SCFZ

Personally, I can usually tell you if what is shown is a 35mm print, a 16mm print, an 8mm print, a 70mm print, or something digital. But I couldn't tell you for sure if what you are seeing is a projected DVD, a Blu-ray a 2K DCP a 4K DCP or whatnot. That is, if it's not "obvious" because of the different quality.

But I've worked as a film projectionist (analogue and digital) for many years, so this is already a bit of "specialized" knowledge ("seeing"), I guess.

There is already a huge difference between how a 35mm acetate print looks (and is projected) to a 35mm nitrate print, for example.
So there are many many many possibilities to "view" and project movies throughout film history.

And that's only the visual side of it. You also have the sound (which is a world to itself, but no less important).

A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY is going to be playing for one screening at BAM, and I'm hoping I'll be able to make it.

Thanks wba. Such a lot of information! Great! I must say, I'm still none the wiser for it, but the main thing is that I still enjoyed the version of The Cranes are Flying I saw on the big screen last November.

No problem pabs. It's really a wide subject, and I only started to get a bit into it, when I started to work at a cinema, do the programming, write the film texts and look into the projection room every now and then.
But even your regular projectionist (even in the days of film prints) doesn't know that much about the subject, cause as far as I know the schooling for this kind of job isn't offered anymore around the world (or only in very few places). In West Germany, I believe, you couldn't get a proper education as a cinema projectionist from the late 70s onwards. Before that I think it was some 2 to 3 years of schooling.

Here's a little intro on wikipedia, if you're interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_stock

it's 105F and i'm watching rockers (1978) w/gregory isaacs, burning spear, big youth, dillinger



IRIE

wba wrote: ↑Tue Jul 09, 2019 1:03 pmIn West Germany, I believe, you couldn't get a proper education as a cinema projectionist from the late 70s onwards.

Can you imagine being a film projectionist in West Germany in the late 70s? Driving up and down the border, fixing projectors, poopin'.

bure420 wrote: ↑Thu Jul 11, 2019 12:32 am

wba wrote: ↑Tue Jul 09, 2019 1:03 pmIn West Germany, I believe, you couldn't get a proper education as a cinema projectionist from the late 70s onwards.

Can you imagine being a film projectionist in West Germany in the late 70s? Driving up and down the border, fixing projectors, poopin'.

Well, I'm sure it wasn't anything like Wenders imagined... (thank god).

pabs wrote: ↑Tue Jul 09, 2019 1:01 pm Thanks wba. Such a lot of information! Great! I must say, I'm still none the wiser for it, but the main thing is that I still enjoyed the version of The Cranes are Flying I saw on the big screen last November.

If you want to read something about experiencing the pleasure of original film prints on the screen as described by a newbie, here's a great article: http://sensesofcinema.com/2019/feature- ... and-white/

all the things he describes should actually be elementary for film lovers, but are seldom taught and (thus) difficult to learn by oneself. He even writes about being surprised by different aspect ratios at one point.

One of the funniest sentences is "I had seen Road House on DVD not long before the Dryden Theatre screening of the UCLA Archive print, but in so many ways the viewing experience was enhanced through the medium of nitrate." But this is sadly the state of film studies and the state of cinephilia we live in.

When I was studying art history at the university, all the professors told us that we had to go to the museum and look at the paintings. Looking at the pictures in your book on Picasso or finding his "work" on the web wasn't enough.
But in film studies classes we got shown VHS copies of John Ford movies, and nobody cared...

I think your university teachers would laugh at you in art history classes, if you'd say you had seen all Picassos, cause you have looked extensively at his work on the web. But if you told your film studies teacher you'd seen all films by John Ford, he probably wouldn't even ask you if you've watched them at home, but would instead compliment you and probably single you out as an exemplary student. And I wouldn't be surprised if the teacher had written a phD thesis on Ford but had never actually seen an original film print of one of Ford's films properly projected at a cinema.

The old saying that filmmaking is painting with light or Godard's version of film being 50% picture and 50% sound are truisms - but many film enthusiasts probably still think such simple facts are poetic expressions or metaphors of some kind.

It's all quite ridiculous (a bit like watching Trump doing politics), if it weren't so sad.

wba wrote: ↑Thu Jul 11, 2019 10:46 am I think your university teachers would laugh at you in art history classes, if you'd say you had seen all Picassos, cause you have looked extensively at his work on the web. But if you told your film studies teacher you'd seen all films by John Ford, he probably wouldn't even ask you if you've watched them at home, but would instead compliment you and probably single you out as an exemplary student.

This means I've not truly seen more than 10 of the great movies, and maybe even none at all, since digital versions don't count as "seeing the real thing" either, and I'm not even sure which of the classics I saw on the big screen were digital.

I strongly agree with you, wba, about the significance of watching movies, on film prints, in a theatre, being a vital experience and one sometimes undervalued in academia. That said, only sometimes. Academia can often also be the last refuge for caring about that stuff. Many big film schools have their own film archives and purposely have theatres set up to show films from their celluloid holdings. The Italian cinema course I took last year included multiple screenings of 16mm prints of neorealist classics and much exhortation to value celluloid over digital as the original format the films traveled in.

All that said, I would defend doing scholarly work on the basis of home video viewings. It depends what you're interested in. If you're interested in pictorial values, then nitrate matters and you're totally right. But if you're interested in studying, say, the representation of the cavalry in the films of John Ford, watching them in digital transfers at home strikes me as perfectly legitimate as a means to produce a PhD or attain scholarly knowledge. I can think of no student in the history of cinema studies who has seen all of the surviving films of John Ford in original format celluloid prints; before home video and computers it was TV screenings or viewings on archival library flatbed editors or downgraded 16mm prints at film societies. In short, if a student or peer of mine had seen all of the films of John Ford that is very impressive, irrespective of how they saw them. In any case, people in academia aren't always wanting to write about visual artistry, we might be interested in charting the representation of an idea across a body of films, and home video makes that work much easier (e.g. the ability to freeze frame and take screenshots, the ability to time shot lengths, the ability to rewatch a film six times without paying for a projectionist, etc.). I guess, for me, the comparison is more to books than paintings; I still read a book even if my text copy is a reprint in a new font and new paper.

Evelyn wrote: ↑Thu Jul 11, 2019 3:51 pmI guess, for me, the comparison is more to books than paintings; I still read a book even if my text copy is a reprint in a new font and new paper.

I agree with your larger point, but I think the better analogy would be between literature in its original language and literature in translation. Thinking of classical novels (and not graphic novels or poetry, say), I don't think many would argue that font or paper choice conveys much of the essence of the work. But word choice creates the tone, texture, vividness of a novel, and those things can be largely preserved or lost in translation, just as the quality of the film image can be lost when film is translated to digital or video. Some works survive that translation well and some not, depending partly on the translation itself, and partly on what's essential about the original work.

My background is in music, and it's interesting to compare how people discuss film and how they discuss music when it comes to this kind of translation. If someone had heard all of Brahms but only on recordings, I don't think anyone in music would make a claim analogous to WBA's claim about seeing John Ford on a laptop -- almost no one would say "you haven't heard Brahms unless you've heard his pieces in concert". One essential feature of the classical music repertoire is that it's always experienced in translation; unavoidably the music is interpreted by the conductor and performers. And that contributes to the richness of our experience of classical music works; new interpretations let us experience a piece in new ways, and they constantly revitalize familiar works. In classical music, there is no such thing as a "definitive version" of a piece, or a unique way a piece should be experienced. But I often hear people argue that film can only be experienced in one way, in a theater on its original film stock.

But it's maybe interesting to think about film and music in the same way, that is, to think about translating film to digital or video as a kind of reinterpretation. Some films will lose a lot when reinterpreted that way. But in other cases, when we take less interest in the texture of the image, we might focus more on thematic or formal choices, say, and might be more likely to discover other things in a film that aren't so dependent on the quality of the image.

The translation analogy came to mind at first, but there's a more clear parallel of translation with films in the translation of the spoken or intertitled language, which I guess is why I went to the way its printed. But I agree printing is perhaps a touch too insignificant to work as analogy here. The music analogy is an interesting one, I could definitely see that. There are choices someone is having to make about colour grading etc. that feel akin to the choices a conductor is making.

pabs wrote: ↑Thu Jul 11, 2019 3:19 pm

wba wrote: ↑Thu Jul 11, 2019 10:46 am I think your university teachers would laugh at you in art history classes, if you'd say you had seen all Picassos, cause you have looked extensively at his work on the web. But if you told your film studies teacher you'd seen all films by John Ford, he probably wouldn't even ask you if you've watched them at home, but would instead compliment you and probably single you out as an exemplary student.

This means I've not truly seen more than 10 of the great movies, and maybe even none at all, since digital versions don't count as "seeing the real thing" either, and I'm not even sure which of the classics I saw on the big screen were digital.

If we're talking about older, 20th century movies, then yes, this could be the case. But instead of seeing that bas something bad, I would suggest you could adopt another perspective much easier: if you have already enjoyed these films in a different form, think how much you might love them, if encountered in something closer to its original state. So actually, you have so much great stuff before you, so much yet to discover, in a field, were previously you might have thought you had already "seen what there is to see".

If we're talking about newer digital film (the era we actually live in) you've probably seen lots of films the way you were "supposed" to. Digital has its own kind of allure, its own logic its own beauty.
Too bad, many current filmmakers still try to imitate "film" with digital means, instead of embracing digital for what it is. Look for example at a Godard film from the past 10 to 20 years to see the astounding possibilities and creative energies that focusing on the digital at hand can yield. And there are so many iterations and transmutations of "the digital", probably already many more than we ever had with celluloid film.

Evelyn wrote: ↑Thu Jul 11, 2019 3:51 pm I strongly agree with you, wba, about the significance of watching movies, on film prints, in a theatre, being a vital experience and one sometimes undervalued in academia. That said, only sometimes. Academia can often also be the last refuge for caring about that stuff. Many big film schools have their own film archives and purposely have theatres set up to show films from their celluloid holdings. The Italian cinema course I took last year included multiple screenings of 16mm prints of neorealist classics and much exhortation to value celluloid over digital as the original format the films traveled in.

All that said, I would defend doing scholarly work on the basis of home video viewings. It depends what you're interested in. If you're interested in pictorial values, then nitrate matters and you're totally right. But if you're interested in studying, say, the representation of the cavalry in the films of John Ford, watching them in digital transfers at home strikes me as perfectly legitimate as a means to produce a PhD or attain scholarly knowledge. I can think of no student in the history of cinema studies who has seen all of the surviving films of John Ford in original format celluloid prints; before home video and computers it was TV screenings or viewings on archival library flatbed editors or downgraded 16mm prints at film societies. In short, if a student or peer of mine had seen all of the films of John Ford that is very impressive, irrespective of how they saw them. In any case, people in academia aren't always wanting to write about visual artistry, we might be interested in charting the representation of an idea across a body of films, and home video makes that work much easier (e.g. the ability to freeze frame and take screenshots, the ability to time shot lengths, the ability to rewatch a film six times without paying for a projectionist, etc.). I guess, for me, the comparison is more to books than paintings; I still read a book even if my text copy is a reprint in a new font and new paper.

I don't think film prints are sometimes undervalued in academia, but moreover always undervalued in any study of cinema of any kind. We haven't come anywhere near the actual appraisal and understanding of the materiality of working on films, which we for example have in other visual arts. When I was studyying art history, I can tell you a completely other world opened itself up, a world where is perfectly natural to speak about the quality of the canvas, the brushes, the different techniques of mixing color, let alone the texture of a brush stroke or the nuances of color applied. In contrast I haven't met that many scholars who actually talk about different types of cameras, of lenses, of different kinds of cinema screens for different kinds of 70mm or 3D films (an essential part of film experience at the cinema), of techniques in laboratories developing film, etc. etc. etc. Even the more obvious and simple stuff, like the characteristics of 8mm when compared to that of 16mm film stock or how different colors from different color processes are aesthetically used by filmmakers, like a general comparison of Agfacolor with Technicolor, etc. All of that stuff is coming on slowly and more or less only recently, whereas "social issues" or issues from other parts of the humanities (as you said for example "the representation of cavalry in the films of John Ford") have been discussed and examined much much much more often.

But whereas the representaiton of cavalry in a handful of movies is a pretty abstract concept, whose theoretical concepts basically comes from other contexts than that of the moving image as such (when filming people and representing human actions on film is just a partial and decidedly minor factor in film - and all art in general), whereas movement, lighting, camerawork, to an extent even colors and sound and whatnot is basically always there, is a given, is actually the body and soul from which all other considerations merely spring forth, so to speak.

It always depends on what you are interested in, but shouldn't it be somehow logical that what people would be first and foremost interested in a audiovisual work was exactly the visual and aural, the "pictorial values" as you say?

I don't really get your comparison to books, cause I have a limited set of visuals and don't have any sound when confronted with a book. All I have is the graphic design of paper, the binding and such and the design of words on paper, which more often than not seems like the outer packaging of the actual work of art itself, like we have posters and trailers and stuff for movies (which are worthwhile in itself, as is the sleeve of a book, but which don't have an inherent connection to the work of art on display). When it comes to the words themselves, they could in effect be printed in any type but still retain the "same" kind of meaning for the same reader whereas the meaning gets changed more radically in film if you change the color, the texture, the sounds, etc. cause they themselves already "are" the art, are part of the meaning. They cannot be simply put aside.

flip wrote: ↑Thu Jul 11, 2019 4:44 pm

Evelyn wrote: ↑Thu Jul 11, 2019 3:51 pmI guess, for me, the comparison is more to books than paintings; I still read a book even if my text copy is a reprint in a new font and new paper.

I agree with your larger point, but I think the better analogy would be between literature in its original language and literature in translation. Thinking of classical novels (and not graphic novels or poetry, say), I don't think many would argue that font or paper choice conveys much of the essence of the work. But word choice creates the tone, texture, vividness of a novel, and those things can be largely preserved or lost in translation, just as the quality of the film image can be lost when film is translated to digital or video. Some works survive that translation well and some not, depending partly on the translation itself, and partly on what's essential about the original work.

My background is in music, and it's interesting to compare how people discuss film and how they discuss music when it comes to this kind of translation. If someone had heard all of Brahms but only on recordings, I don't think anyone in music would make a claim analogous to WBA's claim about seeing John Ford on a laptop -- almost no one would say "you haven't heard Brahms unless you've heard his pieces in concert". One essential feature of the classical music repertoire is that it's always experienced in translation; unavoidably the music is interpreted by the conductor and performers. And that contributes to the richness of our experience of classical music works; new interpretations let us experience a piece in new ways, and they constantly revitalize familiar works. In classical music, there is no such thing as a "definitive version" of a piece, or a unique way a piece should be experienced. But I often hear people argue that film can only be experienced in one way, in a theater on its original film stock.

But it's maybe interesting to think about film and music in the same way, that is, to think about translating film to digital or video as a kind of reinterpretation. Some films will lose a lot when reinterpreted that way. But in other cases, when we take less interest in the texture of the image, we might focus more on thematic or formal choices, say, and might be more likely to discover other things in a film that aren't so dependent on the quality of the image.

Yeah, thanks for expanding on that analogy between literature and film flip. As you translate a words from one language to another, something new is created and something original is lost. it's pretty much the same with translating film from say 35mm to 16mm or from 4k to SD, let alone from celluloid to digital, which would be analogous to translating poetry to prose - like if you are trying to translate an old nitrate film onto 4K digital technologies you are trying to translate the language of Shakespeare from the 16th century to the language used in Great britain in the 21st.

I'd personally say the music analogy applies perfectly to the "audio" part of any motion picture. You have good recordings and you have bad recordings, you have different kinds of mastering and authoring, if you translate an optical soundtrack or a magnetic one to a digital file format, etc. etc. Also the audio of a film, (the sounds, noises, the score, etc. is like an orchestral composition, and has basically to be orchestrated as well as conducted by someone as well).

There are often really a plenitude of artists from different artistic strata working on a film (see also architecture and design and make-up and clothing, etc.)

But in music you have different interpretors of Brahms, for exampler, whereas in visual art you haven't (a tradition) of any such thing, cause there isn't a written thing to relate to. The screenplay isn't anywhere in the same league as thze lyrics in a song, let alone something like sheet music. We don't have different artists, different "instrumentalists" interpreting say the works of John Ford or Akira Kurosawa, we don't have different cameramen all trying to re-shoot Citizen Kane for example.

So the analogy with interpreting classical musical pieces in concert (or on recordings) would rather be that of the stage (which in itself has little in common with cinema as we know it), where different directors and actors interpret classical plays, or how different singers interpret a song, similar to how different comedians interpret a sketch or a stand-up routine. You have the sound of music coming from an instrument played by an individual, as you have the sound of words coming from the mouth of an individual actor. And you have the conductor as you have the director for the theater stage.

Film, as we know it, in my opinion, is essentially something very different to any of that.

PS: I'd say remakes of a certain kind get somewhat into the tradition you describe with (classical) music, whereas a filmmaker refers to a previous film (instead of another source material, like a book or a screenplay) and tries to remake it in his own vision, something like the two Suspiria films, or the two Psychos, the first two versions of Ben Hur from the 20s and 50s, the first Rambo and its turkish reimagining, the exorcist and its turkish remake, etc. The concept itself can be(come) misleading though, when the initial film isn't of interest but an underlying idea or another property (as I said when the basis is merely the "same" screenplay", or another lirerary source or something else). Though it's all probably more akin to playing Monteverdi with Renaissance instruments or playing him with rather more modern ones, which would somewhat be the analogy to different technical equipment and film stock for film remakes from different decades.

wba wrote: ↑Fri Jul 12, 2019 7:36 am But whereas the representaiton of cavalry in a handful of movies is a pretty abstract concept, whose theoretical concepts basically comes from other contexts than that of the moving image as such (when filming people and representing human actions on film is just a partial and decidedly minor factor in film - and all art in general), whereas movement, lighting, camerawork, to an extent even colors and sound and whatnot is basically always there, is a given, is actually the body and soul from which all other considerations merely spring forth, so to speak.

It always depends on what you are interested in, but shouldn't it be somehow logical that what people would be first and foremost interested in a audiovisual work was exactly the visual and aural, the "pictorial values" as you say?

I'm interested in form but rarely for its own sake, rather I'm interested in form insofar as it bears on the content, which does interest me. My interests are, some would say, interdisciplinary: I'm interested in philosophy and history, and I like movies as an entryway to talk about those other things, through the movie's historical documentation or thematic content. All that said, I think it's reductive to say that form is the body and soul, the only given and the only logical foremost interest, in a moving image. Moving images always (always? certainly almost always) have content too. There can be a performer, words, representation of race or gender, a filming location and time, there's wind in the trees, etc. All of that isn't coming from other contexts, it's part of the moving image itself. John Ford isn't just filming with particular movement, lighting, camerawork, etc. He's filming the American cavalry. And that choice of subject, like the American landscape painters before him, is a choice Ford's making that's really important to him and one that informs his formal choices. Just as you benefit from certain level of understanding of form for understanding content, you benefit from a certain understanding of content to understand a work's form. It's a choice to say that a John Ford film is an "audiovisual work" and, thus, the logical focus would be audio and visuals. Someone with different interests might say that a John Ford film is a "work of American military propaganda" and, thus, the logical focus would be the representation of the American military. To my mind, a John Ford film is a work that can be described and approached various ways, and the primary logic governing how to approach it is the student's interests.

Well, I can't say I really agree, but of course everyone has different interests and entry points. Personally, I couldn't care less about "content" as you describe it, cause for me form is content, or content comes only as and through an expression of the form. I'm a materialist, so I'd say I can only hear a voice because it's produced by the body and the air and such, and I can only see the cavalry in a film, cause my mind interprets the form, the colors and shapes as the cavalry. For me, thus, it seems "natural" that what comes first, is the most interesting thing. Like if a child sees a shape, only when he gets explained that it's a horse, it becomes a horse, and when he learns what a cavalry is this horse might become part of a cavalry. The one evolves out of the other. But I'm not an intellectual, so I don't really understand the more abstract interests (as primary interests, that is) by people.

I don't think there is any form for its own sake. Form exists as we make sense of it. We already and automatically interpret it. If we could see differently we might see atoms or molecules or whatnot. And I think film actually teaches you to see (foremost physically not intellectually) differently (like Vertov once proclaimed), and furthermore makes this difference of experience comparatively easy to access, if you're open and receptive.

I'd agree insofar as film is philosophy (in my opinion a moving image already presents/posits a philosophical discourse in itself, through itself) and history (as a material artifact, that is - when viewed/projected, film is rather the present, a hyper-actualized past, where the past becomes the present and completely sheds it's being "history", whereas we don't so much experience "history" as the now, but the present is changed by the past. similar to how a thought is always the present, even when we think about and change the past through our thoughts, and the history inscribed in the body cannot but be and become the present, constantly, as much as my current breathing denotes my present, my being in the now of each breath).

But I personally tend to dislike film (or any art) as an entryway to talk about other things, rather than an entryway into the artwork itself.

PS: That's where my problem with academia in its treatment of film probably stems from, cause I don't see that much of people actually engaging with the work as a work of art, than seeing them using film and films as (often very lazy and actually forgettable) springboards for other concepts and ideas - which is in my opinion simply a waste of time, and stems from the need in humanities to "ground" your theories somehow or to make them seemingly "attractive" or "accessible", cause "pure" theorizing seems a task too difficult (or maybe boring?) for many.

ima watch some Fregonese (The Raid, 1954)

upvigilant wrote: ↑Sun Jul 14, 2019 10:56 pm ima watch some Fregonese (The Raid, 1954)

Excellent movie! Apache drums is even better

I'm seeing Apocalypse Now: Final Cut at the cinema this Thursday.

today I'm gonna watch Mensch ohne Namen (1932) directed by Gustav Ucicky, a version of the tale Le Comt Chabert by Balzac, after that the first episode of the TV series The Red Road (2014), cause it was directed by James Gray, then I'll watch Sunset Motel (2003) a film by Eckhart Schmidt on which I want to write a piece of film criticism, and finally, I'm gonna try and finish The Beloved Rogue (1927), directed by Alan Crosland, the first hour of which I have already watched on August 1st. A tight schedule for today after work, but I'm confident that I'm gonna manage it.

Where's Karl?

kanafani wrote: ↑Sun Jul 14, 2019 11:19 pm

upvigilant wrote: ↑Sun Jul 14, 2019 10:56 pm ima watch some Fregonese (The Raid, 1954)

Excellent movie! Apache drums is even better

This is why SCFZ is the greatest film site on the internet

M Penalosa!!

Karl is having some more fun in the eastern parts of europe I suppose, making subtitles and stuff, so he only occasionally visits here.

On another (Fregonese) note: a friend of mine here in Germany, whom I first met 3 or 4 years ago at a local film festival, gave me a monologue of about half an hour on the incredible greatness of Fregonese and his work, after I had initially replied that I had seen only one or two films by Hugo and didn't have an opinion on his work. Must have been one of the first things we "talked" about.

Seeing the final cut thing of APOCALYPSE NOW tomorrow night. Fingers crossed.

i'm gonna watch the wild angels have we done a corman poll yet

were motorcycle gangs the original alt-right that almost makes sense