The Way of the Present: Adventures in Digital Projection
Know your enemy, right? I think it was either Machiavelli or Rage Against the Machine who said that. Anyway, these days I’m apt to inveigh against the in-progress paradigm shift of digital projection in movie theaters — the method of exhibition by which movies are screened from digital files rather than 35mm film prints. My rejection of the rejection of film: is this an aesthetic preference? An ideological stance? An emotional attachment? All of the above, but never mind that. Point is, I realized my actual experience with digital projection was too limited for truly authoritative inveighing. I needed to spend some time in the trenches.
My battleground for the day (done with the dumb war metaphor now, I promise) was Chicago’s AMC River East, the 21-screen multiplex sandwiched between the Mag Mile and Navy Pier. In prelapsarian times, when no format-related research was required before going to the movies, the River East was the ideal venue for an idyllic day of theater-hopping: for the price of one ticket you could see (e.g.) some loud superhero blockbuster, a Sundance-feted indie drama and the new Woody Allen movie, all with top-notch projection and sound, stadium seating, and, of course, the sweet emulsion of rich, creamy film. But this summer, my beloved River East — with its impossibly cheesy murals of some jerk’s idea of “classic” movie iconography, including images from The Mask and Charlie’s Angels — became the latest domino to fall: all digital, all screens, all the time. Film need not apply.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. The digital revolution has obviously been going pretty strong for, uh, most of my lifetime. Godfrey Cheshire predicted the extinction of film as an analog medium twelve years ago in his landmark essay “Death of Film/Decay of Cinema,” and that prediction wasn’t even a salient point of the essay; it was the premise. But I still feel like this is happening too quickly. Can’t it be part of the same theoretical, fantastical future as hoverboards and the colonization of Mars? Can we turn back the clock on this anti-cinema, anti-beauty trend that renders all images, no matter how lovingly crafted, as mere information?
I guess I came to the River East for a reality check: nope, there’s no turning back. I hadn’t been in several months, refusing to support the switch, so this was a homecoming of sorts. Ah, even the box office display had beefed up its digital muscle: instead of a simple listing of film titles and showtimes, I was now faced with a busy, garish LCD screen filled with graphics and color. I’d selected two movies that I was vaguely interested in seeing, but not so interested that I would feel deprived if the digital experience turned out to be excessively shitty: Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark and The Guard — a low-expectations double feature. Sitting down for Dark, I was horrified at the flat, pixelated look of the trailers. On-screen text is a particular giveaway. Ugh, I might as well have been watching this shit on YouTube. (One of the frustrations of digital projection is that, unless you have world enough and time to see every film in both formats, you never know exactly what’s being lost. “Is that really supposed to look like that?” is a question I asked myself more than once on this excursion.) But my hostility diminished as the feature got underway. The distraction of the lesser format never entirely departed, but you know, after a point, you’re just watching a movie. This proved even truer, distressingly, when I hopped over to The Guard. My eyes were adjusting. My inner monologue started having less to do with the travesty of digital projection and more to do with what was actually happening on screen. I’d become, temporarily, one of them: the people who don’t give a shit.
But I do give a shit. The essence of cinema has something to do with a beam of light and a projector and reels of film. (It’s still real to me, dammit.) That I was able to sorta-barely-almost overcome my resistance for the duration of a couple of mediocre movies is proof not that the scourge isn’t a scourge, but that it’s an insidious scourge. My commitment to the cause is hereby renewed. When the holy light of cinematic truth and beauty that is Contagion comes out next weekend, I am sure as hell going to see it on film, even if I have to drive to Wisconsin. (Which, thankfully, I won’t; there are still a few film-friendly ‘plexes here, plus of course the arthouses, though even there film is no longer an absolute certainty.)
It’s possible I’m being unreasonably stubborn. Will aesthetes of the future look back upon the likes of me as visionless reactionaries who just didn’t get it? You never know. It occurs to me that the first generation of moviegoers with no ingrained sense of celluloid texture are probably already old enough to see R-rated movies without their parents, or at least to sneak into them. This sort of bothers me, but mainly I’m concerned about myself and my own access to film projection. Younger generations won’t really know what they’re missing, after all, but I will. I can’t accept digital projection as the way of the present, only as the way of the future. Which, hey: maybe that’s what Leo’s crazed Howard Hughes was raving about at the end of The Aviator. And maybe what drove him bonkers was the secret knowledge that this particular “future” had already arrived.
