Week 3: The 70mm film experience

Building from Mia’s blog contribution this week, I can’t help but to think about my recent screening of Quentin Tarantino’s new film, The Hateful Eight. What is interesting, and unusual, about the screening was its film projection (as opposed to digital projection) and the fact that Tarantino filmed it in 70mm film. Not only was film projection an experience that I haven’t encountered in, at least seven or eight years, but 70mm format has been declining in use since the mid-century and rarely used since the 1990s. From my understanding (of my reading of various reviews and news articles), the advantage of 70mm is its wide format—in other words, its ability to capture wide shots and to include a lot of landscape in a frame.

The blog question for this week concerns what insights can be garnered from the process of digitalization (what is different or lost from the analog representation), which is a question similarly inflicted my thoughts throughout watching The Hateful Eight. I use the word inflicted because throughout the approximately three-hour film, form was explicitly on my mind. Some thoughts included, 1) “that wide-angle shot captures so much of the mountainous landscape”; a thought surely influenced by reviews and news articles that I read, 2) “an imperfection from the film projection!” 3) “an intermission! How golden age Hollywood.” Many these feelings were obviously the desired effect of Tarantino, who is a quick outspoken of this dislike for digital cameras. Last week’s reading from Sperberg-McQueen makes an interesting about how the form of the representation (of a text, film, etc.): “But tools always shape the hand that wields them; technology always shapes the mind that use it (p. 34, my emphasis). My consumption of a film reel projection of a movie made on 70mm film is inflicted by the format. Would I have enjoyed it as much from a digital projection? Is asking how I would have enjoyed/experienced the same script filmed on the standard 35mm even worth asking, given how a format always mediates my experience? The blog post has helped me work through why it is not productive to examine analog versus digital debates in binary good versus bad discourse. A representation, in various forms, is much more complex and can evoke different meanings that ultimately require further critical engagement. Indeed, especially in our consumption of art or artistic endeavours, the artist’s use of a given medium offers a wide range of opportunities to explore how forms affects those who consume it.

References

Sperberg-McQueen, C.M. "Text in the Electronic Age: Textual Study and Text Encoding, with Examples from Medieval Texts." Literary and Linguistic Computing 6, no. 1 (1991): 34-46.