I won’t claim to be a cinematographer or filmmaker, nor do I claim to know anything about the making of a movie down to the very bones of how you shoot it and what you shoot it on. However, I do know one thing, and that’s how much I love anything shot on film. Despite it being less advanced or less practical (depending who you ask) than digital shooting today, I want more people to emulate the quality that film gave to movies and TV, or better yet, go back to film.
To preface, I would be remiss not to mention my inspiration for this lesser-informed tirade: my obsession with “Grey’s Anatomy,” specifically, the early seasons when it was still good. Every time I watch a new episode of the show, I have to detox with a rerun immediately after. I could talk about the writing, the more compelling actors or characters, and the overall vision for the show for ages, another rant of mine in itself. However, another main reason is because in the original several seasons (one through nine), the show is shot on 35 mm film and is so vibrant, so colorful, and so well-lit. Sit me in front of an episode from 2005 and I will be enraptured by its aesthetic.
This brings me to my main issue with the diminishing use of film — lighting is becoming a dwindling art. The rise of digital cameras has made lighting a completely different task for cinematographers on set. Digital cameras make editing in post much more accessible, especially due to the precision film as a medium requires. Film allows for less of a margin of error; since the film has to be developed before viewing the shot, filmmakers have to be intentional with lighting and colors on set. In an editing suite, a digital shot can be made lighter or darker effortlessly, and on a set where a digital camera can capture the tiniest details in low lighting, no one has to think about making sure it’s visible in the final product on the first or second take.
So a new question is, “Why are people making movies so dark now?” The answer is because they can, and a lot of the reasoning behind it circles around shooting digitally being more common and more accessible. But, in my non-expert opinion, I don’t love it.
There’s something so beautiful to me about the way film portrays people, our world, and what human vision actually looks like. It’s an inherent “softness” that can’t be captured on a digital camera, even if the tradeoff is extreme fine detail. Even though film quality has increased exponentially since the days where grainy technicolor was the pinnacle of cinematic achievement, the slight imperfections and the nature of every single crystal on a film frame being a little unique to form a full picture are the best parts.
And above all else, color and saturation are so much easier to see because you have to light a shot as you make it. You can lighten film strips, and now, editing capabilities are much stronger, but you’ve always been able to lighten it just a certain amount without losing the details in the darker parts of the film — at a point, it just makes it grainier and softer than it already is.
In digital shoots, the director can see exactly what the scene will look like as it is being filmed. A shot can be underlit and still usable because of how much light the digital cameras can capture, which would be a great thing if we didn’t just take that poor lighting and run with it under the guise of realistic dark lighting for “atmospheric reasons.” There’s also the fact that using less light in a scene is a great way to hide imperfections in CGI or set design (or even bad acting), which many creators might need to be reliant on in a consumption-based age of media.
None of this is to say digital is inherently worse than film, or that there aren’t directors making beautifully bright films or shooting on a 16 mm roll anymore — but I just want to watch a TV show or movie on my poor-resolution laptop and not have to turn up my brightness to see an actor’s face, or any sort of saturation, or to look past plain flat and unblended and lazily shot scenes. (Sorry, GA, but as one of your last five consistent fans, I’m exhausted.)
Call it my nostalgia, but I don’t care if a movie looks uber-realistic. I’m not trying to watch real life (and feel just as vision-impaired as I am there) and end up squinting to see details in an almost pitch-black scene. I’m not here to groan at a desaturated, dimly lit scene with mood lighting where the actors look washed out yet over-shadowed and vibrant color grading has gone out the window. I’m not asking for a sickeningly bright RGB superimposed technicolor “The Wizard of Oz” style either! (However, that movie is a visual masterpiece that we should still aspire to today.) I want movies with enormous color, movies utilizing lighting, and movies working within the limitations of a more meticulous medium. I’m no self-proclaimed film snob either — just a sucker for the more human beauty this method usually brings and the potential it has.
I just adore the slight imperfections that come with shooting on film, no matter the effort and care it takes, and I think it shows even more love to the craft to put up with making something in a painstaking, disciplined way. While you can edit a digitally-shot movie to be pretty dang close (“Pearl”), there’s a certain je ne sais quoi to the tactile smoothness of film over the stark sharpness of digital for me any day.
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