The conversion is complete, or at least, virtually complete. When you go to a cinema today, it’s a certainty that what you’re watching on the screen is not “a film”, but a digital projection of bits and bytes stored in a hard disk and transformed into images.
“Of the 800-plus movie screens in Thailand, in Bangkok and in the provinces, almost 100% of them project movies in the digital format,” says Suwannee Chinchiewchan, deputy chairman of SF Corporation, which runs SF cinemas. “Film projection is over.”
Film processing is, in a sense, over too. Earlier this year, the last major film laboratories in Thailand took turns in closing down, including the legendary Technicolour Thailand. Kantana, the other major player, has moved their business entirely to digital. This means that there’s no longer a facility in this country to process 35mm film for theatrical release. The migration to hard disk has been quiet and swift and is complete.
For the young generation of filmgoers, this doesn’t sound like a big deal. A movie is a movie, and if we have a clearer, crisper picture of a high-definition video up there, then all the better. The somewhat inevitable conversion to digital, however, signifies a historic shift into a new era for filmmakers, film editors, film archivists, cinema owners, the movie business, and, of course, the audience. It’s a cultural and technological landmark. It means an end of a technology that has been widely used for over a century, from the time it was introduced at the world’s first film screening in France in the late 1890s. It also means that “film” is no longer a physical entity that can be touched, kept, cut and restored — but a stock of invisible data.
The evolution: Digital Cinema Package (DCP) and the gold old film roll.
And while film fans are trying not to get too hung up on the romance of film as the tyranny of progress arrives, it is inevitable that many will wistfully reminisce about the natural, flickering quality of film against the super-clear (too clear?) digital image and the absence of the sound of film reels rattling against a metal projector.
Film fans are also likely to mourn the lost craft of the projectionist with nimble hands versus the button-pushing convenience of playing a movie from a machine. In short, film is going through the same spiritual transfiguration as when vinyl gave way to cassettes, to CDs, and then to the iTunes Store.
“Of course it’s inevitable, but I can’t help feeling that some of the magic of cinema will die along with the passing of film,” says Paul Spurrier, an executive at Kantana, who also runs a mini theatre called Friese Greene Club; equipped only with a digital projector.
The world’s first projection from a hard drive was in 1999 with Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. From then on, more and more movies were shot on high-definition digital cameras, though the final output was still in the format of 35mm film because of how most cinemas then still operated. Soon, however, the pressure from Hollywood to save print cost, coupled with the steady digital march has persuaded more and more theatre owners to favour digital projection, (screening motion pictures from a digital cinema package,(DCP) — a kind of storage disk) rather than from film prints. One thing is clear from the very start: the DCP, for all its efficiency and advancement, certainly looks boring compared to the elegant, transparent film strips.
In Thailand, distributors of Hollywood films stopped releasing their movies on 35mm film last October, meaning all theatres had to migrate to digital by buying new projection machines.
The venerable Lido and Scala cinemas installed digital projectors in March 2013. Another long-standing film venue, the Alliance Francaise Bangkok, retired its 40-year-old film projector last September and switched to digital screening.
Outdoor cinemas with their purring projectors are becoming less common and there are very few travelling movie caravans that remain in business these days, with those that do having restricted access to old titles that still have 35mm film prints in circulation. Those that are in business cannot screen new movies as they are only available on the DCP.
“It all happened pretty fast; faster than I thought,” says Lee Chatamethikool, a well-known film editor who runs a post-production company for Thai and international movies. “Film is an illusion, it’s moving pictures made up of 24 frames of image per second. Digital screening, meanwhile, is a set of signals that run continually. I think the difference isn’t significant when you watch most films aimed at the mass market — commercial films — but it does make a difference when you watch movies intended as art. The perception of the images is not the same.
“In regards to my work as an editor and post-production specialist,” Lee adds, “I admit that the digital model helps me control the quality and oversee the workflow more easily.”
One of the few remaining cinemas to screen 35mm print is at the Thai Film Archive, the public organisation that oversees the preservation of film. Every first Saturday of each month, the archive puts together a special programme to show film the way it was conceived to be shown: with film, and with a beam of light atomising the moving pictures onto the screen. All the films in the programme are old Thai films that the archive has restored.
“Film and digital are like two different mediums,” says Dome Sukvongse, the archive’s director, “It’s like looking at watercolour paintings and oil paintings. It’s hard to say which is better. If a movie has been shot on film, it should be screened with a film print. But if it has been shot by digital camera — which is almost always the case these days — it’s suitable to be projected digitally.
“We came up with the ‘film shown with film’ programme, precisely because old film projection is vanishing,” says Dome. “Young people that go to the cinema these days don’t have the experience of seeing film as it once was, so it’s important to show them on the big screen.”
Even the natural and instinctive act of referring to a film as a film will begin to feel inaccurate from a certain perspective. It has already inspired a sort of geeky joke: should we call a film festival a “DCP festival” or a film magazine a DCP magazine? The world’s most prominent film showcase, Cannes Film Festival, will, from this year, screen everything only on DCP, including its famous outdoor cinema on the beach.
But if vinyl comeback and film camera survival teaches us anything, it is what’s gone now is not necessarily gone forever. Screening digital movies come with its own set of problems, like malfunctioning and viruses. Meanwhile, the question of stability and longevity of digital data — think of retrieving files from a 10-year-old hard disk — looms large over film archivists.
“Our job is to preserve films, which we consider an audiovisual heritage of the nation,” says Dome of Thai Film Archive. “But we’ve begun to archive hard disks too, because new movies have no film print. As technology keeps changing, in a few years we might have to migrate the data from the current format of DCP into something else to make sure the files can be played. With film, however, if you keep it in the right condition, it will be there for decades, if not forever.”
Thai Film Archive screen 35mm print movies every first Saturday of the month. Visit www.facebook.com/ThaiFilmArchive.
Remembrance of film past
Manotham Theamtheabrat
- Film writer
“I’ve been watching film for over half of my life, that’s over 40 years, and I’ve been through many changes of format, from 16mm film to 35mm, from grainy video to hi-def digital. I think everything has to move forward. Some people may prefer film image rather than digital image, but for me I’m fine with anything. My only concern is that during the transitional period, cinemas may ask for a higher price, and I’m not sure why it has to be that way.”
Paul Spurrier
- Filmmaker and film historian who also runs a movie club
“Few lament the demise of film projection. It’s true that film projectionists miss film. For one thing, digital has made many of their film-handling skills obsolete. Film projectionists used to have a relationship with their projectors the same way as one might have with a classic car. They knew the quirks of a projector and how to calm it when it became temperamental, for example. Now, a digital projector could be operated by any 12-year-old child who understands graphic user interface.
“But there are worrying aspects [to DCP projection]. Hard disks break down, the decrypt code gets lost [in order to play a DCP, a theatre needs a code from film companies to unlock it], etc. One thing is for sure: over the next century, thousands of film will disappear purely because the digital data no longer plays. If humanity is ever wiped out, and an alien civilisation finds evidence of human life through film, I’m sure what they’ll be looking at is a 35mm film print that has survived long after digital is just a soup of 1s and 0s.”
Lee Chatamethikool
- Film editor
“Film feels more alive. When you project a film, it means shining a light through a strip of plastic that contains an image. When you project a digital file, it means shining a light through nothing, because the data is invisible in the file. But in truth, as an audience, we don’t feel that much difference any more. And as an editor, I can handle problems with less hassle with digital.”
Suwannee Chinchiewchan
- SF Cinema executive
“Working with DCP is like working with a computer. Sometimes it hangs, sometimes there’s a virus. Sometimes when you transport a hard disk and the road is too bumpy, the data is damaged. Our film projectionists used to be good at cutting films and reconnecting them and trying to make everything smooth once the picture goes up on the screen — it’s handiwork. Now they don’t have to do that any more. Instead, they have to learn English in order to be able to operate the digital machine.”
A projectionist at Thai Film Archive prepares a 35mm film print.
