Tools

Matt Zoller Seitz looks at the [end of an era](http://www.salon.com/2011/10/13/r_i_p_the_movie_camera_1888_2011/singleton/):

> [T]he three major manufacturers of motion picture film cameras — Aaton, ARRI and Panavision — have all ceased production of new cameras within the last year, and will only make digital movie cameras from now on. […]

> What this means is that, even though purists may continue to shoot movies on film, film itself will may become increasingly hard to come by, use, develop and preserve. It also means that the film camera — invented in 1888 by Louis Augustin Le Prince — will become to cinema what typewriters are to literature. Anybody who still uses a Smith-Corona or IBM Selectric typewriter knows what that means: if your beloved machine breaks, you can’t just take it to the local repair shop, you have to track down some old hermit in another town who advertises on Craigslist and stockpiles spare parts in his basement.

Typewriters are a tempting but imperfect analogy. Motion picture cameras have traditionally been a rental rather than a retail business, which means Panavision will have the parts and expertise to repair its cameras for quite a long time.

And film isn’t going away tomorrow. It’s still a better choice than video in many situations, for both technical and artistic reasons. A few weeks ago, I visited the set of R.I.P.D in Boston, where they were happily shooting digitally. But director Robert Schwentke told me there were still film cameras on set for high-speed work.

Other filmmakers will choose film for its look or its ruggedness. And they’ll keep having that choice. Film cameras last a long time. Part of the reason Aaton, ARRI and Panavision can stop making new ones is that they already have plenty, and can keep them running.

Still, it’s a moment worth noting. In an [article at Creative Cow](http://magazine.creativecow.net/article/film-fading-to-black), Debra Kaufman observes that we’re not talking about something that *will* happen; it’s already done:

> “Someone, somewhere in the world is now holding the last film camera ever to roll off the line.”

Khoi Vinh [doesn’t recommend the format](http://www.subtraction.com/2011/01/10/blu-ray-blues):

> Aside from the fact that Blu-Ray’s high definition picture is so ridiculously gorgeous, the whole format is demonstrably worse than what came before it.

> [Blu-ray] takes longer to load and menus take longer to navigate than on a stock DVD player. This is doubly frustrating because one of the early promises of the format was that users could pop in a disc and the movie would begin playing immediately, doing away with the interminable trailers that have opened DVDs for the past decade. Not only has that promise been essentially broken, but trailers are an even worse problem on Blu-Ray. Often the way a Blu-Ray disc is formatted, it’s harder to fast-forward through a bundle of trailers than it used to be on a DVD.

On friends’ recommendations, I bought a PS3 as my Blu-ray player. I’ve ended up really enjoying it as a game machine, but in two years, I’ve watched exactly two Blu-ray movies on it.

Remember the showdown between HD-DVD and Blu-ray? Streaming won.