Jackpot and Session 9 Are Proof that HD Movies Can Be As Intimate and Lovely as Those on Film
As director Robert Zemeckis pointed out, moviemaking has been a film sandwich for years now: everything between the shooting of the movie and its theatrical projection is done with computers; that includes the cutting, the sound mixing and the scoring. It was only a matter of time before the industry figured out a way to make the bread digital as well. The main question moviemakers are asking now is, "Is the convenience and control of video worth an inferior image?" Despite major advances in film-to-tape image quality, notably in such films as The Anniversary Party and The Heart of the World, feature-length movies shot on digital video and transferred to film tend to give away their video origins no matter how hard the filmmakers labor to disguise them. When the camera moves across bright indoor lights or reflections from the sun, you sometimes see a slight afterimage you just don't get with film. In scenes shot against sunlit windows, the windows "blow out," going totally white and losing any detail on the other side of the window. Diagonal perspective lines often break up into disconnected sticks. And if a director puts a plaid shirt or a screen door onscreen, watch out; the resolution of digital video is still so low that when the image is recorded to film, these busy visual patterns seem to oscillate and shimmer.
Perhaps the most sensible thing DV moviemakers can do is stop pretending they're shooting film, and embrace the video-ness of video. About seven years ago, Hoop Dreams, a documentary shot with tv-news-quality Beta video cameras and then recorded to film, became a huge critical and popular success, even though it didn't look or move anything like film. The cliche is probably true: if the drama is interesting, most viewers don't care about the format. And if they do care, there isn't much a moviemaker who's chosen to shoot video can do, besides turn in a good movie. Film has certain properties that can't be duplicated even by the most sophisticated video. Because it's a chemical process?and because the grain in celluloid appears randomly, almost organically?film records light and shadow imprecisely, irregularly, lending the image a pulsing, lifelike energy. The video image can't replicate that energy because it's more like a board comprised of itty-bitty mosaic tiles that always stay in the same place on the screen; this accounts for the slightly cold, rigid quality some film boosters attribute to video.
Another big problem with video is that it records images at a different speed from film?30 frames per second, compared to 24 for film?which smooths out movement and eliminates some of the flickering mystery we associate with movies. (The flicker returns, rather halfheartedly, when video images are converted to 35 mm film for theatrical release.)
High definition video is a different ballgame. Although the equipment is expensive and much less portable than digital video, the density of the HD image is vastly superior. When recorded to film, HD images are about as detailed as images produced with Super-16 film, a format often used by independent dramatic filmmakers (including Mike Figgis, who shot Leaving Las Vegas on Super-16) and by some documentarians. The video-to-film tradeoff?an image that doesn't look like 35 mm film, or film, period?seems much less pernicious when the movie was shot on HD. It just so happens that some new HD cameras shoot at 24 frames per second, which eliminates the frame rate conversion problem. George Lucas used a 24-frame HD camera to shoot the new Star Wars movie due next summer. If you saw The Phantom Menace, you know the technical experiment won't mean much if audiences have to suffer through more of Jar Jar Binks.
No matter: This past month has seen the release of two small, inexpensive, character-driven movies shot with the same HD camera Lucas favored. One is the road movie Jackpot, which opened July 28; the other is Session 9, a haunted-house horror picture that opens Friday. Neither is a great or perfect movie. Yet both Jackpot and Session 9 suggest that HD movies can be as intimate, peculiar and lovely as anything shot on film. The density of the movies' HD video images, when coupled with the organic liveliness of the 35 mm film they're recorded to, hints that the creators of these two films are figuring out how to fuse the best of both formats: video's quietness, intimacy, cheapness and astounding sensitivity to light, and film's painterly richness.
What I'm talking about here is an esthetic conversion rather than a technical one. From The Celebration (which I liked) to Dancer in the Dark (which I didn't), DV movies have traditionally made what I think is a key mistake: they look and move too much like video projects. The camera whips all over the place and cuts, cuts, cuts?suggesting that the director really dug the fact that he had so many cameras on hand even though he probably didn't need them all, and felt obligated to include snippets from every angle just to prove he really was everyplace at once. A bit more deliberation and selectivity might have made the stories feel weightier, more precise?more like honest-to-God movies and less like playful experiments by creative folks with nothing to lose. (Timecode went too far in the opposite direction, splitting the screen into quadrants and rarely cutting at all; it was like a modern version of Andy Warhol's split-screen verite mishmash The Chelsea Girls, but without the charm.)
Session 9?a chiller about a hazardous waste disposal crew that's been assigned to decontaminate an abandoned mental institution?does not make the same mistakes. Scene for scene, it feels like a real movie; cinematographer Uta Briesewitz frames the long, rectangular, Cinemascope-shaped images in order to isolate characters in the frame (sometimes in closeup).
You're aware of the person in the frame and the darkness behind him, around him, above him. It's classic horror film direction, reminiscent of the original Alien. Sound designer Lisle Houston Engle and soundtrack composer Climax Golden Twins go the David Lynch route, backing the film's cautious exploratory trips into the bowels of the asylum with an array of disturbing sound effects and music cues. Some sound organic, others vaguely industrial or electronic; either way, you're not sure what you're listening to, or whether you should be scared of it.
Shot on HD and recorded to film, Session 9 has an icy, drained beauty. Director Brad Anderson contrasts the golden yellows, browns and oranges of a Massachusetts fall against the rotting impasto interior of the dank asylum, which supposedly was abandoned in the 1980s after a string of disastrous experimental therapies uncovered tales of Satanism and ritual sacrifice. Only hardcore film buffs and filmmakers will spend time pondering the physical properties of the image; they'll be too busy sweating with hero Gordon Fleming (Peter Mullan), the owner of the hazmat company, who promised to clear the whole enormous building in one week and is having trouble keeping his fractious crew (David Caruso, Josh Lucas, Brendan Sexton III, Stephen Gevedon) from fighting. But if you have an eye for such things, you'll be intrigued, perhaps excited, by the look of Session 9. The HD images very rarely give away their origins, unless you know what to look for. (For instance, the sense of depth in the images: it's too mathematical, too boxy, to pass for film.) Yet its not-quite-film look works to increase the sense of intimacy and undefinable spookiness. Like The Blair Witch Project without the conceptual gimmickry, Session 9 plays on our comfort with video in order to make a horror story feel more real somehow?more connected to everyday life.
Jackpot, the second movie from twin brothers Michael and Mark Polish, takes that everyday connection even further. Unlike Session 9, it's not a genre piece?unless you consider grungy, laid-back, semi-improvised 70s movies like Scarecrow to be a genre. (I kind of do.) Jon Gries, who had a small part in the Polish brothers' debut film Twin Falls Idaho, plays the hero, Sunny Holiday, a karaoke singer who's traveling the country with his elderly manager, Les (Garrett Morris), competing in karaoke contests. He likes to bust out with a little George "No Show" Jones?a significant match of interpreter and artist, considering that Sunny, like Jones during his disaster years, has had trouble taking responsibility for his life and career. Despite his gentle speaking voice and somewhat boyish demeanor, he's a womanizer and a flake?a guy who's deluded himself into believing he's a star of sorts.
The Polish brothers never quite get us to believe their central conceit?a whole detailed, coast-to-coast subculture of professional karaoke, where thin-voiced posers like Sunny can command a room and subsist (barely) on prize money. An early scene where Sunny whips a crowd into a frenzy isn't convincing at all; it tries to generate energy through quick cutting, presumably because Sunny's musical performance is just barely competent. But these are matters for karaoke fans to debate; I believed in Sunny and Les because Gries and Morris had such a lived-in rapport, and because the look and sound of the film struck me as deeply, woozily cinematic. M. David Mullen, who shot Twin Falls Idaho, was the director of photography on Jackpot, and he and his collaborators compose the shots with confidence, filling the screen with a range of different textures (screen doors, hanging beads, Christmas lights, smoky spotlight beams). The bar scenes have a whiskey-soaked loveliness, with rich, flat browns and reds framing luminous faces.
Intriguingly, Jackpot shares with Session 9 a nonlinear sense of how editing can be used?not merely to advance the story, but to comment on the storytelling process, and to suggest the eddies and currents of one character's ever-shifting consciousness. (It's somewhere between the third-person omniscient voice in literature and first person.) This is a familiar approach in movies made by people who grew up with videotape and computers; they think in nonlinear terms, jumping back and forth through time, and moving in and out of characters' consciousnesses. This approach, seen in The Heart of the World as well, hints that perhaps the future of digital cinema will be more cinematic, more image-dependent, less word-driven and linear than the feature-length films that foes of digital cinema often hold up as examples of beauty that can't be achieved without celluloid. At points in both Jackpot (an extended flashback by Sunny) and Session 9 (in which time appears to be splintered by the asylum itself), we suspect that what we're watching is not an objective representation of dramatic events?the usual tactic for feature-length movies?but a highly suggestive facsimile, tainted by personal emotions and collective memory. There is beauty in both movies, and it's not beauty imposed from without; it's beauty recognized from the inside, by participants in a hidden world who've grown to love their familiar surroundings, and their chosen medium.
In time, for better or worse, digital cinema will find its own set of rules, its own fallback language, and audiences may grow to love and respect movies not shot on film. Session 9 and Jackpot alone won't do the job, but they're steps in that direction.
Framed
The rarely seen 1914 silent film His Majesty, The Scarecrow of Oz, opening this Friday, Aug. 10, at Two Boots Den of Cin, is so primitive that watching it forces you to imagine your way back into another era, before the basic rules of dramatic feature-film grammar had been figured out. (The period before Griffith; the period digital filmmakers are in now.) It's one of three features directed by Oz mastermind L. Frank Baum from his own books?and the only one that survived intact. The no-name cast scampers across terrain that looks suspiciously like Southern California, trying to enact a partly comprehensible story of royal romance (the evil King Krewl wants his princess daughter to marry a courtier named Googly-Goo rather than a low-born gardener). Yet the spareness of the images has its own brand of effectiveness; once you settle into this silent adventure, you find yourself getting into it and wondering things you never wonder about while you're watching contemporary high-tech blockbusters. For example: the guy in the donkey outfit has moveable ears and, it seems, moveable eyes as well; if he walks on all fours, how are his expressions controlled? Perhaps these and other low-tech secrets are buried deep in Oz.