PTA filmed The Master on 70mm and had 70mm blow-ups of Inherent Vice made, but Phantom Thread was the first time he’d committed to 70mm as the final necessary step-“because right now Kodak is trying to compete with digital, it makes their film stocks very, very fine grain,” his gaffer Michael Bauman told Indiewire’s Chris O’Falt in 2017. The other film event I was anticipating, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, had accomplished that, at least for its first limited-run month, by the expensive expedient of being shot on 35mm but (per experimental film-world wording) optimally “finished” and presented on 70mm at only four theaters. Granted, this level of control from initial conception to optimal presentation is a gallery space luxury, never a standard filmmakers have been able to guarantee themselves. I found myself stuck on this part of his “Statement for an Exhibition, Paris, 1992,” on the choices that come with photography: “in the first stage (taking the photo) these include framing, focus, exposure and lighting, but for me the choices made at this stage are also aimed at certain already defined decisions as to the final physical state of the print: whether it is to be printed on a surface, backlit or projected, also its size and shape, color grain and the mounting and physical placement of the photo/object in the gallery space ” I went all in, taking a hint from the volume’s availability at Anthology’s box office and buying October Files: Michael Snow to read along with the films. Most of his films were shot and shown on 16mm, making the few 35mm inclusions startling for their comparative, immediately perceptible sharpness and sheer volume. One was Anthology Film Archives’s pandemic-delayed retrospective of Canadian experimental filmmaker, multihyphenate artist and all-round hero Michael Snow-initially scheduled for March 2020, finally screened in December and finished just before Omicron started surging around me. releases shot in 35mm 1, the two movie events I was personally anticipating didn’t primarily revolve around that format. As I began, for the eighth year in a row (!), to research the year’s U.S.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |