R.I.P., the movie camera: 1888-2011
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.”
%5B1%5D.jpg) |
| A director shooting his film with Panavision camera Source:thinbluelinewallpaper.blogspot.com |
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.”
Acknowledgement:
No comments:
Post a Comment