Chris Kenneally (2012)
I probably wouldn’t have read a long piece about the losing battle that film is now fighting with digital and I like documentaries to present the facts, so that I can decide what to make of them – without feeling I’m being steered in a particular direction. But the even-handedness of Side by Side makes for rather a dull film – I think I’d have preferred passionate partisanship. Chris Kenneally and Keanu Reeves, who co-produced and who conducts the interviews that Side by Side comprises, maybe sense this. Every so often, Reeves gesticulates a bit as if to liven things up – as if the talking heads aren’t quite enough. I guess it’s a fact of life that most of the people to whom these heads belong wear sneakers and have a takeaway coffee close at hand but these accoutrements come to seem more and more the work of wardrobe and a set dresser.
The narrative is well organised: there’s a description of how images are created on celluloid and digitally which, although incomprehensible to me, sounded as if it might well make sense to plenty of other people. Kenneally explains that, after the digitisation of sound and editing in cinema, photography had to follow. There are some interesting differences of opinion expressed – about whether the loss of daily rushes is a loss, about the unreliability of digital as a lasting archive. A couple of things have stuck in my mind. I was relieved to hear that Wally Pfister is driven mad by the darkness of 3D. Martin Scorsese wonders if young film viewers nowadays believe anything of what they see. But these things are peripheral to the main subject of Side by Side. Perhaps that subject isn’t sufficiently important to me because my greatest interest, performance on film, is relatively protected. There are laments about the loss of the communal experience of cinema but I can barely remember (as Barry Levinson can) curtains in the cinema. Although it’s important to me when the lights go down, I’m more than happy for most of the seats around me to be empty. I felt I should see Side by Side and I’m glad I did but I was glad when it was over too. Reeves talks to a lot of people – including those absolutely for digital (eg George Lucas), those absolutely against (eg Christopher Nolan), those who’ve been converted to it (eg Danny Boyle). The last group are the most interesting to listen to.
21 February 2013
