Disruptive concepts drive the evolution of cinema.
Gunleik Groven
Awarded Cinematographer and Director
Member of the technical board of the European Association Of Cinematographer (IMAGO)
Teacher at the Norwegian Film School
Inventor of tools for advanced modern workflows and film-sets
Working on tracking solutions for film-sets, VR and other use
Worked on POPART at LABO Mixed Realities, joining new ventures from January 1st 2017.
Ang Lee’s new movie Billy Lynn’s Long halftime walk, has recently been prescreened at New York Film Festival, and the reviews have been mixed, at best. It seems like the marketing parameters of 4k/3D/120 fps/HDR has lead to more confusion than resolve amongst seasoned critics. But is that really any reason to not go and see it?
Film distribution went digital in 2006. Film-production went digital abruptly, unwillingly and surprisingly to most in the business over a few months from April 2008. Kodak, the market leading film-stock company, ironically the inventor of the digital camera back in 1975, the untouchable godfather of “all things film” and host of the Oscars, filed for bankruptcy in 2012. By 2013, Fuji, the 2nd largest producer of film stock, gave in. ARRI, the market leader in film cameras for almost 100 years, stopped selling cameras almost overnight and it’s main competitor, Aaton was quickly out of business.
Almost to none of the “business specialists” wanted this change to happen, as they overwhelmingly agreed that “digital would never achieve the filmic characteristics needed for the language of narrative filmmaking”. But digital projection was a reality, and so was RED Digital Cinema Camera, and the film industry and moviemaking will never be the same.
Changes in this business happen incredibly fast. Despite producers like George Lucas experimenting with digital productions in large-scale through the Star Wars reboot for a decade, this transition hit the business like a bomb when it happened. And those positioned for that change survived and prospered.
Technically, film-making has been largely the same since the mid 1930’ies when colour and sound were introduced. Of course the way we make films has evolved since then, but the technical parameters has remained unchanged. 24 FPS has its limitations as to how you move the camera to get fluid motions, and blurry low-detail images has become a signature of “filmic” look, due to the limitations of the format.
History is rich with examples of movies hated by the critics and connoisseurs, that have become normative technical and aesthetic masterpieces, as the audience has grown to syncronize with the evolution that really happened. My favourite examples are the Stanley Kubrick movies “2001: A space Oddysey”, “A Clockwork Orange”, “Barry Lyndon” and “The Shining”. All hated by the reviewers at the time of their release because they each in their way broke “the rules of filmic story-telling”, but each of those films have become influential reference works technically and aesthetically for those film-makers that figured out what they just had seen and they are all by now baked deep into the vocabulary of filmgoers, cinematographers and directors alike.
Film is a language, like music. It needs a bit of getting used to to understand the code and what is “good” or “bad”. To me, it is impossible to comprehend if the Peking Opera performance I go to is an excellent one or a total catastrophe, as I don’t have the language or knowledge to evaluate it.
When someone breaks these established rules, outrage and confusion is usually the result amongst those who have prided themselves of knowing them. Breaking those rules, challenges the reviewers taste, knowledge and competence. But this is also a necessity to nuture the evolution of an artform. Music history would not have been the same, if Igor Stravinskij had accepted defeat when rotten tomatoes were thrown at the performance of the Rite of the spring, back in Paris in 1913.
4k/3D/120 fps/HDR. 20+ times the data normally used to display a second of film.
Those are just numbers, and unless you work with and are intimately familiar with these terms and visual implications, the numbers don’t really translate into anything meaningful. Thus it’s kinda strange to see how the movie is marketed through these numbers and not through focus on an exceptional story and perspective changing story-telling.
That said, these numbers don’t represent minuscular breaches with what we know as a “filmic expression”. Each and every one of them represent a major deviation from film “as we know it” and how films can be shot and screened. Still there are good reasons to explore these fields.
When the critics see this thing, they naturally rely on the references they have to try to express what they saw, which is sports on TV, video games or Peter Jacksons “The Hobbit” for the frame rates, 4k 3D has simply not been possible and would look catastrophic with the current cinema projection standard, and “HDR” part of the equation seems to get lost on most: That you get to see a colourful contrasty and lively image, even after putting on the 3D glasses that inherently softens the image and cuts and dulls the amount of light and colours that hit the eyes in half… at best.
There are some significant differences distancing Billy Lynn from the Hobit here. Peter Jackson shot “The Hobit” exactly as he would shoot 24fps, it was even edited at 24fps and he shot with the same shutter you normally use for a 24p release. The remaining frames were just re-ingested for the final master and projection. But the choice didn’t practically affect the production a lot, outside storage needs.
Ang Lee spent 100 days in prep with full crew to find new concepts for lighting and camera movements, directing and set-building, really: how to explore the new framework they had created. For what it’s worth, James Cameron agrees with him, the most successful director of the last few decades, has pledged that high framerates is the future for cinema. But of course, these new boundaries need to be explored.
What Ang Lee and Sony has done, is really to change most of the accepted technical boundaries of film-making that directors have complied to for practical reasons for 90 years, and experimented on what these new parameters could mean for film-making and movie-goers. Something none of us know the answer to at this moment.
But why is this development close to a neccesity? Noone ever complained about Charlie Chaplin? Or Tarkovsky?
Personally I think the tools presented through Billy Lynn will go into the language. You’ll change frame rates within a movie like you change lenses or filters or lighting, to express a multitude of expressions. If you look closely at a fight-scene in the “Bourne” series, you realise you don’t really see anything for real from the violence that is expressed. Despite the critics unison outrage of technology presented, it seems like most of them oversee how the war scenes work with this new expression, an interesting contradiction in the tech analysis.
Whether Billy Lynn becomes a success or not, the film is an early iteration of a necessary evolution that production companies and owners of theatres eventually have to confront, if they want people to still horde to the box-office and create recurring income for studios and theatre owners, instead of watching movies on platforms like Netflix, Amazone Prime or Le TV. The last few years streaming services has caught up with and in many respects surpassed the technical quality of the digital cinema standard.
In a speech in LA, Wanda had invited to, the worlds largest film distributor, one of the most influential box-office producers through its ownership of Legendary and builder of one of the world biggest film studios in Qingdao, Wanda chairman ****** Jianlin stated:
“An average American goes to the theatre four times a year, while in China the average is less than one time per year in 2015. However, in 10 years, if China’s cinema attendance rate reaches that of the U.S. or slightly less, China’s box office will still be 3 times as big as the current level in North America.”
That is a statement that comes after both Chinese and US box-office has declined. This is only true, if the theatres still have content that makes it worthwhile to leave the living-room and get that total and immersive experience a movie in a theatre can be, compared to what people can see in the comfort of their own sofas.
If the Cinema experience does not evolve, it risks getting dated and left behind like a few other popular cultural relics of the 20th century. It is easy to forget that cinema is the youngest of the art forms, and I believe it has the potential to evolve with the time it exists in. Like music and theatre have a multitude of genres that all manage to draw audiences to the public performances. Problem is at the moment, we all have a too defined idea of what makes a “good movie”. But if we compare that to music, we know that some love Mozart, others love Xenakis, while there is still room for a billion or so to actually love ****** Pistols. Art is diversity.
This inevitable evolvement of the genre, translates to huge investments in new production techniques and not least in theatres and screening technology to secure an experience not allowed for in your home, with glasses, on a computer screen or an UHD TV.
Film as entertainment is a huge business, but unless the producers and the theatre owners are aware of the realities in the technical evolution they are part of, many more will experience the same fortune as Kodak and Fuji.
Companies like FOSUN that have invested in forward thinking IP for these new techniques , can look at a hefty return on investment, no matter if Billy Lynn ends up only being displayed the way it was intended to at only the 5 theatres around the globe at this stage. The tech can be implemented in a number of other settings, and keep people happy and out of the sofa, no matter what happens to movie-theatres.
Ang Lee has a long-term deal with Studio 8 and FOSUN is said to be there for keeps, he will direct the biographical movie about Mohammed Ali, which is rumoured to take on even larger technical achievements than Billy Lynn, what can we expect from that?
This is of course highly speculative, but let’s say for a moment that Billy Lynn is taking cinema as far as is possible within the parameters known for a 100 years. It’s 3D, but that’s been worked on since 1890, it is high framerate, that can still evolve, but won’t significantly change the format, it’s 3D, but that still requires the audience to sit at a fixed point and look at a flat screen, and it’s full of details, that can get even richer, like the 8k Japanese NHK TV, and finally fidelity is getting good for 3D, still there is a limit to how far you want to take that, but all this is still just “more of the same”. None wants to copy the suns real intensity within a theatre.
Take that, that Ang Lee wants to create immersive experiences and the claim that he wants to “Take the viewers inside the ring”, all of that hints at a new way to see a narrative movie.
VR has a bit of that, but VR is thus far currently limited by the viewers point of view and the limitations of what the cameras “see”. It is possible, though to imagine a bright new immersive world for narrative filmmaking based in VR and other emerging tech. And as it happens, this is the problem many are currently exploring and researching.
With a thought set like this, you could really “Take the viewers inside the ring” while still keeping them in theatres.
And this is actually what Billy Lynn is all about. It’s a way to expand the format of “filmic experience” beyond what anyone currently imagine. And it takes a man like Ang Lee to be brave enough to go there.