Leitner's Cinematography Corner

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All photos by D.W. Leitner

I write this as Halloween looms once again, lining neighborhood stoops with scary pumpkins and pint-sized goblins targeting a sugar rush. Halloween is our Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, which Mexicans celebrate as an embrace of the role death plays in life, both as last stop and final transcendence.

Which got me to thinking: in a way, life is like a reel of film on a projector. There’s a beginning, middle, and end. Then the reel runs out and the projector’s empty gate flashes white.

The narrative of any technology is linear too, from first flickering to maturity to decline. It’s easy to trace an arc from Muybridge to Edison to Bell & Howell to Arriflex and Mitchell, then Éclair and Aaton. Likewise, Zworykin and Farnsworth to RCA, then Ikegami, Philips and Sony. (Neither reel has run out yet, by the way.)

Technology taken as a whole, however, is a meta-narrative (I’m using the term loosely here), an overarching historical drive with no end in sight, comprising endless individual births and deaths. In my brief tenure on the planet I’ve seen slide rules give way to calculators, then pc’s, now cloud computing. Whichever technologies my teenaged daughter shall take for granted in her old age, I truly can’t imagine.

There’s always a sadness in passing, isn’t there? Remember Ampex? For those who don’t, Ampex invented helical recording and videotape (originally an Ampex trademark) and the world’s first videotape recorder in 1956. For decades, through the 1980s, Ampex was the biggest name in TV recording, even inventing in 1967 the first magnetic-disk video recorder for instant replay, slo-mo, and video freeze framing.

In April, while on a shoot in Silicon Valley, I made a side trip to visit what remains of the once-sprawling Ampex campus in Redwood City. The streets and buildings of the campus, home to 6,700 employees in the late 1980s, are deserted, having been parceled and sold off (the main street was given away to the City of Redwood). Only the central building, adjoining a vast, empty parking lot, is still occupied by Ampex employees.

Haunted house.

I rang the buzzer several times and waited. The silent, forsaken headquarters felt as spooky as a haunted house. A lone engineer eventually emerged from a dark portal to the side of the abandoned reception desk and shuffled into view. Surprised to encounter visitors, he invited me into the lobby, where I learned that only 80-100 employees remain in the mostly empty building. He showed me decades of Monitor and Emmy Awards, collecting dust under a staircase behind the reception desk. He’d been there since 1967, he said.

Empty parking lot on a workday. Car in foreground is ours.

Today once-mighty Ampex, whose high-tech virtuosity captured the first images from the moon, maintains mostly data recorder contracts, government-issue I suspect, under Chapter 11 rules.

Cling to this industry long enough and you, too, will witness technologies, if not whole industries, bloom in living color, then wilt.

I once directed the optical printing operation at DuArt Film Laboratory in New York. I designed liquid gate systems and condensing optics, experimented with novel objective lenses, adapted 2000-ft. Mitchell magazines for large loads and initiated photometric monitoring of light valves. Who knew, with the triumphs of CGI and eventually D.I., that the estimable art and craft of motion picture optical printing (look up Linwood Dunn), along with the market value of my expertise, would someday, soon, be gone with the wind?

DuArt owner Irwin Young at the dry end of the “last bath” on August 26, 2010.

On August 26th, DuArt, founded in 1922 and the oldest continuously operating film lab in the U.S., ran its “last bath.� With the flick of an off switch, eighty-eight years of mastery in motion picture film processing was scattered to the wind.

Come this December 30th, Dwayne’s Photo in Parsons, Kansas, the only commercial lab developing Kodachrome, will run its last Kodachrome bath. (Super 8 Kodachrome was discontinued in 2005; all other Kodachrome products, last year.) National Geographic will air a special in Spring 2011 about the last roll of Kodachrome manufactured by Kodak and processed at Dwayne’s.

Sprocket projection, based on optical and mechanical principles in place since the 19th century, is being swept aside. I’ve written elsewhere about the preponderance of DCP (Digital Cinema Package) files screened at September’s New York Film Festival. Most of the selected dramas were shot on 35mm negative at the wide 2.40 aspect ratio—notably the festival’s longest at 5 ½ hours, Olivier Assayas’s Carlos—yet digitally projected from a server.

Final daily processing reports after 88 years of continuous motion picture film developing.

Follow the money if you don’t understand why this trend is accelerating. Compare the costs of a 5 ½ hour 35mm print—lab fees for duping and printing, worldwide shipping of steel ICC cases (four reels to a case, at least four cases), inventory costs and reel replacement, projectionists’ time building and breaking down platters—to the costs of a single USB hard drive. And what do you get for your trouble when you choose to incur the not-incidental costs of a 35mm print? How about jitter, weave and buckling; splices, scratches and surface abrasions; fixed keystoning…

35mm prints, in other words, will soon go the way of 16mm prints. By the beginning of this year, 20,000 of the 150,000 35mm screens worldwide had been already converted to digital projection, with half that total in the U.S. This was before AMC, Cinemark, and Regal Entertainment announced a joint venture to convert another 10,000 U.S. screens of the 16,000 they operate. I’m told that my local AMC 25 megaplex on 42nd Street is already 100% digital.

2010 was a tipping point for digital projection in another way, too. Attending a series of New York Film Festival press conferences, I encountered, for the first time, twenty-foot talking heads answering back from the big screen.

Not Big Brother. Filmmaker Patrick Keiller in London interviewed via Skype at a New York Film Festival press conference in September. His film Robinson in Ruins concerns his own fictional alter-ego, the researcher Robinson, wandering the south of England while making notes about “agriculture, architecture, the collapse of late capitalism and the extinction of the planet.”

For the entire history of sound motion pictures, out-loud conversations with onscreen personae were the daft province of the delusional and deranged. No longer, courtesy of Skype.

Perhaps this is a response to the skyrocketing costs, not to mention mounting indignities, associated with flying. So much easier, isn’t it, for a director to roll out of bed in Copenhagen or Bucharest and be interviewed via home computer? (Remember when jet-setting was the epitome of glamour?)

Once upon a time only the cartoon detective Dick Tracy wore a two-way picture phone on his wrist. Now Skype, as you probably know, grants similar capabilities to iPhone 4 and Android users, with Apple’s marvelous FaceTime in hot pursuit.

Will my teenager someday communicate via dimensional images emanating from a finger ring? Will she fondly recall the iPhone the way I do a rotary phone?

Births, lives, deaths—of seasons, people, things, industries, nations—form the natural rhythm of change that marks not only the passage of time but the forward sweep of progress. One door closes, another opens to the future.

Make that countless doors, constantly swinging.

The print magazine world I encountered in the 1980s–that’s when I began writing reviews for Millimeter–is a bygone. The explosion of online media (by which you are reading this column) and alternatives to print have relegated both lucrative ad sales and substantive writing fees to the storied past. The ethos of our information-wants-to-be-free moment can be exhilarating, but everything comes at a price.

Thus ends, with this 25th entry, Leitner’s Cinematography Corner. Thank you for reading. Hope we meet up again in the Infosphere.

Whatever the future brings, I’m looking forward to it.

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