We all know that our phones listen to us, right? That they keep track of keywords we say, then feed them to algorithms so we get served content that's of interest to us?
My phone did that to me this week. I'd been talking to my colleague, Kalum, who had written a story about film photography making a comeback in cinema with Jurassic World Rebirth. I'd also been talking to someone about David Lynch, after writing my own article about his camera collection being auctioned after his passing.
So my feeds were serving up numerous videos related to those topics. Ultimately the combination of 'film', 'David Lynch' and 'Jurassic Park' surfaced two very specific videos: one with David Lynch denouncing film photography (appropriately enough calling it "a dinosaur"), the other with Steven Spielberg singing its virtues.
My phone had unwittingly given me a debate between two of the finest auteurs in cinema history, arguing about film versus digital. And it made fascinating food for thought.
"A dinosaur. Dead. Completely ridiculous"
First up, Lynch. And while his handcrafted, artisanal methodology might suggest that he'd be a lover of shooting on film, it's fair to say that he had thoroughly soured on the medium. Which won't come as much surprise to his fans, given his lo-fi forays into digital video with films like Inland Empire (which was shot on a lone Sony PD150 miniDV camcorder).
"Now I love digital video," he proclaimed in the video that my feed served up to me. "And I'm through with film."
He made those comments back in 2006, the year Inland Empire was filmed, in an interview with Stuart Mabey. You can watch the excerpt above, while the full interview is here. But his position is pretty short and sweet.
"Even though I love film, it's a dinosaur. And everything about it is a dinosaur. And it's soon to be gone, pretty much forever. It happened in sound first – tape, analog, is so gone. You can't even get a roll of tape, hardly. And everything's digital, same thing with image."
Mabey was somewhat taken aback at this. Probing for more, he asked what Lynch thought of the the photochemical process. "Dinosaur. A dinosaur. Dead. Completely ridiculous… It scratches, it breaks, it's dirty – nothing but dirt on it. And no two prints are the same. It's a nightmare; you can hear the projectors chattering. It's a nightmare [laughs]."
When Mabey jests that Lynch isn't a cinema romantic, he smiled but his position was deadly serious. "I just love cinema, I love it. But I don't want to go there any more."
"The film itself, the image is alive"
The Spielberg video had been on my feed before, but I was happy to see it again – there's nothing like seeing this man evangelize about the filmmaking process.
And of course, he is one of the biggest champions of shooting on film – which is perhaps curious, given his friendship and working relationship with George Lucas, who was an early convert to digital photography. Yet Spielberg is unwavering.
"Digital photography is a science and and film photography is a chemical miracle," he told Kevin McCarthy for Fox 5 Washington DC back in 2017. "And when I say chemical miracle, it is – you never quite know what you're gonna get.
"And it always looks different, always looks real. There's grain, number one, and the grain is always moving, it's swimming. Which means that even in a still life, of let's say a flower on a table, that flower is alive even though it's not moving – because the film itself, the image is alive."
I have to wonder, when Spielberg directed Lynch on his 2022 film The Fabelmans, what the pair talked about in their downtime. Probably nothing as mechanical as 'film versus digital'… so I guess my eavesdropping little smart device has done me a favor, simulating that conversation for me. Thanks, algorithm.
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