Today’s scheduled post has been derailed by a recent conversation between Marc Maron and William Friedkin that I can’t get out of my mind. It’s a two-and-a-half-hour long talk that made me want to revisit the films of Billy Wilder (Ninotchka), John Huston (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), as well as many of Friedkin’s films. The notable director behind The French Connection, The Exorcist, and Sorcerer, to name only my three favorites of his from the seventies, was himself enthralled by the magic of movies thanks to a visit to the Surf Theatre in Chicago circa 1956. The Surf Theatre was an arthouse revival venue that screened Citizen Kane on its 15th anniversary. Friedkin watched Citizen Kane several times on that one day, and it opened the doors to him for the works of Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, the French New Wave, Akira Kurosawa, and the early works of Elia Kazan, Alfred Hitchcock, and Stanley Kubrick, to name only a few. Flashforward less than 20 years later and that same young man would bump Kubrick as the first choice director for a hot studio property called The Exorcist.
As a film programmer for an arthouse theater that also screens repertory titles, like the Surf Theatre, and one still trying to keep 35mm alive as a format, I comfortably settled in for a riveting conversation that, sadly, wasn’t the love letter to film that I thought it would be. One of the reasons I enjoy Maron’s podcasts is that he’s a kindred analog-loving spirit who still enjoys vinyl and himself seems to psychologically register a tangible difference to the look and feel of flickering film over the cool crisp sharpness of digital. I say “seems” because Maron is clearly always trying to get some kind of validation for his feelings about film from any of the long string of movie professionals to grace his garage, only to find most of his filmmaker guests fully embracing the new digital realm – which is fine, and to be expected. Digital has been a great boon to movie-makers and is easier, cheaper, and puts more tools in the toolkit. What is a bit surprising, however, is how hardly anyone has a nice word for the legacy of the format that helped shape cinema culture for well over a century. With each passing year film, as a format, takes on the role of a centenarian entertainer that has not only been abandoned by his friends and colleagues, it has been tossed out of the old-folks’ home, left homeless in the street, and is now being kicked and beaten by droogs out for a bit of the ultra-violence. Friedkin was especially harsh:
Maron: “And you’re shooting on digital, right?”
Friedkin: “I shoot now on digital, yes.”
Maron: “You have no problem with that?”
Friedkin: “No, it’s great! When they release the picture, it has no dirt, no scratches, no splices, you can go into a frame of film and tune the color. You can make the sky bluer, or lighter blue, you can make people’s faces warmer, or colder, stuff you could NEVER do, from frame to frame with 35mm. So, yes, I love it. And by the way, over 90%, 95% or more of all the screens run only digital.”
Maron: “No, I know, I guess I just romanticize the commitment necessary, budgetarally and technology-wise to film.”
Friedkin: “Most 35mm films are not in good shape enough to be seen. If you want to hear Caruso sing on an old 78 rpm record…
Maron: “No.”
Freidkin: “…and his voice sounds like this (makes horrible gargled sound) with needle scratch? That’s what 35mm is compared to a digital print.”
Maron: “Right.”
Friedkin: “Or something that you stream on your computer, or iPad, or iPhone, at 1080 in HD? It’s beautiful, I think. And 35mm… I’ve seen prints of my films… you know Quentin Tarantino, this guy I like very much, he owns a theater…”
Maron: “Yeah, the New Beverly.”
Friedkin: “Yeah, and he runs only 35′s, and I’ve given him prints. He actually had bootleg prints of a lot of my stuff, and he calls me and asks me if it’s okay to run them there, and I say ‘Yes, as long as I don’t have to be there and see it. ‘Cuz 35′s SUCK. It’s like listening to a podcast vs listening to radio on a tiny little AM thing that you used to plug into the wall and it had nothing but static.”
Maron: “Alright. I understand that.”
Now listen, folks, I’m not here to start up the tired old film-hugger’s eulogy for film being better than digital. Film lost. Digital won. Fine. But there are a few of us out there that are struggling to keep the format of film alive so that people can experience something different in case it does fire up different neurons in your brain. Last Thursday we screened a mint condition 35mm print of Cobra Woman (thanks to Universal) that was an explosion of Technicolor goodness. A 4K restoration would also look great, but perhaps, just perhaps, it would still feel a bit different on a subconscious level. If you love the legacy of film, why not let a few people keep it alive for further study? We are a handful of dedicated venues and museums that want to show both the new (on digital, no problem) as well as the old (and if that’s a digital restoration, great), but also, if possible, and when possible, we’d also like to show people movies on 35mm for a variety of reasons.
Despite Friedkin’s understandable frustrations with the medium, it is still undeniably a different format with some advantages as they relate to the light that is captured on dancing grain, depth of textures, especially blacks, and the way it makes the viewer an active participant that has to sew together 24 images a second to create the magic of movement. I admit it’s a possibility that those of us that grew up with film may be the only ones that feel we are mentally in a more passive state when watching digital movies nowadays, which Tarantino equates to glorified TV. Or maybe it’s spandex fatigue from all the superhero nonsense that’s so pervasive. Probably both.
Friedkin goes on to talk about a private audience he managed to have with the Shroud of Turin while directing operas in Italy. He wept at the sight of it. Would he have had that emotional and possibly even spiritual experience if he had been staring at a cleaned and touched up replica of the shroud – with blood reds “redder” or, y’know, “touched up” so as to be “warmer”? No. He had an emotional experience because he saw something authentic that had somehow survived the tests of time and that was, as he described it, the ultimate visual testament of man’s inhumanity to man.
It’ll be interesting to see which ones of Friedkin’s films will still be around 100 years from now. Even Killer Joe has a chance, because while it was shot on digital, it came out four years ago, when they were still striking 35mm prints for release. DVD’s and Blu-rays in the far future? Good luck finding the players. Stream it on interwebs? Who even knows what that will look like? At least film is a physical object that can be protected. Everyone who loves “the cloud” seems to forget it’s not a real heavenly cloud but, rather, a bunch of data stored on computers that you don’t and can’t control. A bunch of zeroes and ones spread out over various data banks, waiting to be hacked or taken off the grid by some other calamity.
Last Wednesday I screened the only traveling 35mm print of Tarkovsky’s Mirror (thanks to Kino Lorber). It had a scratchy soundtrack, some emulsion damage, and white-on-white subtitles, but the color schematics were still rich and complex, and if some people want to dismiss the sort of mental 3-D image it created somewhere within our cerebral cortex as nothing but nostalgia, I guess that’s inevitable. Still… seeing The Mirror on 35mm took my breath away. Two older women in the audience even cried and later remarked as to how it reminded them of how the cinema could still feel like a sacred place. I’m also still getting emails from appreciative customers who knew their only other recourse for watching The Mirror was to see it on smaller screens and DVD.
pk
PS – Marc, keep a warm place in your heart for analog. And when you grab your vinyl for Bowie’s last record, Blackstar, think about how it was designed: black-on-black letters that require the right light to suss out the lyrics, as well as a clear reflective sleeve that makes the album visible from the cut-out pattern on the front-side of the album. This time, with the right light, you can see your reflection within the blackstar cutout. The implication is clear: ask not for whom the bell tolls. Sadly, all the people streaming Blackstar on their computers or phones will miss out on these poetic touches meant only for those who still care for physical relics of a bygone era.
One last note: a friend who had been listening to it only as digital files finally got his back-ordered Blackstar record and he called me up to excitedly report how upon listening to the vinyl he heard, for the first time, snippets of ghostly piano chords that made him look around to see if someone was actually at the piano in his recording studio. Yeah, degradation is inevitable over time, but the magic is real. Enjoy it while you can.
Link to Maron’s podcast:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUp9Y_YzuBE
