[Frameworks] Quo Vadis Celluloid?

[David Tetzlaff]

I want to thank John Woods and Jay Hudson for offering additional info on the state of the photochemical film business. As John notes, Kodak operates at a level where motion picture film sales is little more than chump change. I didn't know that the decision to drop stocks was related to scrapping the machines used to make smaller runs... it all makes sense, though, in terms of Kodak's corporate mentality, and their utter inability to understand the connection between the small-stuff like fine arts filmmaking and non-industry-oriented education and the "bigger picture."

Jay offers an interesting scenario in the thought that Bollywood might pick up the pieces of film manufacturing in the wake of a Kodak default, or those assets being essentially discarded after a takeover by 'new media' giant. The idea of all the DPs, distributors and exhibitors still attached to celluloid having to buy everything from Mumbai is somehow fitting to the 21st century. And I suppose as long as any motion picture film stock is being made, someone will split it down to re-canned 16mm and re-spooled Super-8 cartridges. 

That's really the economic question: if Kodak-as-we-know-it folds is anyone going to be able to operate a motion-picture-film manufacturing plant at a profit margin acceptable to whatever capitalists might invest in it. In some parts of the world this might include government subsidy and/or the exploitation of cheap labor. Old school toxicities to join all the hi-tech poisons foisted upon the proletariat of 'emerging nations!' No pension funds to fall $1.2 billion behind.

---

As for the chef metaphor... 'film' is not analogous to 'goat's milk' but to 'dairy products.' That is, as Fred has come to understand, even if there are some unbridgeable differences between 'film' and 'video,' neither of these things have a defining essence that unites all their variants. For example, the difference between 1) watching a Brakhage film shot on regular 8 and projected in regular 8 from a beat-up print in a basement cinemateque, and 2) watching a freshly-struck 70mm print of "The Longest Day" in a 'picture palace' equipped with carbon-arc projection... is greater than the difference between 1) watching a clean 16mm print of "Cat's Cradle" projected on an Eiki SSL-OL and 2) watching a BluRay of "Cat's Cradle" projected on a 3-chip DLP Panasonic at the same image size in the same auditorium. 

The goat's milk is already gone: Kodachrome, and before that 7240 and before that ECO and so on. Vision? 100D? It's all cow's milk. But our chef is not only not going to stop cooking if goats become extinct, she's not going to stop cooking if all dairy production stops and the only thing left available is soybean based simulations. She may not be happy about it, but if she's a real chef she'll keep cooking because that's what chefs do. 

Fred's query plays by the heuristic of my original post: the 'what if there was no more film?' question. He asked "What is there about your particular practice that depends only on celluloid and could not be accomplished with [high definition] video?" And no one has answered him. Various posts have offered a number of reasons for preferring film, (a number of them, again, falsely essentialized). But these posts are not playing the 'what if' game. In this sense the key word in Fred's guestion is "depends". 

Now, playing along with the thought experiment (and Fred did say he found the prospect of the demise of celluloid horrifying and hoped it was not, in fact, impending) is NOT an attempt to declare cow's milk the equal of goat's milk or to suggest that the chef change recipes while goats continue to lactate. When Fred said, "I don't think we should  
have mystical, or fetishistic, attachments to any particular media, but rather, explore the possibilities of whatever media we are able to use," I understood him to be addressing the larger theoretical question, and amplifying his contention that "What matters is results," not making some kind of blanket judgment about how individual artists may approach their work. He used the plural 'we', not the singular, 'you.' So if 'you' get satisfying aesthetic results by fetishizing your favorite emulsion and having a mystical relationship with your Lomo tank, that's all good, but it has nothing to do with whether 'we' (in any sense) hold mystical and fetishistic views about particular media, anymore than we need to grant validity to Crowleyism to appreciate Kenneth Anger films.