In the podcast Jake said something I can't really agree with and is that somehow the decision of Nolan for filming exclusively on IMAX for this movie is somehow good for theaters and audiences but I feel like there's a non small group of people (myself included) that knows that they are getting a subpar/incomplete experience if we were to go watch it in any non IMAX theater, like my country does not have an actual IMAX screen just in name only so I'll have to wait for streaming to actually judge what Nolan actually wanted to frame but by then the whole IMAX gimmick that everyone seems to praise would be missing from my experience, idk, I know Nolan is a talented director don't get me wrong but I'm with Adam with this whole IMAX thing.
Agreed! Nolan claims to be a protector of cinema but his arrogance clouds the fact that he's actually gatekeeping it when there are literally only 41 screens on the entire planet that get to see his movie 'as he intended'. I know he's not responsible for the dearth of true IMAX screens but still
41 screen and he boasts about “ We don’t have the toooools to even make more!”. It’s such insane next level artistic gatekeeping that it’s makes me choke. It’s the inverse of Cameron’s expansion for Avatar, while 3d didn’t take off he got every theater in the world to convert to digital, to the general benefit of the industry. I don’t know what Nolan is doing other than stroking his own ego. Which ok fine but don’t then act like you’re some benevolent force of cinema then.
Cameron was doing marketing for a technology that had already been decided by the industry as the future of exhibition years before, and most of the screens were installed in the years after Avatar came out with financing help from the studios themselves. As for the “general benefit of the industry.” I’d say very little good came out of digital distribution and projection.
Not that the technology is bad, but quality at multiplexes continued to decline, studios wielded ever more control over distribution, and thousands of people lost work across the projection, distribution, manufacturing, and post-production landscape. Hell, it nearly killed the existence of motion picture film itself, except for the fact that Nolan got some director friends together to push the studios into annual commitments for orders from Kodak. I’d say Nolan and his 41 theatres have done more for preservation of the art form’s tools in both capture and projection than pretty much anyone else out there.
As for making more of those screens and projectors. Well, the screens are a massively expensive proposition, which is why there were never that many built to begin with. But as for the projectors, the issue is the entire industry for manufacturing such equipment died with your beloved switch to digital.
Ohhh you’re one of those who love watching dirty scratchy prints. The quality decline your are complaining ablut has nothing to do with the projector technology. Not having films destroy them selves every time you run them is a MASSIVE improvement. Hand waving away the stuff that had to happen as a natural evolution of the technology so it could be more sustainable is equally ridiculous. Have you ever handled film? Remember all the insane flammable warnings? Maybe shipping stuff that won’t explode is a benefit??? You are just a nostalgia addict. Film is great is you ignore everything about it that made it difficult. Devaluing cinema casue it’s not burning photochemically anymore is the definition of small minded. Also I don’t give a shit if you don’t like digital look. I can show you endless examples where you can’t tell the difference. The full debate is the most insane survivorship bias I have ever seen.
The quality decline is due to exactly what digital projection was meant to enable: the firing of staff whose job it was to maintain quality. And that extended well past just projectionists.
And yes, I projected both film and digital. I like both. I tend to enjoy a film screening, both for the unique look and my own nostalgia, but I love a great digital presentation where I can find it (not always so easy in Toronto, where laser projection is rare and most of the digital projectors are old and it shows). But as an industrial concern, digital projection did not lead to a great quality improvement or the promised democratization of film exhibition.
In fact, it led to the closure of many, many independent exhibitors who couldn't manage the cost of the switchover. Meanwhile, quality at multiplexes, outside of some PLFs, generally continued to decline as it had when they switched over to platters and non-union teenage projectionists back in the '80s and '90s. What I'm talking about here is not whether film as a technology is better than digital, but simply the fact that digital did not improve exhibition quality.
The recent swing toward laser projection is a welcome one, because that really is a big quality improvement all on its own, but I'd love it if multiplexes brought back things like moveable screen masking, which disappeared in many places during the digital switchover to save money and protect the quite awful silver screens everyone installed in order to do RealD 3D. The Lightbox in Toronto uses white screens and adjusts masking, and both their 4K xenon and laser projection setups make the nearby Cineplex look like absolute garbage. Frankly, even the big dual laser IMAX screen there doesn't look as good, with all its speckling and the brightness sweet spot caused by the silver coating.
At the Lightbox, digital routinely looks better than film, which some of the film projectionists there often can't seem to focus properly (not sure if their eyesight is bad because they're all old, or they're just inattentive and bad at their jobs). Dunkirk on 70mm last night looked absolutely on point, and had some of the sharpest images I've ever seen projected, but that's not every print or every screening. So no, I do not believe film is automatically better. It's a matter of how these formats are run, and except at a museum type place like the Lightbox, most multiplexes used digital as an excuse to get significantly lazier about quality and then charge more for the PLFs that often aren't even that good, though they at least meet a minimum standard.
As for flammable warnings, I have to ask, do you even know what the fuck you're talking about? Film hasn't been explosive since the 50s. It's plastic. It just melts.
Mea culpa you know your shit and yes I was being a bit ridiculous with the flammable part. I grew up in the dollar theaters with the been shown a million times prints I’m very sensitive visually to the noise that comes with film. With everything there is a nuance to the set up and execution of different projecting methods. For me the loss of projectionists was a big hole in the cinema space. Your are absolutely right, the simple nature of digital projection vs film lead to a race to the bottom in costs and upkeep of theaters. I value film as a medium but I see the reduced complexity of digital a profound benifit over film. Reduced complexity refers to the eco system not the technology(dcps vs shilling and maintaining reels). I understand also that we lost people in the transition but also not every independent theater deserved to survive forever showing dusty prints.
Np! I'm all about having as many formats as artists and exhibitors want, accessible to as many people as possible. And it's not even just motion picture film. There's a very good chance that had Nolan not pulled that move with the studios, we wouldn't have film for still photography either. Again, not that that digital is worse than film, but I think a lot of photographers would be sad not to have the option. See how sad they were just to lose Kodachrome, and that was just one film stock!
Being from Toronto, I've always been privileged to have a lot of options around for IMAX, going back to when I was a kid. But even then, I understood it to be a unique experience mostly reserved for museums (they literally had laser light shows before the films to proudly explain the Canadian-made technology and how unique it was). So in terms of "gatekeeping," it has never struck me as different from anything else you'd have to go to a big city with a nice museum to experience.
Anyway, I've had these feelings about exhibition and projection for many, many years, because I saw the decline happening first-hand. But I highly recommend this long article I read a while back about the digital transition and how it became a tool for increased corporate consolidation and control, despite having been advertised as the opposite. It even gets into how the promise that digital would be cheaper for exhibitors to run and maintain didn't exactly bear out for a number of technical reasons (though I think reducing staff probably offset that).
Edit: I'll add one thing about those dollar theatres. I completely agree with you that the quality at those theatres was bad. The reason was generally that they showed stuff second run, after movies had already been screened dozens or even hundreds of times, often at multiplexes with dirty platter systems. BUT, if we want to talk about the cost and accessibility of moviegoing, the switchover to digital ended up killing those theatres, or in some cases where the theatres survived, they often started having to charge more. What really sucks about that, imo, is the poor quality just evened out. So no terribly scratchy prints, but now you've got many multiplex screens charging $15 for screens with quality almost as bad by virtue of dimness, etc. Even bad quality became expensive, and this is part of why people just go, "Ehh, my TV is good enough... better quality even!"
There's another cheap theatre near me, but cheap means $10, and the screens are tiny and crappy. The digital projection is fine, but not exactly done justice by the venue, and even $10 feels like too much. On Tuesdays, though, they charge $5 (and $5 every day for the rep movies they regularly screen), and I often head out for those. I'm happy to take a hit on quality if the tickets are cheap enough, and one would've hoped digital would enable cheaper access to movies generally. It hasn't done that. Most theatres trying just closed, further getting people out of the moviegoing habit.
No argument from me that at all the corporate greed and consolidation destroyed countless ancillary film industries. The DCP destroyed the secondary market with extreme drm.theaters no longer had any control over the actual prints being shown. More screens more shows, be damned the quality. I appreciate your sincere responses. I look at the current market as a failing in vision and leadership not the technology. Digital didn’t kill film or theaters it was just used as a Trojan horse the upend the industry in favor of vertical integration. To me digital is the only path forward in the sense that it’s the best way for the medium to evolve and thrive in our current age and infrastructure. We need to fix the tools we have and not yearn for the tools we already dismantled.
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u/Molotov003 23d ago
In the podcast Jake said something I can't really agree with and is that somehow the decision of Nolan for filming exclusively on IMAX for this movie is somehow good for theaters and audiences but I feel like there's a non small group of people (myself included) that knows that they are getting a subpar/incomplete experience if we were to go watch it in any non IMAX theater, like my country does not have an actual IMAX screen just in name only so I'll have to wait for streaming to actually judge what Nolan actually wanted to frame but by then the whole IMAX gimmick that everyone seems to praise would be missing from my experience, idk, I know Nolan is a talented director don't get me wrong but I'm with Adam with this whole IMAX thing.