One hundred years ago, the Eastman Kodak Company introduced a shiny new camera that promised to revolutionize filmmaking. By then, the company had been selling film equipment for more than two decades, but this new device – the Ciné-Kodak camera, sold with the Kodascope projector – offered a new thrill: the ability to make and show movies at home, without special expertise.
The marvel of engineering, however, was not only the camera, but also the film inside. Until 1923, the film most commonly used in motion pictures was 35 millimeters wide. That year, Kodak produced a new size of just 16 millimeters. The image wasn’t as sharp when you blew it up on the big screen, but it allowed for smaller, cheaper and more portable cameras.
16 millimeters ushered in a new era of movies made outside of the Hollywood system. Ordinary people could now document their own lives, journalists and soldiers could film in the middle of war, and activists could make political documentaries on the streets. Until digital video emerged in the late 1990s, 16mm film was the mainstay of the amateur or independent filmmaker, requiring neither the investment nor the know-how of commercial cinema.
Last week at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, which has thousands of 16-millimeter reels in its collection, film archivist Elena Rossi-Snook projected short films for a group of students from Marymount Manhattan College. As the projector buzzed, a beam of light cut through the darkened room, painting the screen with scenes from the 1946 animated film “Boundary Lines,” a stirring Philip Stapp film about social integrity in the aftermath of World War II. That was followed by “The End,” an anti-war stoner comedy directed by a teenager, Alfonso Sanchez, in 1968. The third film, 1970’s “Black Faces,” was a lavish one-minute montage of portraits of Harlem residents.
These productions, precious documents of the lives and concerns of ordinary Americans, have endured, Rossi-Snook explained, because their creators had relatively cheap and easy access to film, a medium that can last for hundreds of years if properly preserved. .
Today, 16 millimeters is no longer optimal for the amateur filmmaker. Analog film is getting more and more expensive, fewer and fewer labs can handle it, and the format doesn’t allow for the near-unlimited recording and instant playback that video can. But even if it gets to 100, 16 millimeters will still have a unique look that neither 35 millimeter film nor video can match.
When analog film is projected on screen, it has a three-dimensional, pointillist texture called “grain”, a product of its synthetic makeup. There’s more grain in 16 millimeters than in 35 millimeters, resulting in a blurrier, more flickering image. In the 20th century, this was a disadvantage for professional filmmakers looking for sharp, theatrical images. But these days, as high-definition media saturates our lives, some directors opt for 16 millimeters precisely because of its grittier look. It reminds us that what we are looking at is not the world as it is, but filtered and transformed, with great creativity, through a chemical process.
Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky has shot several films on 16mm film, including “The Wrestler” (2008), “Black Swan” (2010), and “Mother!” (2017). But when he made his feature film debut ‘Pi’ (1998), 16 millimeters was a necessity, not a choice. The resolution of available digital cameras at the time was not good enough for making feature films, and Aronofsky could not afford 35 millimeters. But he and his cinematographer, Matthew Libatique, quickly realized that 16 millimeters — especially the high-contrast film they used called reversal film — emphasized the hallucinatory style of “Pi,” a black-and-white psychological thriller that delves into the obsessions of a paranoid number theorist. .
“We decided to really lean into the 16 millimeters,” Aronofsky said in a phone interview. “I wanted the big grain and the contrasting look. It’s funny because we just had the 25th anniversary of the movie and we blew it up for IMAX. And the IMAX people were nervous because of the grittiness. They wanted to know if I had a wanted to clean up part of the grain with computer technology. And we said: absolutely not. We thought it looked great.”
Several TV shows from the late ’90s and early 2000s, including “The O.C.” and “Sex and the City,” used Super 16, a 16-millimeter variation with a larger image area giving them a sense of real-time immediacy got. The first 10 seasons of “The Walking Dead” were also largely shot at 16 millimeters to capture the grimy, crumbling feel of classic horror cinema.
Cinematographer John Inwood, who filmed 150 episodes of the comedy “Scrubs,” recalled that 16-millimeter cameras, which are smaller and lighter than their 35-millimeter counterparts (and indeed many today’s professional video cameras), were critical to the development of the series. hectic mockumentary style.
“It was good for ‘Scrubs’ because we moved the cameras around a lot and we were sometimes in tight spaces,” he told me. “We shot in a real hospital, the former North Hollywood Hospital, and we shot into every square inch of it, even into the morgue.”
As digital cameras have become sharper and more versatile, many filmmakers have turned to 16 millimeters to evoke the analog past and the hazy, precarious nature of memory. In an interview with Gold Derby, Newton Thomas Sigel, who filmed Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods” (2020), said the director urged Netflix to use 16-millimeter reversal film for the sequences set during the war in Vietnam, despite the costs and logistical challenges. The film had to be shipped from Vietnam to an American lab for processing, and by the time the crew members could see what they had shot, Chadwick Boseman’s acting schedule was already over. But Lee was adamant that the scenes look authentic, like archival newsreels filmed in the field in the 1970s.
Veteran cinematographer Ed Lachman used Super 16 in two of his collaborations with director Todd Haynes, both period dramas: the miniseries ‘Mildred Pierce’ (2011) and ‘Carol’ (2015), for which he received an Academy Award. Award nomination.
Both projects were formatted to recreate photographic images from the 1940s and 1950s and the ruggedness of post-war America. But Lachman realized that the grain also brought “tension to the surface of the image,” paralleling the repressive qualities of the characters in both “Mildred Pierce” and “Carol.”
For Lachman, the appeal of 16 millimeters transcends nostalgia. It comes down to the status of cinema as art, intended to stylize rather than simply reproduce reality. He compared film to painting and grain to brush strokes. “The grain changes in every frame with exposure,” he said. “It’s like breathing, almost like an anthropomorphic quality.”
The filmmaker Kelly Reichardt recalled that when she started shooting her 2016 feature film ‘Certain Women’, she didn’t have the budget for 16 millimeters. But when she and her cameraman, Christopher Blauvelt, did some test shooting in Montana, where the film is set, Reichardt was shocked by how “flat” the snow looked on video.
“It wasn’t like that with film stocks Real look,” Reichardt said. “A lot of it is grain, and 16 has more grain than 35. So when you blow it up, you don’t get the hard lines you get in HD, which you see in sports.”
Thanks to a grant, Reichardt was finally able to shoot “Certain Women” at 16 millimeters. It made production more labor intensive, but the results – soft, textured images of wide roads, snowy mountains and grassy plains, all shimmering with light, dust and shadow – made it worth it.
“I think it’s about beauty in a way,” Reichardt said. “I remember on ’30 Rock’ they did something where Lemon walks in front of the HD camera, and it’s like she’s a skeleton. You know? You see every thing. It’s very ruthless. Also for nature.”