Alongside low-resolution realism, some films demonstrated what would become a prevailing theme over the decade: the effort to obscure the cinematography’s origins in video. The Anniversary Party (Alan Cumming and Jennifer Jason Leigh, 2001, d.p. John Bailey) and Jackpot (Michael Polish, 2001, d.p. M. David Mullen) were dramatic features in which the filmmakers did their best to hew to
classical form and re-create film-look. Video cameras had a tendency to “blow out” highlights, were ill suited for creating depth of field effects, and usually suf-fered poor color rendition compared to film. Stuck with such limitations, these movies may seem examples of “low-resolution realism” in action, but rather they showed that a thoughtful shooting plan and careful avoidance of certain lighting situations made it possible to bridge the gap between serious video- and film-based cinematography.
Jackpot was one of the first features to use a new 24-frame-per-second high- definition video camera (a collaboration between Sony and Panavision marketed as CineAlta). The shift to 24 fps was seen by many as a qualitative improvement over video’s usual 30 fps. The most widely seen features in this period used the CineAlta, not for dramas but to better integrate live-action photography with extensive visual effects workflows. George Lucas used the CineAlta in his move to video-based photography for Star Wars: Attack of the Clones (2002) and Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith (2005).35 In remounting the Star Wars franchise, Lucas hired a trusted collaborator, cinematographer David Tattersall. Tattersall had experience with film-based photography on Lucas’s Radioland Murders (Mel Smith, 1994) and with creating cost-sensitive combinations of film- and visual- effects workflows on the Lucasfilm-produced television series The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones (1992–93). Despite the professional pedigree of its cre-ators, the look of the Star Wars prequels only served to confirm the fears of many cinematographers, who judged them to be unattractively flat and unexpressive.
The look was more akin to television than cinema, and the cinematography was subservient to visual effects processes such as integrating live actors with CGI characters like Yoda or Jar Jar Binks (figure 6.4).
Robert Rodriguez, with encouragement from Lucas, used the CineAlta for Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams (2002), Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003, shot in 2001), and several later films, filling the role of cinematographer himself. Cin-ematographers watched these developments with great interest and considerable
Figure 6.4: Video-based cinematography facilitated the inclusion of cgi characters in Star Wars: Attack of the Clones (2002).
skepticism, especially as Lucas adopted the role of digital evangelist, vouching for the new technology across the Hollywood trade press.36 The more cynical among them noted Lucas’s longstanding relationship with Sony and Sony’s enormous advertising budget in the trades. However, unlike Rodriguez, who ceased to hire professional cinematographers after Once Upon a Time in Mexico and (like Figgis and Soderbergh) began operating his own camera, Lucas continued to use sea-soned professionals such as Tattersall for the Star Wars films and other projects.
This difference revealed much about Lucas and Rodriguez’s vastly different rela-tionships with the Hollywood studios and the greater production community.
Lucas continued to work closely with craft guilds, the trade press, and other insti-tutions, spinning a story of digital inevitability, while Rodriguez was most visible as an antagonist to traditional production methods, decrying Hollywood in a series of interviews and engaging in public battles with the craft unions—battles discussed below.37
Considerable press attention was lavished on new cameras in this period, especially their frame rates, resolution, light sensitivity, and other specifications of their high-tech sensors, often leading to widespread confusion as to where the lines between video, digital, and digital-video should be drawn. Less attention was paid to the lack of professional quality lenses for the new generation of cameras.
Without quality “glass,” the cameras were limited by lenses developed for the vid-eo-based sensors, with inferior resolving power, less ability to pass light through to the imaging chips, and distortion problems profoundly unappealing to profes-sional cinematographers. The next generation of Sony/Panavision cameras, the Genesis (2004), sought to correct these problems by adopting a larger sensor (the same size as a 35mm frame) and a new design configured to accept Panavision’s Cine Primo lenses, leading to depth-of-field performance much closer to film-based cinematography and further reducing the distance between video-look and film-look. Generations of lenses and imaging chips that followed continued to bring video and digital cameras closer to the affordances of film imaging.38
Low-resolution auteurs and special-effects integrators demonstrated to audi-ences and filmmakers alike the new possibilities of digital cinema. Despite the wide discussion of those films, though, critics and professional cinematographers largely dismissed the photography of these early video features as experimen-tal dead-ends, amateurish, or worse: recalling the flat, overlit style of some series television. Cinematographers pointed to most of these films as examples of producers’ misguided rush to adopt video and digital production methods for dubious cost benefits and the burst of free press they received for joining the “digital cinema” revolution.39 The complaints weren’t unfounded, but they also ignored an important point. In many cases the low-resolution realists and special-effects integrators alike were breaking with traditional production struc-tures, challenging the impersonal, market-tested storytelling conventions of the studio system and testing new divisions of labor. In doing so, they demonstrated,
for better or worse, how efficiencies in the production workflow could increase authority for the producer or director, and how malleability of the image through postproduction might outweigh the aesthetic benefits of careful cinematography and film-based imaging.