DCP and the Mission of the BFI

[htshell]

I've booked about 25 repertory titles for exhibition in the past year and zero of those titles has been available on DCP. I think the argument of projection/conversion needs to take into account that an extraordinarily small segment of all films will make it off celluloid and onto the proprietary DCP format. And DCP is just one of a myriad digital formats, who can say that the industry won't change its mind and move on to a different "standard" format in 5 years?

[MichaelB]

I've booked about 25 repertory titles for exhibition in the past year and zero of those titles has been available on DCP. I think the argument of projection/conversion needs to take into account that an extraordinarily small segment of all films will make it off celluloid and onto the proprietary DCP format. And DCP is just one of a myriad digital formats, who can say that the industry won't change its mind and move on to a different "standard" format in 5 years?

Absolutely - and this is not only a major, major headache but it also explains why archives like the BFI must hang onto their 35mm materials at all costs. Fortunately, this seems to be very much the intention, as demonstrated by the recent construction of a dedicated nitrate storage facility (essentially a gigantic £12 million freezer).

[Duncan Hopper]

As far as the BFI screening films at BFI southbank, this is a slightly different issue. Currently they have a Pasolini season, showing pretty much all his films, with an extended run of The Gospel According to Matthew. I saw Matthew first, as expected it was a DCP of the recent restoration, I then saw Oedipus Rex which was from the same restoration, however, this was screened on 35mm. So, in all likelihood, a 35mm was available for Matthew, but they chose to screen it in DCP, probably due to the many times they are screening it. It would have been nice to have been given the option of 35mm, as it seems there must be a print available.

But even if a print was available, would it have been in good enough condition to compete with a high-quality DCP, especially given that this was a showcase presentation? Or would it have been exactly the same print that I used to play over twenty years ago, with all that that implies in terms of (further) deterioration?

If you have the choice between a good 35mm print or a DCP, clearly a 35mm print is preferable. But if it's between a poor 35mm print or a DCP, there's a stronger case for a DCP. After all, I suspect far more people would be distracted by print damage, especially if it's in the form of projectionist splice repairs - as is often the case with prints that have done the rep-cinema rounds.

Although BFI Southbank has the huge advantage of access to the BFI National Archive, that doesn't invariably mean high-quality prints either. The Archive has to have at least two copies before they'll grant viewing status to one of them, and for obvious preservation reasons it's the poorer-quality copy (often a former distribution print) that'll be made available for public screenings, while the better-quality one is locked away in the vaults and banned from ever being projected. So, again, if the DCP is in better condition than the 35mm viewing copy, you're faced with the same decision.

Indeed, I agree. However, in this instance, I was interested in the Pasolini films, perhaps not the best example. But what interested me, was that most of them have been recently restored and the BFI seem to be showing nearly all of them on 35mm with the exception of Matthew, when it seems a 35mm was very likely availble if all the other restorations are showing on 35mm. Sorry if this wasn't clear, but I guess this also shows that the BFI ARE showing 35mm when DCP is also available. Which goes to prove that they are not only interested in DCP as some people would like to think. I assume they were using Matthew on DCP as it will be screened so many times and is, as you say, it being a 'showcase presentation'. That said, I'm greedy and want to see them all on 35mm!

[MichaelB]

Indeed, I agree. However, in this instance, I was interested in the Pasolini films, perhaps not the best example. But what interested me, was that most of them have been recently restored and the BFI seem to be showing nearly all of them on 35mm with the exception of Matthew, when it seems a 35mm was very likely availble if all the other restorations are showing on 35mm. Sorry if this wasn't clear, but I guess this also shows that the BFI ARE showing 35mm when DCP is also available. Which goes to prove that they are not only interested in DCP as some people would like to think.

Yes, that's absolutely the case. The BFI is completely pro-35mm (and pro-lots of other film formats), for reasons that hardly need spelling out - but it also has to make some very difficult decisions about the whole film-versus-digital conundrum, many of them with a keen eye turned towards what's likely to be happening over the next few years and the likely impact on archives and general archival practice. And it seems to me that their always-limited funds would be far better spent on preservation and high-definition digitisation than they would on striking increasingly expensive new 35mm prints to service an ever-dwindling number of venues that can handle them. Sad as it is, the latter is just not cost-effective any more.

Obviously, if there's any sign of them junking their 35mm collections, I'd be at the head of an angry mob descending on Berkhamsted (although flaming torches might not be an ideal protest medium where nitrate film is concerned), but I suspect the bulk of the staff would resign en masse if that was to happen.

[bdlover]

even I am finding it increasingly hard to tell the difference these days - and I grew up with 35mm and must have physically handled and/or examined hundreds of prints over the last couple of decades.

I've also handled 35mm and can't agree, so there we go. For one, film projection is capable of far greater contrast than video. Some may not perceive it on a screening-by-screening basis (the brain will compensate to some degree) but in a side-by-side comparsion the difference would be obvious even to the layman. Speaking of the brain, studies have shown that the particular flicker of 35mm projection triggers different brainwaves from the constancy of a digitally projected image. Another problem with the very latest digital projectors: they are far too bright. Compensating for the dark glasses that audiences wear during 3D films, 2D screenings from the same projector can be eye-burningly unpleasant. We come back to the essential principle that these are two very different mediums with very different feels and effects.

To come then to your question "even if a print was available (of Pasolini's Matthew), would it have been in good enough condition to compete with a high-quality DCP?" - the answer is that any functional 35mm print would be preferable to a digital copy. However, part of the BFI's good work used to be to the production of high quality new 35mm prints for flagship seasons as a matter of course - and I imagine this is where many of the prints from the current season come from. That the BFI no longer places emphasis on such important work is already a tragedy.

You attempt to argue from a position of 'reason', talking about "The way things are inescapably going", yet developments within modern commercial cinema are utterly irrelevant to way in which film history is preserved and presented to the public at the flagship venue like the BFI Southbank. Is not 99.9% of modern music produced electronically and 'performed' through large PA systems? Are traditional orchestras and opera houses not archaic and expensive to maintain? This is precisely why large, public-funded cultural bodies such as the Arts Council and the BFI exist in the first place...

Ultimately, it's all about the stock. It would be nice to believe that motion picture film stock will be with us for the foreseeable future, yet all evidence points to the contrary. Kodak is now the world's only remaining producer of motion picture stock. They are currently in administration and would have already ceased production if not for major studio subsidies which run out in 2015, by which date the studios intend to have bullied all of their directors and cinematographers into working on the Arri Alexa and Red. Unless public funding and/or philanthropy steps in, there will be no more film stock after this date. Duncan Hooper and others should therefore consider what this then means for events such as the recent Pasolini season at the BFI Southbank: once the stock disappears, those Pasolini prints will become irreplaceable. This means that ALL PRINTS will have to remain in the archive, can no longer be screened to the public. Programming will very soon be limited to the tiny percentage of older films that exist on DCP. And what this leads towards, inevitably, is the death of theatrical projection altogether, at least when it comes to arthouse, niche and repertory programming. THIS is the long term implication of the position Michael advocates, if you really think ahead instead of pandering to present political trends...

Yet the answer to this 'major, major headache' is simple - a publicly subsidised European facility to produce, develop and print motion picture film. That's it, there's no other answer.

[RossyG]

I'd like that to happen, although I wouldn't want to be the one explaining to tax payers in a recession why their money is being handed to Kodak.

Public funded bodies can't fight against this tide. The commercial interests are too great.

Ultimately, the people have the power with things like this. If enough people boycotted digital, with the latest blockbusters playing to empty houses, then the studios would be forced to return to celluloid. But this won't happen, sadly, as the vast majority of people don't care. To them, cinema is an amusement not an art-form.

I've stopped going to the cinema; I can get a good digital picture at home, so why bother? But I doubt they miss me much.

[MichaelB]

Yet the answer to this 'major, major headache' is simple - a publicly subsidised European facility to produce, develop and print motion picture film. That's it, there's no other answer.

But until such a thing actually happens, you can't base a workable preservation/screening policy around it.

Especially not if you have to justify such a policy to your paymasters, as of course the BFI has to do on a regular basis - and I imagine such scrutiny has increased since April 2011, when the BFI started being funded directly by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Even when the UK Film Council controlled the purse strings (and therefore acted as a flak-catching bridge between the BFI and the DCMS), their interrogation of senior BFI figures concerning exactly what they were spending public money on and about their medium and long-term strategy was decidedly aggressive - I had to give a presentation at such a meeting once, and I remember it vividly.

[bdlover]

I can see the challenge in mustering the will to act before the crisis hits - but hit it will, by which point it will be much much more expensive to do anything about it. Right now, a significant portion of costs could be reclaimed through commercial activities. There are studios and filmmakers who are still demanding negative stock for production purposes (Django Unchained, The Dark Knight Rises and Lincoln being just a few of the recent productions). Countries, especially in Asia, that are still reliant on 35mm for distribution. There are commercial facilities, although increasingly rare, where the stock may be processed and printed - so that side of the issue could be left for a later date. Then there's all the equipment owned by Fuji, the experts recently made redundant. Right now, a fairly cost effective plan could be mounted, one which would help stimulate the economy through the creation of jobs. Compared to the cost of not doing anything, the cultural devastation that will be wrought if film stock disappears altogether, it seems crazy not to at least start thinking about the issue and putting a contingency plan in place. Unless the alternative of making (and maintaining) a digital copy of every film ever made and then letting the original materials rot away in a vault really seems like the cheaper, more feasible and more enlightened option.

[TMDaines]

As to the populist arguments coming from Cheshire, eg. the student filmgoers who don't realise what they're missing, etc, I imagine in many cases this amounts to inexperience pure and simple. Have these kids seen Lawrence of Arabia, Playtime or 2001 projected in a new 70mm print from one of the front rows in NFT1? Or Once Upon a Time in the West or The Seven Samurai in 35mm for that matter? Even if they have, it would be foolish and bizarre to defer to popular intelligence in such matters. Can the average punter-on-the-street tell the difference between a Stradivari and a cheap Chinese knock off? In which case, wouldn't the former be better off used as firewood? The subtleties of a master pianist versus an accomplished amateur, the difference between a master painting and accomplished forgery, etc... In such matters we of course defer to experts in the field to guide us down the proper path, but in the tradition of British contempt for art, and art cinema in particular, such experts are now described as "loud voices", ie. crazies by implication (btw, you'll have to throw in the likes of Christopher Nolan or Quentin Tarantino, who recently declared that cinema is "over... television in public isn't what I signed up for"). Hey, if we're going to be truly populist then who cares about this old artsy crap anyway? Why not just burn all of it and run Ridley Scott movies 24/7? Cameron and The Sun would no doubt approve.

Really stupid to make a snipe at me. Seeing as you were interested in my location, you might want to consider my uni and the student cinema there. We're the only one in the country still equipped for 70mm and we show everything in 35mm where possible. Considering the state of the prints, however, especially for classic films, but also for something recent such as Anatolia, this is becoming ever harder to justify. Why watch a battered print full of scratches, cigarette burns and dirt specs when you can watch a pristine digital copy? If your argument is to try and get as close as possible to having the perfect experience, i.e. a freshly-struck, pristine 35mm print, then the digital copy gets far closer to this. The battered 35mm print just looks atrocious.

[MichaelB]

I wonder what Stanley Kubrick would have thought of digital presentations? Given that he used to employ spies to check out the print quality of his films at repertory screenings (I can confirm this from personal experience, having taken more than one follow-up call from Leon Vitali) and the fact that he distrusted cinema's presentational standards so much that he carried on mixing his films in mono long after multichannel formats had become the norm (certainly for major studio projects like his), would he have appreciated the fact that it's harder to fuck up a digital presentation, even if a flawless example won't quite match a screening of a pristine 35mm print?

[tenia]

Why watch a battered print full of scratches, cigarette burns and dirt specs when you can watch a pristine digital copy? If your argument is to try and get as close as possible to having the perfect experience, i.e. a freshly-struck, pristine 35mm print, then the digital copy gets far closer to this. The battered 35mm print just looks atrocious.

Isn't it a definite part of the problem ? Because it might come from a too low number of circulating 35mm copies, which could be solved by getting more 35mm copies printed, thus more rotation, less use of the same copy, and, for the late person to screen it, a better 35mm overall ?

I've seen battered 35mm copies, and I totally agree with you, but if digital copies are better for preservation, I also lean with a preference over 35mm-print look, even if there's a few scratches (but a few only, not an awful lot everywhere). And, for me, it's not exactly looking at the same part of the problem : in one case, you access the stability of the copy, in the other one, the "theoritical" superiority.

[TMDaines]

Sadly, I don't believe there is the market to justify them. Look at how few showings many of the BFI re-releases get across the country. The recently restored Underground had, what, three showings outside of London? I'm guessing that was digital and why wouldn't it be.

[MichaelB]

I've no idea how much a new 35mm print costs to strike these days, but it was four figures even twenty years ago - in other words, completely uneconomical unless accompanied by a properly marketed reissue. The costs would never be recouped purely by a handful of repertory bookings.

[RossyG]

When I was briefly a projectionist ten years ago, I was told each print cost about £2000.

[htshell]

Single 35mm prints are likely in the five figures (USD) these days.

[JamesF]

Apologies if the following post seems only tangentially related - I'm talking more from the industry perspective of distributors releasing contemporary films than the BFI releasing archival titles, but the two worlds will converge sooner than you think.

When I was briefly a projectionist ten years ago, I was told each print cost about £2000.

And that's versus costs that can be as low as £50 per drive to hire DCPs for a few months (the initial theatrical run, which may be all the film demands if it flops) and £250 to purchase a drive outright, after DCP authoring costs that can often be well below the cost of striking a single 35mm print. Those are low ballpark figures but give you an idea of just how relatively cheap even a good-quality DCP is in comparison. Absolutely dreadful for archival, of course - aside from the much-discussed unreliability/fragility of harddrives, also factor in the issue of KDMs: what happens if the lab is not around to issue them anymore?

Given the serious niche appeal of many of the films we're discussing and taking into account the percentage taken from the gross by cinemas, for the short-term purposes of exhibition, 35mm just doesn't make a shred of sense from an economical perspective anymore. I truly wish the opposite was the case; I see classic films in 35mm as much as my wallet will allow (gawd bless Prince Charles Cinema's cheap members prices!) and I completely agree we'll see swathes of films get lost from this era because there's no accessible industry-wide digital film archival policy in place. Ultimately, however, no distributor (independent or otherwise, BFI included) can argue with the kind of increased profit margin DCPs provide. I'd genuinely love to see an endless source of new 35mm stock coming out of Europe as bdlover proposes, but the horse has well and truly bolted in terms of film making a comeback in exhibition.

[bdlover]

I wonder what Stanley Kubrick would have thought of digital presentations?

He's turning in his grave, no doubt.

Re: "recouping costs", it was never before a prerequisite that a new print at the NFT be circulated nationally. I've seen many, many beautiful new prints over the years that certainly never made it out of London. Nb. Before Fuji threw in the towel, you could get a new colour print for <£1k, but now that Kodak hold the monopoly costs have sky-rocketed - just another argument for a European stock production factory, I would say.

But of course DCP is much cheaper for distributors, and this is the one and only reason it's been forced on us over the past 5 years (and the reason imho it can't be compared to a genuine technical advance such as the introduction of sound in the 1920s). Since the job of the BFI (and CNC, etc) is to protect the history of cinema for future generations, not to protect "profit margins", the argument is irrelevant in this context however. The very reason state and charitable funding is now required is because it is no longer profitable...

I should add that it isn't possible to separate acquisition and exhibition in a commercial context, since 95% of Kodak, Fuji and Agfa's motion picture income was from release prints. This is where the present situation differs even further from the genuine advances of sound and colour in the 20s and 30s: filmmakers were (and are) still free to make silent and black and white pictures if they chose, whereas the disappearance of film stock would deny hundreds of filmmakers from across the spectrum their medium of choice.

Just take the £40m or so that's thankfully not being spent on this jejune scrawling and secure the most important medium of the last century for another century to come - seems like a no-brainer to me...

[JamesF]

This article from ScreenDaily emphasises 35mm production but proof that hope is not dead just yet:

Company3 ties with iDailies to secure 35mm processing in UK

16 April, 2013 | By Adrian Pennington

The mid-term future of 35mm and 16mm film processing in the UK looks to have been secured in an eleventh hour deal struck between Deluxe-owned Company3 and London film lab iDailies.

The move comes in the wake of the pending closure of Technicolor’s processing facility at Pinewood Studios to which Deluxe had sub-contracted its 35mm/16mm color negative processing business since summer 2011.

The withdrawal of that lab threatened to leave the UK without significant film processing capacity.

The new deal enables 35mm projects currently in production or in pre-production in the UK, including Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella for Disney, to continue to be serviced in the country.

The deal is understood to be local to the UK and does not represent a reversal of the company’s wider policy of shuttering uneconomical labs worldwide.

“The agreement allows Co3 to continue to provide a full 35mm/16mm film service. There is a huge appetite among local clients and those overseas to continue shooting on film,” said Patrick Malone, Director of Digital Film Services at Company3 London.

“It’s one thing to base decisions on the global needs of a huge corporation and another in identifying the needs of clients which we see on a daily basis,” he added.

“Despite the understandable and inevitable fact that a huge lab can’t be sustained in this day and age, there is still a very real need to support those filmmakers choosing to shoot film.”

Directors UK victory

The initiative represents a victory for campaigning group Directors UK, whose members include Ken Loach, Stephen Frears, Lynne Ramsey and Paul Greengrass.

It had lobbied Deluxe, Technicolor and studios including Warner Bros. into maintaining a substantive 35mm processing presence on home soil.

Directors UK Film chair Iain Softley said: “There is a huge desire from all quarters of the industry to sustain film processing and manufacture. Our campaign is evolving and certainly will push forward.”

He added: “We are trying to make sure that all parties are aware of the filmmaker’s strong desire to continue working on film in the medium to short term.

“This is not a fringe issue but one that is central to the fatality of the film business in this country.”

iDailies boost

The Ealing, West London based-iDailies will increase capacity from 40,000ft to 100,000ft with the addition of a new chemical bath. It will also develop black and white developing, answer prints, soundtracks and film deliverables in conjunction with Company3.

Malone said Company3 has four features and one 16mm TV project currently shooting film.

“On average the UK would see about 25-30,000 ft processed a night throughout the year so the entire daily output could be done on one processing machine,” said John Tadros, co-founder, iDailies.

“Because the nature of filmmaking goes in peaks and troughs, realistically we need at least two machines to cater for periods of demand up to 100,000ft a night.”

Film “not dead”

Deluxe London, of which CO3 is a part, houses four telecine machines and two Arri scanners. Warner Bros. Anna Karenina and Universal’s Les Miserables are among recent 35mm projects transferred there.

“It’s likely that those filmmakers reluctant to switch to digital will revert back to 35mm if they made aware of an opportunity to do just that,” said Malone.

“A lot of people have the wrong impression that film is dead. It clearly is not. Filmmakers do not have to turn away from film.”

He added: “Digital is just as valid as shooting media is a subjective choice. We don’t think people should be forced down one route or another.”

The only other 35mm laboratory of note in the UK is Bucks Labs, a member of Kodak’s IMAGECARE Program.

Deluxe is a subsidiary of investor Ronald Perelman’s MacAndrews & Forbes Holdings.

Technicolor announced its decision to shutter the Pinewood lab in March.

[bdlover]

Yeah, this is good, however futile if Kodak stops producing the stock.