A Confounding Tension: looking back at the digital video cinema of the new millennium.

Heading into the new millennium, a major shift was beginning to happen in the world of filmmaking. Digital video was getting cheaper, easier to use and, in some cases, better-looking. Starting in the late nineties and continuing onto the mid-2000’s, many productions (both small and large) opted to shoot on standard definition video instead of 35mm film and then transferred the video onto 35mm film for distribution (once editing was complete).

The result was a blending of two mediums that produced bizarre and sometimes garish images, and in doing so created a brief period in film history where some movies looked completely different than they had ever before (looking back most people would probably characterize this looks as cheap or low-budget). Once HD and 4K cameras became available filmmakers opted to use those instead of lesser-quality SD cameras, leaving behind a look and feel that was unique and unprecedented. 

I should start by pointing out that DV-on-film is unique from the VHS aesthetic that is seen more and more frequently in the form of instagram filters. Those utilize analog-looking distortion and other VHS ephemera (date and time, horizontal tracking distortion), whereas what is being discussed here is the cumulative effects of transferring digital video onto analog film.

What it is that gives SD-on-film a unique look? Why is the DV image transformed when transferred onto film?  A few elements are at play:

SD video at the time was shot 60i, meaning the image was made up of 60 interlaced fields of motion per second.  In order to transfer that to film (which runs at 24 frames per second), the video needed to be interpolated, meaning fields are both combined and, in some cases, dropped. The result is that motion has a bizarre look, that is both smeary and cinematic, smashing together two wholly different visual contexts.  The effect is sometimes subtle, almost subliminal, but is wholly evident when comparing unaltered video footage with the final results of a film-out. Interpolation also sometimes leads to a doubling of images in one frame (if the source video was shot with a high shutter-speed).

The image itself retains the hallmarks of DV video: low detail, low dynamic range, limited color palette, and a wide depth of field. None of the drawbacks to shooting DV are improved with a film transfer (a common misconception back then). Beyond that, there is an evident tension in professionally color-graded low dynamic range images. Often you will see blown-out highlights pulled down, giving the whites in the image a cloudy look.

Another point of tension is the introduction of film grain. For productions mostly using a film transfer as a distribution tool grain would often be minimal being that it was transferred onto 35mm film. But for filmmakers utilizing a film-out as a step of the creative process by choosing unconventional film stocks this step had a huge impact on the look of the film.

There's also the tension present in watching a production that is entirely professionally made, save for the actual look of the image. Often in these films you have recognizable, talented actors giving great performances in what looks like a home movie. Depending on the context and the film, this can either undercut the performance and story, or enhance it.

The pinnacle of SD-on-film was undoubtedly the late 90’s and the early 2000’s, but what are the origins of this mode of production? I first became interested in looking into this when I remembered, perhaps inaccurately, a piece of trivia regarding the first performance to be nominated for an Oscar in which the film had been shot on video. As I recall the answers was a best-supporting actor nomination for a film from sometime in the 70’s, although I can’t seem to find the actual answer - as far as I can tell the only possibility would be Jack Gilford for Save The Tiger in 1974, which was shot on an experimental camera rig called a Cinamobile, although judging by movie's trailer is was almost certainly shot on film (also Jack Lemmon won best actor for the same film, undercutting the premise of the question).

Regardless of the actual answer to this question, my curiosity was piqued.  I had always assumed Video-on-film was a product of the late 90's. When did this process actually begin?

Transferring video to film is almost as old as video itself. Starting in the 1940’s, live television broadcasts were routinely preserved on film by recording a TV monitor with a film camera. This was before videotape existed and therefore was the only way to create a copy of a live TV show. Called “Kinoscopes,” these filmed reproductions were low-quality, due to the numerous image artifacts introduced when filming a TV screen. There were many different systems developed to limit these undesirable image problems, and the process was used well into the 1960’s. The technique was also used in the form of “hot-kinescopes” where a live broadcast was done for the east coast, then the resulting kinescope was broadcast at the corresponding time for the west coast.

Being that these kinoscopes are historically inaccurate in terms of how they reproduce a live TV broadcast (moving at 24fps and not 60i) recently there have been attempts made to restore the image to its original look. VidFIRE is software used primarily by the BBC that restores kinoscopes to 60i by digitally creating intermediate frames from 24fps material (this is the same technology responsible for the “motion-smoothing” scourge of most modern televisions). The recordings still have the many artifacts associated with filming a TV screen (loss of resolution, dirt and scratches), resulting in a true Frankenstein’s monster of cumulative dissonance.

Video-to-film transfers were also used to fill in the gaps of video technology, a prime example of this being Laugh In. The popular sketch series was shot on video, but since editing on analog video was cumbersome (especially for a fast paced show like Laugh-In), the video dailies were actually transferred onto film for editing, and then the original tapes were matched back to the film edits. This method is a bit ironic, considering the exact opposite would become true once digital video editing took off - in the early days of video editing often films would be shot on film, transferred to video, and then the film negatives matched to the video edit for release.

According to its wikipedia page the winner of the first film to utilize SD-on-film is 200 Motels, Frank Zappa's weirdo concert film from 1971. After being shot and edited on video it was transferred to film using a technicolor film printer. The film’s frantic pacing certainly feel well-suited for the visual dissonance of this process.

However, this claim to fame on the part of 200 Motels is not accurate. Starting in the early 60’s H. William "Bill" Sargent, Jr. pioneered the use of Electronovision in order to shoot films on video and distribute them on film. Using high-definition (for the time) black and white video cameras shooting in 819i, Sargent released a filmed version of Richard Burton’s Hamlet in 1964. Other releases to utilize Electronovision included The TAMI Show (a concert film) and Harlow, a biopic of Jean Harlow. Sargent’s company went out of business in 1966, although similar processes emerged in the 1970’s and their complexity speaks directly to the many issues inherent in video transfers.

From wikipedia:

Beyond Motels, there only appears to be a handful of films in the 70’s shot on video. Although technicolor was interested in pioneering this process as a new, cheap alternative to shooting film, it never really took off.  They even went so far as to finance the little-seen 1973 film Why, an improvised drama starring OJ Simpson and Tim Buckely as a showcase for SD-on-Film.

The only other examples I could find of SD cinema in the 70’s were The Resurrection of Zachary Wheeler, a 1971 sci-fi film starring Leslie Neilson and Norman… Is That You?, a Redd Foxx comedy based on a play is another example which was filmed with a multi-cam setup (like a sitcom). There also appears to be a western called Santee, but I couldn’t find very much information about it - the film is available on Amazon Prime, although it’s an SD version from an interlaced source and therefore hard to asses the image characteristics. According to wikipedia it was shot on the Norelco PCP-70 portable plumbicon NTSC camera, although from the looks of it, it really doesn't look like it was shot on video.

After the 70’s it appears SD on film slowed down for quite a while through the 80’s. Interestingly though there were a few films in the 80’s the were shot on early high definition video including Peter Del Monte’s Julia and Julia (shot on the Sony HDVS) and Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books (shot in the NHK “Hi-Vision” process). I find it to be almost anachronistic that the technology to shoot on HD video existed and was being used a full ten years before SD video was widely implemented, but it is in fact the case. Panavision seems to have been the first company to introduce an HD video camera to market, called the Panacam.

Starting in the mid-90’s we begin to see a new crop of films using SD-on-film.  An early and important proponent of this is undoubtedly Lars Von Trier, who shot The Idiots and Dancer in the Dark (using anamorphic lenses on PD-150) on SD video. But his experiments with video began before those films.

A few years ago Criterion released a Breaking the Waves on Blu-ray. In his review of the release, Mike D’Angelo commented on how bad the images looked: 

Having never seen the film myself and intrigued by this critique, I decided to look into it.  While the film was indeed shot on film, it (like many films from that era) was transferred onto video for editing.  But rather than simply use the SD video edit as a reference to conform the film negative to, they transferred the video back onto film. The result is an image that has many of the characteristics of film (depth of field, color tone), but lacks the vivid resolution of 35mm film.  It’s a bizarre choice that lacks any precedent.

The advent of cameras like the PD-150, VX1000 and XL1 gave filmmakers a tool that some had been hoping for - a small, easy to use camera that stood in stark contrast to a bulky film camera. One of the largest proponents of DV filmmaking was Von Trier’s Dogme 95 movement, a framework for filmmaking that placed harsh rules on how things could be shot - no artificial lighting or sets were allowed. The movement also specified that, while films can be shot on anything, they must be presented on 35mm film. Shooting on video and transferring to film was a natural fit for this mode of filmmaking.

Working within the Dogme 95 framework, Harmony Korine made what is, in my opinion, the absolute pinnacle of DV cinema in regards to the look and feel of the image matching the content of the film. Julien Donkey-Boy (released in 1999) tells the story of Julien, a disturbed young man dealing with mental illness and a bizarre home life.  The film was shot on a vairety of different DV cameras, and then transferred onto 16mm reversal film (a high-contrast, high saturated stock), before being transferred again onto 35mm for distribution. The results of all this is an utterly unique look that amplifies the characteristics of each stage of post work. The images are equal parts muddy, grainy, noisy, grimy etc. The production techniques extended beyond just the look of the film - Korine shot Julien with a number of cameras simultaneously, and incorporated that into how scenes were edited, thinking of the process as more of a math equation than traditional editing.

Von Trier utilized SD-on-film twice for The Idiots and Dancer in the Dark before switching to HD for Dogville. Dancer is certainly one of the more high-profile examples of this technique (other than maybe 28 Days Later) and both the film and the process of making it are spectacular exercises in cognitive dissonance. It’s a musical that looks like an amatuer film, starring one of the most famous singers on earth. It was shot with specially made anamorphic lenses, giving a widescreen look to decidedly lo-fi images. Some scenes are almost comical in how handheld the footage looks, while others are shot with rigidly locked down cameras, that almost feel arbitrary in their framing. The Idiots takes the looseness of the filmmaking even further, with crew members visible in some scenes.

Beyond Dogme 95, DV-on-film was only briefly embraced by mainstream filmmakers - from 1999 to around 2004 there were a few notable films shot this way, including 28 Days Later, Chuck and Buck, Tadpole, Bamboozled, Everything Put Together, Tortilla Soup, The Anniversary Party and November, which won the award for excellence in cinematography at Sundance in 2004.

The notable exception that I’m not including on that list is easily the most successful and famous film to utilize the method - The Blair With Project. It was shot on both video and film, and the use of video was in service of its mockumentary conceit.

Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle is also a notable addition in DV cinema and, when watching in the order they were shot (as opposed to numerical order), they serve as a visual history of evolving digital cinema. Cremaster 4 and 1 (made in 1994 and 1995) were shot on SD video and transferred on 35mm for screening purposes. Starting with Cremaster 5 in 1997, the series was shot with HD cameras, culminating in 2002’s epic-in-scale Cremaster 3. When watched as a series, the differences in the look of the films is immensely noticeable.

 The narrative film world only ever lightly embraced SD video. The documentary world was transformed by it. Starting in the late 90’s, shooting video became standard for docs, and allowed for many films to be made that probably wouldn’t have otherwise. But, its use was typically practical and not for aesthetic reasons.

The choice to use SD video is most striking in films where traditional 35 or 16mm film is also utilized. 28 Days Later was shot on the Canon XL1 for both creative and practical reasons. However the final scene of the film was shot with 35mm film, offering a stark juxtaposition with the rest of the film and accentuating the film’s happy ending. Spike Lee shot Bamboozled almost entirely on consumer-grade DV cameras, although the film’s TV show segments were shot on 16mm, often cutting back and forth between the two quickly within a scene - you can view a prime example of this here, at the bottom at the bottom of the page. Bamboozled is a satire about a modern-day minstrel show, and the harsh contrast between ugly imagery made palatable through the glamour of show business is evident in scenes like this.

Criterion’s recently release of Bamboozled is noteworthy because most of the films mentioned here are not available in high-quality formats (for the new release Criterion went back to the mini DV tape originals as opposed to transferring a print of the film, which you can read more about here). Most were released on DVD at the time they were made, but standard-definition compressed video makes it challenging to really assess the characteristics of the image in present-day. It might seem strange to be wanting HD versions of films shot in SD, but for films like Julien-Donkey Boy which incorporated the film-transfer step of post-production into their look, much of the grain is lost when watch in standard definition.

By 2004 HD had arrived and there was a vast drop-off in films shooting SD DV. There was, however, one notable straggler: David Lynch’s Inland Empire, shot on the PD-150.  Released in 2006, the film was the result of Lynch’s experimentation with shooting DV, and included stuff originally shot for his website.  Lynch compared the look of video to early film, saying that it left more “room to dream.” Ultimately the film suffers as a result of it’s look - it’s not just shot on DV, it’s shot poorly (by Lynch), and much of it feels arbitrarily composed.  It has an immediacy that undercuts the surreal selling point of Lynch’s other work.

Hal Hartley’s The Girl From Monday (released in 2005) is another late-period piece of DV cinema. Hartley shot the entire film using a variety of slow-shutter and frame rates, giving the film a smeared and stutter-y look (he had previously shot The Book of Life the same way). I attended a screening of the film where Hartley stated that he shot the film this way because he didn’t like the basic look of video, and felt it needed something more to make it interesting.

The landscape for DV on film gets sparse after Inland Empire. HD video was already taking hold and there was no longer a practical reason to use DV cameras when HD ones were just as affordable and mobile. George Lucas used early HD cameras to shoot The Phantom Menace in 1999 - right as SD-on-film was gaining momentum, it was already being outflanked. The difference between HD and SD cameras extended beyond simply how sharp the image was - HD cameras had a high dynamic range and, unlike many of the early SD cameras, they could shoot natively in 24 frames per second, eliminating the need to interpolate the images once transferred onto film and offering a less “smeary” digital-looking image (there were certainly SD cameras that could shoot 24p as well like the DVX100, which defined the looks of documentaries from this era). Ironically though, many early HD films made use of the fact that the cameras had a digital shutter and therefore the shutter speed could be set to the same speed as the frame rate being used - on film cameras the shutter is a physical piece of the camera that blocks light from entering in between frames and therefore your shutter speed can only ever be twice what your frame rate is. A digital shutter allowed for more light to enter the camera and made shooting in low-light easier but, like interpolated 60i footage, it gave the images a smeary, digital look (the first few films Michael Mann made digitally - Collateral, Miami Vice - feature this look heavily).

As digital cinema cameras advanced, the hallmark looks of early digital cinema disappeared. Only occasionally could some of these characteristics be seen in films like Tangerine or Unsane which were shot on iPhones. The iPhone shares a lot of the characteristics of DV video (wide depth of field, low dynamic range), although it has its own specific quirks too - most notably the frequent use of high-shutter photography due to the camera’s fixed aperture.

 Being it was utilized primarily for utilitarian reasons - the low cost and ease of use - and not for creative reasons, it is easy to see why filmmakers stopped shooting in standard definition. There seems to be very little interest or appreciation for this brief moment in cinematic history when films very suddenly started looking different than they ever had before. The Dogme 95 films, as revolutionary as they were at the time, do not seem to be inspiring a new generation of filmmakers to follow in their low-fi footsteps. Although some recent films like The Plagarists, Computer Chess and Stinking Heaven have utilized older analog video cameras for their productions, but they were presented in their native frame rate (60i, although Stinking Heaven appears that it may have been interpolated to 23.98) - indicated an interest on the filmmakers part in exploring a video look, and not a video-on-film look.

When it comes to the legacy of SD-on-film, the entire esthetic was abandoned and forgotten almost as quickly as it emerged.

April 2020