David,
Just caught up with your postscript. In the discussion of video projection vs. film, you ask: “What is the distinction is between hypnosis and reverie? That sounds like mystical poetry.” I first got turned on o this in Jerry Mander’s book Four Arguments for the Abolition of Television. To simplify, he suggests that TV actually does hypnotize its viewers, while film creates more of a dream state. That is one reason so many of us get restless when a film runs for more than two hours, yet are perfectly capable of watching the TV for five hours at a stretch. We can only take so much dreaming, perhaps.
My own feeling is that when a film is really working, it takes me to a mental state that nothing on television has ever approached. Nor have I ever felt, even on the very best video projection systems, the film experience. I am proud of my home-theater setup. A superb Runco quadrupling projector, DVD as source, THX surround, 10-foot-wide screen, etc. But film it ain’t.
Digital projection, of course, is not to be confused with projected television. It does not scan the screen but organizes the material into digital “frames.” Whether these frames do the same thing as frames of film is doubtful, but Hollywood has certainly not spent one dime to find out. (One wistfully pictures the lab technicians of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, with their beakers and flasks.)
As for subjective comparisons between projected video and projected film, I have here an e-mail from a man who asks not to be quoted by his name (which you would recognize and respect), who points out:
“They’re digitally projecting at 2k … but also comparing against film at 2k, so that both film and digital are of equal resolution. And both are half of the normal film resolution of 4k. I would love to see them put up something digital against a film image by Freddie Young, even derived from an older (grainier) film stock. In short, as I see it, the test of digital vs. film is rigged to make digital look good.”
What we have here is a company (TI) with unlimited resources that wants to take film away from us and replace it with their system. And the film community is so technically uninterested and illiterate that there is no outcry. I myself feel keenly inadequate on this subject. I am not technically trained. But I got into this issue and the more I find out about it, the more disturbed I grow.
Best,
Roger
