[Frameworks] Forbes editorial about Kodak

[Matt Helme]

You have Fuji,for now?
Matt

http://www.youtube.com/user/oscarthepug1234


http://www.youtube.com/user/matthelme007


________________________________
From: David Tetzlaff <djtet53 at gmail.com>
To: Experimental Film Discussion List <frameworks at jonasmekasfilms.com>
Sent: Tuesday, October 4, 2011 8:45 AM
Subject: Re: [Frameworks] Forbes editorial about Kodak

What's important about the Forbes piece is not the precise details (Kodak Park may not be shuttered, but it was more or less a ghost town as of 5 or 6 years ago), but the fact that a major business publication is looking at Kodak's stock collapse as a sign of 'the end.' Forbes is not going to print anything like that if Kodak has real chance of pulling out of it's tailspin. 

There's really nothing new here... The questions remain:

- What will happen to Kodak's motion picture stock business?

- If Kodak's film unit is just shut-down, rather then sold etc., what limitations will be imposed by whatever appears in it's place to provide small gauge filmmakers with material (SOMETHING will, but what?)

Strangely, for Frameworks, Aaron Ross seems to view things from the standpoint of the mainstream entertainment media biz, and from that perspective, he's no doubt correct. 35mm will hold on for a number of years, mainly because small theaters cannot afford the capital outlay to go to digital projection. But once that obstacle gets overcome, the 'movie biz' will be essentially all-digital.

I don't go out to 'the movies' much any more, but I did go see 'Drive' last night. The multiplex seems to have converted all or almost all of it's screens to DLP. I have been going to this theater over the course of 10 or 11 years now, and had many poor-quality viewing experiences there: films out of focus; uneven focal planes; multitudes of bad audio issues...  35mm projection is pretty complicated technology, and requires people who know what they're doing to be presented properly. And as we all know, the exhibitors cast aside professional projectionists long ago, leaving their multiple screens on some kind of automation system under the supervision of a single minimum-wage teen-age employee who had no idea how to handle any kind of problems, which happened pretty regularly...

I realized last night that digital fixes all that. No mechanical issues. No film to handle. No analog audio path to get messed up with ground loops. No deterioration of the print. The corporations have what they want now:  dutiful machines do all the real work, and a minimal staff of disposable low-wage workers is all that's required to run the show.

For the average moviegoer, this is an improvement. However 'cold' or 'dead' or whatever digital projection may seem to some in comparison to film, most people aren't going to care, and at the retail end out in the suburbs and towns it's going to work a lot better and more reliably.

Me, I'd MUCH rather watch a nice print projected properly (but then, I like real newspapers, magazines, books... you know, on paper...), but, really, over the years it's been like a 50/50 proposition at best that that's what you'll get for your $10. 

'Product' continues to be separated not just from 'art' but from human craft more generally. This should not come as a surprise. (For a good account of this process as history and concept, read Harry Braverman's 'Labor and Monopoly Capital'. Don't be scared by the title or cover, which evoke fears of thick academic jargon and proclamations of doctrinaire Marxist cant. It's actually an engaging read, and the politics aren't shouty at all...)

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