How Dunkirk gave me a light-bulb moment about film
The other morning, when I was thinking about light bulbs, I had a bit of a light-bulb moment. It was after I’d been at the British Film Institute on London’s South Bank for an early screening of Christopher Nolan’s
Dunkirk, shown in the director’s preferred format: a 70mm Imax print as big as a tractor wheel. Seeing a film projected from a physical print – as opposed to the briefcase-sized digital cinema package (DCP) now standard in UK cinemas – is a rare treat these days, even for critics who watch five or six new releases every week. Unless you’ve deliberately sought out the experience, you probably haven’t seen film projected in a cinema for at least 10 years. But trying to explain what makes it so special can be tricky: in the past I’ve used words like “radiant” and “buttery”, then watched noses wrinkle in doubt.
Anyway, this great light-bulb story: my bedside lamp had conked out and the only spare bulbs in the house were the energy-efficient fluorescent kind that look like irradiated Walnut Whips, so I bought an old-fashioned, horribly energyinefficient halogen one. There’s no noticeable gap in brightness between the two, but the light from the halogen bulb as it falls on the page is like a completely different substance. If you’re a reader, you’ve almost certainly noticed this – it feels natural, even snug, in a way fluorescent light doesn’t. The words themselves don’t change, but the experience of reading them does. Ping! That’s like projection.
Or at least it sort of is, a bit. The specifics are complex, but the difference is as easy to spot as the wrong kind of lamp. Something you notice immediately, for instance, is the ease with which film captures natural light: the limitations of the digital colour palette don’t allow for it.
Then there’s the fine detail. Film, every frame of which is made up of a swarm of microscopic silver halide crystals, excels at reproducing it. Digital images, with their steady grids of pixels, really don’t – at least, not yet. Because it’s not like-for-like, comparing resolutions is a bit of a red herring. But to store all the visual information on a single frame of a 70mm print would require almost 25 megapixels, or 25 million individual points of coloured light. The best digital projectors in the UK, running at 4K ultra-high-definition, can stretch to eight megapixels per frame. In a typical multiplex screen, it’s two. There are some great directors, such as David Fincher, who shoot on digital cameras specifically to achieve that cool, lucid image. (Watching Gone
Girl is like looking in the fridge.) But that century-old photochemical technology is bearing up well.
As for Imax prints, those capture such a preposterously comprehensive image that comparisons are pointless. But all it means is it’s far easier to lose yourself in the image – and in a film like Dunkirk, where the Second World War seems to be unfolding in real time in front of your eyes, that makes the experience thrillingly immersive. That’s why Nolan, the director of the
Dark Knight trilogy and Interstellar and a career-long projection enthusiast, is pushing for the widest possible roll-out of 70mm prints of Dunkirk when it’s released next week – the widest given to any film since the Tom Cruise/Nicole Kidman vehicle
Far and Away 25 years ago. ( Dunkirk is better.)
A couple of years ago, I took part in a discussion panel organised by Nolan and Heather Stewart, the BFI’s creative director, about bringing film back from the brink. The issue, as Nolan framed it, ran as follows: it’s been convenient for distributors and cinemas to allow the format to die out in a way that meant consumers haven’t missed it. Striking a single 35mm print costs upwards of £1,100, while digital copies cost barely a tenth of that. And since DCPs require less attention – in theory, anyway, though victims of muffled sound and mangled aspect ratios in understaffed cinemas know otherwise – dedicated projectionists became a cuttable expense. Old projectors that had been purring flawlessly for decades were sold off for scrap. Arrivederci, Cinema Paradiso: the future was zeroes and ones.
But as Nolan pointed out at the time, we enthusiasts hadn’t done a good enough job of explaining what made projection so different. The conclusion was that cinemagoers should have the opportunity to find out for themselves: it would just take a bold director with a commercially appealing film in the can to be enough of a pain in the neck to insist on it.
And, well, here we are. In the UK from next week, selected cinemas in London, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Dublin will be showing
Dunkirk on a standard 70mm print, while the full Imax whack will be running on dedicated screens at the BFI and the Science Museum in London, and the Vue Printworks in Manchester. Several other cinemas will be screening 35mm prints. If you’re going to see the film, please seek one of them out. Take it from me: the effort is always worth it. After the release of Star Wars: The
Force Awakens, I made a point of seeing the 70mm print at the Science Museum. The viewing experience was so tinglingly intimate – compared to the pristine digital version I’d caught at a press preview the week beforehand – that I felt like I’d had a bath with the cast.
Around the same time, Quentin Tarantino, another champion of all things hairy and analogue, was rolling out his chamber western The Hateful
Eight with a 70mm roadshow. The UK leg wasn’t much to talk about: a single print trundled forlornly up and down the M1, stopping at only three cinemas en route. But in the United States and Canada, things were different, buzzy, hopeful: 100 venues, opening night queues, ticket sales records broken, higher average takings per screen than even Star Wars could manage.
Next week, we’ll find out if Dunkirk can stir similar interest – but in the age of Netflix and streaming on demand, cinemas have to show us things that we can’t see at home. Surely film is worth a shot?