Major manufacturers have ceased production of new motion picture film cameras; cinema as we once knew it is dead.
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We might as well call it: Cinema as we knew it is dead.
An article at the moviemaking technology website Creative Cow reports that the three major manufacturers of motion picture film cameras — Aaton, ARRI and Panavision — have all ceased production of new cameras within the last year, and will only make digital movie cameras from now on. As the article’s author, Debra Kaufman, poignantly puts it, “Someone, somewhere in the world is now holding the last film camera ever to roll off the line.”
What this means is that, even though purists may continue to shoot movies on film, film itself will may become increasingly hard to come by, use, develop and preserve. It also means that the film camera — invented in 1888 by Louis Augustin Le Prince — will become to cinema what typewriters are to literature. Anybody who still uses a Smith-Corona or IBM Selectric typewriter knows what that means: if your beloved machine breaks, you can’t just take it to the local repair shop, you have to track down some old hermit in another town who advertises on Craigslist and stockpiles spare parts in his basement.
As Aaton founder Jean-Pierre Beauviala told Kaufman: “Almost nobody is buying new film cameras. Why buy a new one when there are so many used cameras around the world? We wouldn’t survive in the film industry if we were not designing a digital camera.” Bill Russell, ARRI’s vice president of cameras, added that: “The demand for film cameras on a global basis has all but disappeared.”
Theaters, movies, moviegoing and other core components of what we once called “cinema” persist, and may endure. But they’re not quite what they were in the analog cinema era. They’re something new, or something else — the next generation of technologies and rituals that had changed shockingly little between 1895 and the early aughts. We knew this day would come. Calling oneself a “film director” or “film editor” or “film buff” or a “film critic” has over the last decade started to seem a faintly nostalgic affectation; decades hence it may start to seem fanciful. It’s a vestigial word that increasingly refers to something that does not actually exist — rather like referring to the mass media as “the press.”
In May 1999 — a year that saw several major releases, including “Toy Story 2,″ projected digitally for paying customers — editor and sound designer Walter Murch wrote a piece for the New York Times headlined, “A Digital Cinema of the Mind? Could Be.” In it, Murch pointed out that only two major aspects of the analog filmmaking process had survived into the late ’90s, the recording of images on sprocketed celluloid film and their projection onto big screens by casting a beam of light through the images. Murch predicted that once digital projection became widespread, it would “trigger the final capitulation of the two last holdouts of film’s 19th-century, analog-mechanical legacy. Projection, at the end of the line, is one; the other is the original photography that begins the whole process. The movie industry is currently a digital sandwich between slices of analog bread.”
Near the end of 1999, my former New York Press colleague Godfrey Cheshire published a two-part article titled “Death of Film/Decay of Cinema“, which in hindsight seems eerily prescient. He predicted just about everything that would happen within the next decade-plus, including the replacement of old-fashioned film print projection by digital systems, the replacement of film cameras by digital cameras, and the near-total takeover of traditional cinematic language by techniques that had once been the province of television.
“Camera, projector, celluloid,” Cheshire wrote, “the basic technology hasn’t changed in over a century. Sure, as a form of expression, film underwent a radical alteration with the addition of sound, but that and other developments – color, widescreen, stereo, etc.–were simply embellishments to a technical paradigm that has held true since photographic likenesses began to move, and that everyone in the world has thought of as “the movies” – until this summer. [...] For the time being, most movies will still be shot on film, primarily because audiences are used to the look, but everything else about the process will be, in effect, television – from the transmission by satellite to the projection, which for all intents and purposes is simply a glorified version of a home video projection system.”
Although I’ve become more of a surly classicist with age, I was an early defender of movies shot on video, and I really don’t see the point of doing a Grandpa Cinema routine, waving a cane and hollering that the movies somehow “equal” film. That’s silly. Cinema is not just a medium. It is a language. Its essence — storytelling with shots and cuts, with or without sound — will survive the death of the physical material, celluloid, that many believed was inseparably linked to it. The physical essence of analog cinema won’t survive the death of film (except at museums and repertory houses that insist on showing 16mm and 35mm prints).
But digital cinema will become so adept at mimicking the look of film that within a couple of decades, even cinematographers may not be able to tell the difference. The painterly colors, supple gray scale, hard sharpness and enticing flicker of motion picture film were always important (if mostly unacknowledged) parts of cinema’s mass appeal. The makers of digital moviemaking equipment got hip to that in the late ’90s, and channeled their research and development money accordingly; it’s surely no coincidence that celluloid-chauvinist moviegoers and moviemakers stopped resisting the digital transition once they realized that the new, electronically-created movies could be made to look somewhat like the analog kind, with dense images, a flickery frame rate, and starkly defined planes of depth.
But let’s not kid ourselves: Now that analog filmmaking is dead, an ineffable beauty has died with it. Let’s raise two toasts, then — one to the glorious past, and one to the future, whatever it may hold.
I think it's a bit extreme to say that cinema is dead. The art of it will prevail, they just changed the medium of it to something that's faster, more efficient, higher quality, and may be safer for the environment.
A bit sensational. Digital cameras still lens an image, but the method of capture and processing have changed. It's a bit like saying an electric car isn't an automobile because it uses different principles to achieve the same result.
A bit sensational. Digital cameras still lens an image, but the method of capture and processing have changed. It's a bit like saying an electric car isn't an automobile because it uses different principles to achieve the same result.
Except elictric cars suck!
Wheres the pur of the engine, the roar when you rev that baby up! You miht as well be riding around in a mobility scooter!
Exactly why the planet is going down the toilet! I can't buy an electric car, I can't hear my motor go VROUM VROUM!!!
Boys with toys
In any case, people take these type of changes very hard. Changes mean's time are moving on, remind's everyone that their time is limited. Everything change and evolve, it's part of life.
Cinema certainly isn't dead, but this is quite a milestone. Movies were shot, edited and screened the same basic way for 100 years. Now they're moving on. It's a bit like when the cathode ray TV tube stopped being manufactured -- as long as TV had existed it, the basic technology hadn't changed.
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they just changed the medium of it to something that's faster, more efficient, higher quality, and may be safer for the environment.
More convenient, cheaper, faster -- yes. Higher quality? 70 or 35mm fine grain film shot through high quality lenses is probably still as good an image as you can produce today. It's a thing of beauty -- obsolete or not.
I think I'm the only one that read this as an article about Film cameras being discontinued by all the major manufacturers
Which is what I think he's getting at.Not that cinema is dead now that you can't buy a new Film camera
And the video in the OP is an example of something that was only possible on film;
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Mothlight (1963, 4 minutes)
This is one of Brakhage’s older, and best known films. It is also one of my favourites. It is composed of hundreds of moth wings, collected from the inside of lamps and windows. Brakhage painstakingly collected them up, pressing them together between two layers of tape. The strip of tape then became the film as he had it run through a film printer. The process gnarled the original beyond further use. Luckily none was needed. The resulting film is a magnificent view of moths dancing. In his catalogues, Brakhage calls it “What a moth might see from birth to death if black were white and white were black”. However, I suggest it might be described as what a light bulb might see, hanging on the porch all night, the object of this nocturnal insect’s desire – a tragic love story.
This is definitely a change to me. I have always loved the old movies with their grain and signature film look. I suppose though it had to happen sooner or later. I was just talking with my grandma yesterday about the old drive ins and theaters that used to be. She said that the world's largest drive in, which was just a mile or two from where she lives, was torn down to literally build a parking lot. A shame to all involved in it.
I'll miss the look of fine-grain and the occasional piece of dirt/dust when we eventually have to deal with every movie being 100% digital. At least I'll have all of the movies made within the last 100 years to tide me over.
I think it's a bit extreme to say that cinema is dead. The art of it will prevail, they just changed the medium of it to something that's faster, more efficient, higher quality, and may be safer for the environment.
Progress is a good thing.
Not to sound dumb, but why would digital cameras be safer for the environment?
I don't mind something shot digitally, but why does it need to be the only thing out there? Technically, film is much more future proof than digital, especially when you don't let it go through the DI process. It also has a better range. Truth be told, digital cameras are still being improved, but there's something about the look of film that digital can't replicate, and that's why they should exist right next to each other.
[B]Major manufacturers have ceased production of new motion picture film cameras; cinema as we once knew it is dead.
Reality:
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As Aaton founder Jean-Pierre Beauviala told Kaufman: “Almost nobody is buying new film cameras. Why buy a new one when there are so many used cameras around the world?
No new cameras or film stock are being manufactured, any more than....you can still find Kodak film cameras or developers any more for your vacation photos.
Lovers of film grain will likely be disappointed, but this does not mean Movies Have Disappeared, or 3D Has Won, or Michael Bay Has Triumphed, or whatever other Fox News spin angry fans would like to put on it after reading one paragraph.
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Originally Posted by Donat96
I'm guessing he means less materials will be used in making film stock.
E-text brought us a paperless society, and digital cameras brought us a celluloid-free society. The fact remains that books are still available to read and shadows are still able to be shown on walls, just that the material goods once used for them will now take up less space on this earth.
Not saying all progress is a good thing, but the first thing a replacement technology does is take away the nagging material boundary between the artist's thought and his result.
Digital cinematography has always been breathing down the neck of conventional lensing techniques since the advent of the likes of the Sony F900 as used in Attack Of The Clones. Michael Mann sent a warning shot over the heads of film stock manufacturers when they heard that the incredible night-time photography in Collateral was achieved by opening the camera aperture to maximum with no additional lighting or digitial processing required. The images of the camera 'seeing into the night' had the likes of Kodak rushing to develop more light sensetive filmstocks for night photography.
I've been waiting for news like this since seeing the results of anamorphic cinematography on the Panavision Genesis. Things can only get better from here on in, folks. Had a thought: Spielberg said a number of years ago "I'll keep shooting on film until the last lab closes." Somebody want to tell him the news?
Just because companies cease production doesn't mean film is dead.
Add to the fact that Digital STILL isn't up to far with film (and even the best cameras don't have the latitude of a film stock). Film will still be around. Heck, records are.
i kind of am sad by this news. many films won't "feel" or look the same now without being filmed... on film. i don't want all our films to look super slick like the latest Fast and Furious movie. i love how some films have grain and have a real grimy, realistic look to them. makes them feel more "real". i don't know if the cameras that are left that replicate that or not, but it certainly seems like it isn't the case.
i'm all for clearer picture and whatnot, but how many films now a days will look and feel like Taxi Driver when they're being filmed with the same camera that shoots Avatar 2, Final Destination 67, and all the others? i'm guessing not many
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R.I.P., the movie camera: 1888-2011
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