Movie Chile Review

Side By Side

By: Jon Bowman
Published online: Monday, November 12, 2012
Appeared in: Pasateimpo

Capsule review

Digital processes have lowered the costs of making movies, rendering the medium more democratic, but has that translated into better movies — better looking or more engaging — reaching the screen? This question is among those debated by scores of moviemakers in Side by Side, a timely exploration of an art form undergoing a sea change on the technological front. Film buffs and industry insiders will get the most out of this documentary, but it’s entertaining and accessible enough to retain a popular appeal, aided by the affable narrator and interviewer, Keanu Reeves. Not rated. 99 minutes.

Full Review

Side by Side, documentary, not rated, The Screen, 3.5 chiles

The 2012 election is over, but in Hollywood, a fierce debate rages on. It’s not focused on Clint Eastwood’s empty chair or Michael Moore’s in-your-face campaign ad, but on an even more polarizing topic that truly divides movie folks into warring camps. The battle lines are drawn over a technological revolution that’s transforming every phase of the industry — the rising dominance of digital cameras and editing tools, paired with the simultaneous collapse of the photochemical regimen that defined filmmaking for more than a century.

While films shot on celluloid continue to be made, their days are clearly numbered. Manufacturers have already stopped making 35 mm film cameras. It’s a medium operating on fumes and borrowed time, destined to disappear altogether within the next five to 10 years, regardless of the howls and complaints of traditionalists who maintain that celluloid produces aesthetically superior and longer-lasting imagery than its digital counterparts.

Christopher Kenneally’s new documentary, Side by Side, chronicles this sea change, allowing the purists to vent and wax eloquently about the dying of an art form, but also giving digital champions a chance to defend the new technologies and explain why they offer their own inherent artistic advantages. Economics have driven this makeover — digital movies are far less costly to make — but proponents say that going digital isn’t simply a matter of kowtowing to the almighty dollar. It has also had an egalitarian impact and opened doors within the industry to a younger and more diverse pool of artists, many of whom never would have caught a break in the old Hollywood.

Given its subject matter, Side by Side could have been strictly an insider affair, targeted solely to moviemakers and die-hard film buffs. But this work succeeds in busting out of that narrow mold and attaining a more populist and accessible appeal as a fascinating time capsule. As such, it couldn’t have come at a more opportune moment, with movie- making in a state of flux, undergoing greater upheaval than any juncture since the advent of sound.

Actor Keanu Reeves, who co-produced the doc, serves as narrator and interviewer. Those worried about his Bill and Ted aura can chill out. He’s quite good at the task, engaging in breezy yet revealing conversations with scores of directors, cinematographers, editors, actors, and technicians who outline how their job duties have radically shifted and how they’ve adjusted as working artists.

Some have openly embraced the change, such as the visionary George Lucas, who dismisses film as “a 19th-century invention,” and Robert Rodriguez, who says his cutting-edge features (including Sin City) “would not have existed if I shot film.” But on the flip side, one director of photography vows to hold out against the rising tides as long as possible, saying, “I’m not going to trade my oil paints for a box of crayons.”

Heavyweights aplenty weigh in here — Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, James Cameron, and David Fincher, among them — but some of the juiciest secrets are laid bare by lesser-known talents, discussing how digital has shaken up the old pecking order on movie sets, blurring time-honored distinctions and causing infighting over who will control the artistic process.

Writer-director Joel Schumacher (Batman Forever) delivers the most humorous line. Now that everyone can instantly see how a scene looks instead of waiting a day for the canned rushes, he says, the actors have become more self-conscious — some insist on reviewing each and every take. He jokes: “I’m convinced everyone’s just looking at their hair.”

Besides the many interviews, Side by Side presents a rich compendium of clips that capture how the look of movies keeps evolving. An extended section delves into the technical nitty-gritty surrounding different cameras that improved digital quality or became more compact and streamlined, allowing filmmakers to go new places, shoot in tighter spaces, or move about and improvise more freely than before. Some of this veers toward the geeky, but there’s also a fun, futuristic dimension to the probing, as we come to see how breakthroughs with new cameras made possible a new universe of special effects, coloring experiments, image alterations, and all manner of groundbreaking advances.

One of the best overviews comes from cameraman Anthony Dod Mantle, who was in on the ground floor with digital, having shot The Celebration for Danish director Thomas Vinterberg in 1998. Dod Mantle says he was “applauded and almost executed” at the same time for his unconventional, hand-held shooting style, and feared he might have destroyed his career. But 11 years later, as old prejudices and attitudes against digital relaxed, Dod Mantle became the first digital-based cinematographer to win an Oscar, for his craftsmanship on Slumdog Millionaire.

As quickly and dramatically as digital has reshaped filmmaking, fears linger about where it will lead. One observer says that over the past decade he has used 80 different video formats — the earliest and most primitive ones being totally incompatible with those now in vogue. This dizzying range of formats can be a nightmare for archivists. Imagine, as a writer, if you had penned a modern-day War and Peace, but only saved it on floppy disks. How could you go about retrieving your work after floppy disks had gone the way of dodo birds, and all floppy readers had become dinosaurs?

Lucas, for one, isn’t worried. Recently hailed by cultural critic Camille Paglia as the greatest artist of our time, Lucas is convinced that technology will triumph, saying that in the end, no matter how much it changes, novel ways will be found to transfer and preserve not only his Star Wars films — without degradation — but also every other meaningful movie from our era. Let’s hope he’s right.