The Auteur as Gearhead

The new medium is promising, nevertheless, and in ways that transcend economics. One of Broderick’s trump cards is a litany of ”established filmmakers, guys who could easily get money to shoot in more conventional ways, who are choosing to shoot digitally for creative reasons“: Eric Rohmer (at 79), Arturo Ripstein (at 55), Tom Noonan, Gus Van Sant, Antonia Bird, Peter Greenaway, Spike Lee, Wim Wenders, Harmony Korine, Hal Hartley, Jon Jost, John McNaughton, and Mike Figgis -- all have made or are currently at work on DV features. Some of these projects embrace DV as the fulfillment of the sardonic ”Dogme 95“ vow of cinematic chastity forged by the mad Danes Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg. Artists are going digital, Broderick says, in order to ”make films on their own terms, without having to get permission or approval from anyone.“

Grover Crisp, vice president for asset management and film restoration at Sony Pictures, has introduced many traditional film-oriented cinematographers to the digital tools, in order to use those tools to restore scratched or faded film images while creating new digitally produced negatives. The digital mastering of films for new, demanding home-video formats like DVD and HDTV has turned many avowed ”film people“ into DV converts because of the opportunity to further define the ”finished“ film.

”Feature films often look different on DVD than they did in the theater,“ Crisp explains, ”because what was projected -- a print from an internegative made from an interpositive made from the original negative -- doesn‘t always reflect the filmmakers’ intentions. Electronic formats allow directors and cinematographers to control things they can‘t control on film, where the variables in color tones, contrast and density are less precise because of the nature of traditional laboratory processing. This is their chance to go in and say, ’Okay, this is what I really wanted to do.‘ They may come in with an almost romantic attachment to film, but often it’s the manipulated digital image that ends up being closer to what they had in mind.“

Res magazine‘s touring DV film festival, ResFest ’99, rolls into Los Angeles on Wednesday, November 10, with screenings at the Egyptian, the Writers Guild and the Directors Guild theaters. Call (310) 641-8932 for information.

In Part Two: What‘s in store? How the digital cinema of the near future will look and feel.