuming they last long enough to get scratched (and they do, they do...it only takes one showing)). Suddenly the math makes sense; it's likely to create a large installed user base of digital projection within just a few years.

AMC, Regal, and Cinemark will leave the smaller chains in the dust, who won't have access to the digital content Hollywood wants to offer. And will exclusively, probably before long. The bigger productions will favor the large chains that can squeeze the largest grosses out of the prints. (Studios won't need to be as promiscuous with print runs and clearances to get high grosses as they have been in the last 20 years, although with digital duplicates being "infinitely" duplicatable they still can be... as long as they keep installing more d-projs.)

Studios will also have more control over each copy before, during and after playdates (Digital projectors can be individually addressed, and "prints" can be locked. They'll know if someone at the theatre scheduled an extra midnight show and collected money without reporting it to the studio).

(People don't copy 35mm prints (they'd need an optical printer, illustrated above), they just show them without telling the bosses (see a previous post, "Fin de Cine" here). This began happening approximately 1 week after projecting film was invented, in 1898. Lot of people got rich this way (including some of the future heads of what would be the Hollywood studios in the '10s and '20s - they all began in exhibition and opened movie studios later). Digital "control" means studios don't have to remain concerned about what happens to the old 35mm prints because they no longer have to track physical assets they can't exploit, and frankly don't want to be bothered with storing.)

Hacking and copying, which has already moved away from the theatre level and now lives within the studios, will move closer to rocket science. Studios in one single swoop are both attempting to bottle and tempting the illegal duplicates devil with one technological carrot.

One minor problem not addressed is the maintenance. What do you do when your $80k+ projector - which has no moving parts, has no user-accessible panels, has highly-proprietary soft- and hard-ware, and hasn't been street-tested over 100 years like 35mm projectors have - goes kaput? You call the $200-an-hour technician, that's what. This is problematic. These machines aren't fool-proof.

A major problem will be with history. In the past there were upwards of 1000 (if not 4000) stable 35mm prints that would ensure some level of redundancy when looking to revisit a recent film. Digital films are ephemeral - you can't put your hands on it and store it safely away. Like all sophisticated computer files, it must be continuously upgraded, tested, re-formatted and in general baby-sat over the course of its life. How will you watch Zemeckis's 3-D version of "Beowulf" (assuming you will want to) in 10 years? The equipment it was created for (and on) is already obsolete, and unless someone spends money to upconvert it, it will become as lost as that Wordstar document you wrote back in 2001.

This is not a robust technology, nor likely to be a legacy one. "Beowulf", as well as the Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus 3-D concert film, "Best Of Both Worlds," are both important technological and historical chapters in the development of the new wave of digital exhibition. Yet they're already unavailable in the original format they were intended to be seen. (The blu-ray 3-d approximations are just that: approximations, technologically hobbled, and only emphasize the unexamined rush to overly baroque and expensive digital exhibition.)

Finally, the reliance on digital delivery will sacrifice timelessness for timeliness. Film, physical and stable, is transportable, over space and over time. Its standardization (as well as its high quality of image capture) is not something to be dismissed out of hand. Digital files are less flexible. The current "conversion" is gu-estimated to be paid for over 10 years. Do they really think the current digital standards and technology will stand still for that long?

Where will the next $10 billion come from when the current specs become obsolete? Oh, say, in about a year? I worked at an AMC with an obsolete digital projector that was only 16 months old sitting in the corner of the booth - the techs were taking pieces off it to jury-rig other newer projectors. A $100k+ boat anchor.

Which venues won't be updated and therefore obsolete, either "frozen" (doomed to show films produced before 2008) or unable to show anything (because they junked the 35mm projectors)? How many screens will close for lack of product?

What will audiences in the future support? What will be produced to take advantage of a new digital IMAX 3-D technological aesthetic? Which most agree is a technological fad itself?

Will it be able to watch it years later? In what form? A museum endowed with old 21st century "digital projection" machines, perhaps?

The exhibition film industry is going to be sorry for their short-sightedness. It won't last. There won't be any affordable back-ups.

What will be saved then?