Will digital ever be as good as film

[David Mullen ASC]

I'm looking at the blu-ray right now and am trying to figure out how this can be called a "really, really, really bad transfer" when it looks rather similar to the prints I've seen:

 

 

 

[David Mullen ASC]

If anything, the prints tend to be lighter than the transfer.

 

I think some of you are in denial that Kubrick wanted a pastel, low-contrast look for this movie and want to blame Warner Bros. or Leon Vitalli for not making this movie match modern technical standards.

 

Many scenes were shot on 10:1 zooms outside wide-open with a Low-Con #3 on film push-processed one stop, so exactly how contrasty, sharp, or fine-grained did you expect it to be?

[Phil Rhodes]

I'm sure Kubrick got what he wanted. A Clockwork Orange and The Shining have a lot in common with it, photographically. I'm just not a fan.

[Carl Looper]

Context is important.

 

For comparison, a good film to look at is the awful 1970 film Waterloo - not least because it's close enough to the same era being depicted. And in particular one will want to compare the interiors. Doing this you'll see clearly why Barry Lyndon is important. In Lyndon the filmmakers deliver a result which is so much more compelling than the semiotic studio lighting setups otherwise employed in Waterloo. In comparison to Lyndon, the interior light in Waterloo is just woeful - not that it's terrible compositions, editing, scripting, acting are in any way a help.

 

C

Edited September 7, 2015 by Carl Looper

[Charles Zuzak]

My favorite shot in the movie comes after the British grenadiers battle the French:

 

 

Skip to 2:52

 

I think it's the combination of the natural light and the depth of field that makes it so interesting to me.

Edited September 7, 2015 by Charles Zuzak

[David Mullen ASC]

All movies are a product of their time, but it can be argued that Kubrick's films, when using a naturalistic lighting approach, have managed to date less than their contemporaries. Sure, "2001" has definite 60's elements at times but compared to many other movies that came out in 1968, it looks relatively timeless. I mean, look at the movies nominated for the Best Cinematography Oscar that year over "2001":

 

Funny Girl -- Harry Stradling

Ice Station Zebra -- Daniel L. Fapp

Oliver! -- Oswald Morris

* Romeo and Juliet -- Pasqualino De Santis

Star! -- Ernest Laszlo

They are all well-photographed, but they are all more of their time, lighting-wise, than "2001".

[Tyler Purcell]

David, I'm a pretty big Kubrick fan and have seen almost all of his movies on the big screen. 'Barry Lyndon' is really the only one I keep missing, as it's more rare to find a 35mm screening then 'Full Metal Jacket' or '2001' which seem to be showing all the time in LA.

 

To me, the problem with the current video transfers is multi-fold.

 

- They used so much noise reduction, the image is soft and MPEG looking even on an HDCAM tape.

- The BluRay's and DVD's were horribly encoded, accentuating the MPEG noise issue.

- They all seem low in saturation compared to original film prints.

- They have horrible registration issues.

- They were made on a telecine machine in 1999. Not from a modern digital high resolution scanner.

 

In contrast '2001' was scanned on a modern machine and it looks flat-out amazing on BluRay or DVD, without any of the problems those Warner films have.

 

It depresses me greatly because scanning technology has progressed leaps and bounds in the last 5 years, let alone the last 15 years. Kubrick's films deserve more then telecine from 15 years ago.

 

P.S. Got the 'Barry Lyndon' BluRay on right now and every shot, the frame is bouncing around with registration issues. The top of the frame on my disk shows the top of the telecine gate as well, darn thing isn't even straight. But then again, I do have a projector, most televisions you wouldn't see that unless they had an under scan function.

[John E Clark]

But the amount of quintuple-fog, mist and glow-provoking filters in 1970s cinematography suggests to me that they absolutely weren't going for realism, they were going for a particular look, and unmistakably a look that would be familiar to 1970s audiences as simply being what movies look like, as much as teal and orange is familiar to us as being simply what movies look like. There's nothing wrong with that, in its historical context, but I don't think it's fair to consider it particularly inspired or out of the ordinary.

 

P

 

Sorry to burst your theory, but from about 1964 (perhaps coincident with the Beatles...) the entire world was pretty much befogged. That sort of fog lasted till about 1975 and was taken over by polyester suits. Fog did continue into the 80's but it was a different sort of fog, a noneidetic fog, that is fake fog.

 

Then again... it could have been because everyone was watching TV, and the examples of 'real' was from crappy TV reception of Vietnam news footage..

[David Mullen ASC]

It's a bit more complex, this fad of using low-contrast and fog filters in the 1970's. Some of it was motivated by a desire to render what cinematographers thought was a more "natural" contrast and color saturation compared to the Technicolor studio look of the previous decades. You read a lot of cinematographers at the time saying that they needed to knock down, mess up, the sharp, saturated look from current Kodak stocks and the lenses of the time (you hear the same thing today regarding digital cinematography!)

 

To that end, some cinematographers were using light amounts of filtration, haze, and underexposure of stocks to get something that felt was funkier and rougher and thus more "real", as vague as that term is. What they really meant was that by going against the standards of studio photography of the decades before, which they associated with a certain level of artifice and stage-bound glossiness, they were somehow embracing a more realistic vibe, but it was only realistic in the sense that it was anti-establishment, not that it represented how human eyes see the world.

 

Last night I watched "Midnight Express" (1978) on an HD channel, which I had not seen before. One could describe Seresin's photography as being naturalistic in comparison to prison dramas of a decade before, but with the use of light low-con filters and smoke, in combination with a single-source lighting style motivated by practical sources, it was also somewhat stylized compared to modern expectations for realism. Today, the same movie would probably be lit in a similar manner but without the low-con filters and smoke.

 

But cinematography is an art form and we are talking about fiction filmmaking here after all, there has always been various goals at work in the same piece, what you might describe as heightened naturalism or romantic realism for the sake of creating a mood. "Barry Lyndon" tried very hard to recreate a past era but it was not a fake documentary of that period, and even that would be stylized since there was no documentary filmmaking of that period, pre-photography. It tried to evoke the period by recreating the style of paintings of the time, and it also tried to emulate some of the moods of its protagonist, who could be described as not having a realistic view of the world. You could say that the romanticism in the photography is similar to the overdone make-up of the period, it beautifies but it is also somewhat of a mask, and it demonstrates how people get trapped into conventions of social power and of physical beauty. In other words, the somewhat stultifying mood that some reviewers found oppressive, like being trapped in a painting, serves the themes of the story.

 

But it is also a movie of its day. It's funny because if you read the AC interview with Alcott on the movie, he sort of knocks other period movies for overuse of diffusion, saying that he was using low-contrast filters instead of "diffusion" (ignoring the couple of scenes where nets were used) partly as a response against the expectation that the past would be presented with heavy diffusion. So from his perspective, the use of the #3 Tiffen Low-Con filter was fairly conservative. Certainly this movie is less foggy than some other period movies of the 1970's. I mean, look at the three frames I posted, they are not particularly diffused.

[Gregg MacPherson]

 

... a noneidetic fog, that is fake fog.....

 

 

Noneidetic fog? What? Please enlighten me....

EDIT: No Googling allowed.

Edited September 7, 2015 by Gregg MacPherson