Introduction: Digital Cinema

Lisa Dombrowski concludes her essay on the conversion of American art house cinemas to digital in this issue with a series of questions, followed by the statement that "the only certainty we can count on is that the era of 35mm is over". My last issue as associate editor of Film History looks at the technological innovation that apparently makes film "history" in the colloquial sense of something that is "over" or "dead". Variety, a paper that has long supported the transition to digital cinema, has not quite written the obituary for 35mm film, but it has duly noted that Eastman Kodak has filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 11 (19 January 2012) and that Panavision and Arriflex have ceased making 35mm cameras (6-12 February 2012).¹ Over 52 per cent of all European screens are now digital and, as Ray Zone reports, "by the end of 2011, more than 50,000 cinemas worldwide were equipped with digital cinema projectors (twice as many as 2010) and 55 per cent of those were 3D-enabled".² By mid-2011, 50 per cent of the more than 39,500 North American screens had become digital.³ In the United States, the major distributors have announced that they will cease to distribute films on 35mm film by the end of 2013.⁴ On 9 November 2011, Twentieth Century Fox wrote a letter to exhibitors advising them to convert to digital as soon as possible because within two years, it would no longer supply them with 35mm prints and would cease paying Virtual Print Fees.⁵ The recent growth in the number of digital screens is due, in part, to this deadline that distributors have set for the payment of Virtual Print Fees, a fee paid to theaters that convert to digital projection to help exhibitors defray the cost of that conversion. Exhibitors must convert by September 2012, if they wish to receive VPFs.⁶ After that date, theaters will no longer be eligible for conversion funds from that pot of money.

35mm film, however, is not quite dead. After restructuring, Kodak will continue to produce 35mm motion picture negative and positive film; though camera owners have abandoned film for digital, Kodak still sells billions of feet of 35mm motion picture film each year.⁷ Variety estimates that from 50 to 70 per cent of commercial motion pictures are still shot on film and a number of major filmmakers, including Steven Spielberg, Christopher Nolan, Clint Eastwood, J.J. Abrams, Zack Snyder, and others, prefer to shoot on 35mm film.⁸ But even those who prefer film to digital understand that, by 2015, their work, though shot on film, will be distributed in digital copies.

Proponents of digital cinema, such as George Lucas, James Cameron, Robert Zemeckis, Robert Rodriguez, and Jeffrey Katzenberg, describe this historical turn as "revolutionary". Several essays in this issue challenge the status of digital cinema as "revolutionary", arguing that it merely simulates what has been done for decades on 35mm film. Gregory Zinman, for example, traces digital cinema back to efforts to "paint on film", seen in experimental works by Ruttmann, McLaren, Bartlett, Bute, Whitney, Paik, and others. Julie Turnock argues that the look of contemporary special effects sequences originates in the pre-digital, photorealistic aesthetic developed by ILM in the 1970s. My own essay insists on understanding digital cinema as a means of simulating codes and practices associated with 35mm film in order to duplicate its "look". Sara Ross compares the ways in which flight sequences are filmed and edited in the silent era and in recent digital 3D films, arguing for a certain generic consistency in their visual treatment (aside from a few computer generated "camera positions" that would be impossible in analog filming).

For the most part, essays in this issue do the work of film history, though the object of historical scrutiny is only a few years old. This means putting digital cinema in some sort of historical context, i.e. viewing it in terms of analog cinema (both experimental and narrative analog cinema). It also means exploring digital cinema's historical claims. But, most importantly, it means assembling...