It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.”
That’s an oft-heard refrain in the computer world, where programmers routinely trot out “improvements” that users experience as irritations and glitches.
The phrase came to mind a few weeks ago during CinemaCon, a confab of movie exhibitors in Las Vegas where Warner Bros. showed them 10 minutes of Peter Jackson’s hotly anticipated adaptation of “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.” As reports filtered out of Caesars Palace, no one was talking about Elijah Wood’s Frodo or Martin Freeman’s Bilbo or how the action and meaning of J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic fantasy had translated to the screen. Rather, the blogs were agog with news about a new 3-D digital format Jackson used to photograph “The Hobbit,” at a souped-up 48 frames per second — twice as fast as the usual 24 frames per second of conventional film.
One exhibitor present reportedly compared the look to a behind-the-scenes featurette; Variety reporter Josh L. Dickey wrote that the new format lacked the “cinematic glow of industry-standard 24 fps.” Although computer-generated characters were a “distinct presence,” he continued, “human actors seemed overlit and amplified in a way that many compared to modern sports broadcasts . . . and daytime television.”
But at least one film-lover in Vegas liked what he saw. The “Hobbit” footage, wrote online film columnist Jeffrey Wells on his Web site, Hollywood Elsewhere, was “like watching super high-def video, or without that filtered, painterly, brushstroke-y, looking-through-a-window feeling that feature films have delivered since forever.” The high frame rate, he continued, “removed the artistic scrim or membrane that separates the audience from the performers.”
In rhapsodizing about the heightened realism and sharpness of the “Hobbit” footage, Wells pointed out an aesthetic trend that, to many viewers raised on the grain and texture of film, looks like a bug is well on its way to becoming a feature.
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Video initially presented a threat to film studios, before they learned to leverage it, both in production and as an added revenue stream. In time, it seemed as though video might even save the cinematic medium itself, financially and creatively. In the documentary “Hearts of Darkness,” Francis Ford Coppola famously predicted that one day “some little fat girl in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart and make a beautiful film” with a video recorder. “The so-called professionalism of movies will be destroyed forever,” Coppola enthused. “And it will really become an art form.”
Art form or not, videotape clearly held equal attraction for big-fish studios and tiny-minnow indies, for the same reason: It’s cheap and easy. Forget the fat girl in Ohio — it was the fat cats in Hollywood who saw video as one way to keep spiraling costs down. Once it was digitized — and video was supplanted by computer technology — its aesthetic potential increased exponentially.
Digital image capture started gaining crucial toeholds in the 1990s, when respected cinematographers and directors began to embrace it. It was no surprise that such early technological adopters as George Lucas and James Cameron began evangelizing for digital. But cineastes took more serious note when in 2000 the revered Roger Deakins pioneered the use of the digital intermediate process — whereby a film is finished in digital form before going out to theaters — on no less than the tea-soaked, Depression-era throwback “O Brother, Where Art Thou?.”
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