REQUIEM FOR FILM...

I remember back when I was in college ('88-'92) we had a subject called "Multimedia", which has nothing to do with what we know today by that term. Back then you developed slide shows (no powerpoint, actual photographic slides) synched with music, sound effects, and sometimes additional performances surrounding this presentation (I remember a particularly weird one I saw at an inter-college competition about German expressionist film with guys dressed up in true goth fashion hidden around the screen behind black veils hanging from the ceiling). Anyway, it was a very hands-on experience: you developed storyboards by hand, made the production design, took photographs with special film, developed the film in a lab (nowadays I have no clue what was involved, but back then we knew about timing, exposure, chemicals, etc.), selected the right slides, cut them, mounted them, arranged them in carrousel projectors and programmed by hand with a mixer and an open-reel sound tape that we also had to mix in a sound cabin (no software whatsoever, we only had a turntable, tape decks, microphones and a mixer). This is the closest I got to doing a full film production by hand.

And remember those old family movies that you watched on 8mm or 16mm projectors on large screens that had to be mounted on your living room? The same way you had to watch movies at school. Again, the smell of film, the light bulb, the clickety clack of the projector... this was of course before the home video camera of the '70's. My and my siblings' childhood  movies were filmed on 8mm and are now in VHS tapes (which by the way now need to be transferred to DVD...) which translates into jumpy images and no sound.

Ancient history.

We are currently at the threshold of digital cinema, where film will literally become a thing of the past. No more film in the physical sense of the word. I've seen digital projections and even though purists have complaints, I think it's amazing (pristine images, no scratches, no cigarrette burns or reel changes, multi-channel digital sound...) However one cannot help but feel a bit of nostalgia about sprockets, film, the smell of the chemicals, the feel of the film itself... even the annoying scratches and cigarette burns. We will undoubtedly see in the future a new Cinema Paradiso where the romantic visual of a guy transporting reels on a bycicle from town to town will be substituted by a projectionist pasting and mounting a film on huge discs and through the intrincate mechanism of a movie projector with it's distinctive clickety-clack sounds. I know I will love the new technology, but I will undoubtedly miss our old friend, the film.

*Sigh*.