Archive for the '' Category

WWI battlefield scene from the 1927 motion picture “Wings.”

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On January 18, 2012, the silent film Wings, directed by William Wellman, was screened in the Academy’s Goldwyn Theater in a new restoration, with color tinting duplicating the original Handschiegl process, and featuring live organ accompaniment by Clark Wilson. But this was in no way a recreation of the original release. In 1927, Wings was heralded for its lustrous 35mm. imagery and for thrilling aerial stunts done in a pre-rear screen era, every frame captured as real events on nitrate negative film. This Academy screening, however, was made from a DCP, a digital file, and shown on the Academy’s 2 K Barco digital projector. Like many of the treasures of the silent and early sound eras, the original negative is long lost; the restoration was made from the Cinemateque Française fifth generation print using state of the art digital technology to restore (as far as possible) the shimmering glow of the black and white nitrate film original.

Several weeks after this screening, the Sci-Tech Council of the Academy released The Digital Dilemma 2 report, the long awaited follow-up to its 2007 paper that discusses preservation and archiving in the digital age. That original paper explained challenges confronting the major studios; the TDD 2 paper focuses more narrowly on indie and independent movies as well as on audiovisual archives. Continue reading ‘THE DIGITAL DILEMMA 2′

Are we living in a golden age of photojournalism? Has the artful sophistication of today’s image makers so unbalanced the hoary “picture/ thousand word” equation that some of the news we read is the photo caption?

Multiple broadcasts, print and Internet platforms swamp us with a daily, even hourly, flood of ongoing and one-off news events from every corner of the earth. We are drowning in images: from the most august, traditional sources made by those dedicated and gifted photographers who are keenly aware of every nuance inside the frame, to ragged grab shots caught on the fly by a bystander’s iPhone, and more and more, those of social or political activists caught in the fray of an unfolding crisis. Where, in such a democratic cacophony of images, do we find some hierarchy of trust, truth and (god forbid) artistic insight? Is it even possible to do, or if so, how? In a world of seeming infinite visual mashups is the concept of photojournalism itself as obsolete as last year’s digital photo printer?

An examination of the thirteen pages of The New York Times “Sunday Review” section of December 25 offers dramatic color images of 2011 from the pages of the Times under the headings “Natural Disaster,” “Occupy Wall Street,” “Arab Spring,” “The World,” and “The Nation.” A double page centerfold is Tyler Hicks’ intense portrait of Libyan rebel fighters near Ras Lanuf reacting after a NATO airstrike against Qaddafi forces in March. It evokes the immersive immediacy of a “You Are There” French heroic salon painting of the 19th century. Delacroix and Gericault seem to loom just beyond the borders of the frame. Hicks’ chiaroscuro photo represents the highest level of an artist engaging the viewer with the drama of a singular moment frozen in the undifferentiated flux of time.

Libyan rebel fighters near Ras lanuf. Photo by Tyler Hicks.

Continue reading ‘The New York Times: “The Year in Pictures”’

Lena Herzog, born Elena Pisetski, photo by Rachel Lorenz.

There was an electrical power blackout the day that seventeen-year-old Elena Pisetski first encountered a collection of jarred fetuses in the galleries of St. Petersburg’s Kunstkamera Palace, where an eerie light seeped in from the windows. Pisetski was a student at the university’s Philology Faculty located on the embankment of the Neva River, next door to the beautiful aquamarine-colored mansion housing the scientific specimens of Dr. Frederik Ruysch. Ruysch was Dutch, one of the legions of seekers of new knowledge who, during the age of exploration of the New World, collected thousands of related and unrelated artifacts from his native Holland as well as from distant lands, into what were called Wunderkammern (Cabinets of Wonder). Continue reading ‘Lena Herzog’s Camera Finds “Lost Souls”’

Florencia Colucci and her lantern, “La Casa Muda.”

On Halloween night, this year’s Uruguayan entry for the foreign film Oscar was screened at the Academy’s Goldwyn Theater. Merely fortuitous, or more likely, a programming wag’s “in joke,” La Casa Muda (The Silent House) is a tense horror film of the “girl trapped in a haunted house” sub-genre. Its defining marker is that it conforms to the even smaller genre of films photographed, like The Russian Ark, in a single, uncut shot (or so the distributor’s ad copy and critics’ gullibility would have you believe.) I knew none of this promotional copy beforehand, but it did become clear with the opening long tracking shot starting from a parked car, walking through a wooded field, around the front of a farmhouse and finally into the house’s dark recesses, as it follows a young girl, Laura, played by Florencia Colucci. Clearly, this was not going to be a chaos cinema movie of 3000 plus edits; I decided to try to discern the few cutting points. This was difficult as the camera cleverly panned into blackness or used swish pans several times to hide cut points. In an email, the film’s producer, Gustavo Rojas, confirmed to me that there are only a dozen shots in its 78 minutes running time. This is a film that owes much of its fear factor not only to the inky depths beyond Laura’s handheld lantern or its device of unfolding in real time, but (in the Bressonian sense that Matthias Stork talks about in his video essay) in the canny and dramatic use of ambient sound. A statement by director Gustavo Hernández cites the primacy of sound as a unifying factor:

Many years ago, when I was a child, I listened [to] a strange noise in my house attic, a soft noise but very clear, that paralyzed me completely. For many seconds that seemed hours, all of my senses were aware, trying to convince myself that [it] was only the wind pushing the window. I sharpened my ear and held my breath simply searching for the silence. It was a tiny experience that I perfectly remember; because in my memory it is the first time that I felt fear, different, raw, and basic.

Continue reading ‘Matthias Stork: Chaos Cinema/Classical Cinema, Part Two’

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It took time for the reality of it to sink in. Although Kodak announced in June of 2009 that it was retiring its banner transparency film, Kodachrome, introduced in 1936, it was only with the cessation of processing at the end of December, 2010 by Dwayne’s Photo in Parsons, Kansas, that amateurs and professionals alike had to recognize that an era of image making had died. I wrote a piece about the demise of Kodachrome that some read as a wake rather than a tribute. I meant the latter. After all, it is not Kodak’s fault that despite its archival superiority to current imaging techniques, photographers just stopped buying it.

John’s Bailiwick: Kodachrome Fades—Out: But the Afterglow Lingers

As if the once mighty imaging empire of Kodak were not already in straits, successive internal “consolidations” have weakened rather than helped its bottom line. An NPR story on September 27 forecast that even with its sputtering attempt to gain market share in digital imaging (even home copiers and printers) the great American icon’s pedestal is crumbling. Some naysayers give it six months to a year before being broken up, its divisions being parceled off to the sharks of corporate raiding. In a dispiriting story in the October 1 Business Day section of The New York Times, Kodak said that it had hired the Jones Day law firm to give it advice regarding restructuring, although it denied rumors it was considering filing for bankruptcy protection. For many of us who have imagined that film will always be there, this is dismaying. Many of us embrace the continuing advances of digital technology even as we advocate that film is still a superior  (and certainly more archival “capture” medium.) And because Kodak is a company that has supported so many generations of emerging filmmakers with its programs, it is even more dismaying to see the near Schadenfreude that so many seem to display at seeing Kodak and its products at a difficult crossroads. Too many of my colleagues who have benefitted from Kodak’s generosity ever since their student days now seem almost ecstatic to dance on celluloid’s anticipated grave. It confounds me because I encounter many students today whose fondest dream is somehow to “shoot on film,” even as their cinematographer heroes abandon the medium as unhip, obsolete. Continue reading ‘Second Year Blogging: A Salmagundi, Part 3′