Youth Without Youth & film grain

I watched the first half of Youth Without Youth today. I was sitting there entranced by how strange it was. It was pure Coppola visually—that rich, old world look. Beautiful cinematography But the picture was smooth and grain free. And there were all sorts of odd effects in it. Like a wave filter here and there. And some squished images. And upside down images. I had to look it up. YWY was shot on a Cine Alta, the same camera used to shoot Star Wars. Tiny $10 million budget. Edited by Walter Murch on FCP. Interesting grading choices. A lot of the beginning of the film is yellowish and orangeish, almost like the white balance is set wrong, but in a nice way. There were a couple of areas that looked video-ish I thought, particularly when faces were in shadows. They seemed a bit red and noisy sometimes. The movie wasn't that interesting to me so I spent most of the time looking at the nice pictures.

That got me thinking about digital technology and how it's changing viewer expecations. You may have heard the chatter about how studios are de-graining films for Blu-Ray. It seems that a lot of consumers are unhappy to find grain on their Blu-Ray movies (just search for "blu ray grain" to get an idea). My first reaction to this was shock, like what is wrong with people? But it started to make sense. First of all, if you're used to watching TV on HD, you're used to seeing a clean, grain-free image. I really don't think HD makes that much difference for a lot of films because of the inherent grain structure. But imagine you're a consumer who bought an expensive TV thinking that HD is supposed to look better. And imagine that you're a studio or electronics company trying to convince consumers that HD does in fact look better. You have the formula for a change in aesthetic right there. This means market forces drive studios to push for a cleaner, grain-free aesthetic in films. This means that Kodak ironically brings about the demise of film by selling film stocks that don't have perceptible grain (which they already do).

This also suggests that there could be another visible rupture in film viewing habits. There's a big gap between black-and-white and color and I wonder if there will be a similar gap between the grainy film look and the digital look? I know it seems unlikely, but consider Network. God, that thing looks terrible. I'm pretty sure it was shot in 35mm, but the opening scene looks like my mind's eye view of 16mm. Probably to kids today it looks like web cam footage. And think about my standby example Heaven's Gate. Even a few years ago, it was a good example of an overdone look-oriented film. But with everything going through DIs and various post-processes these days, Heaven's Gate just doesn't look like it used to. It almost looks more normal than something like Network. When it first came out, Heaven's Gate looked gauzy and finicky. But now that it's easier to get that look with digital grading the cinematography comes across more as an aesthetic choice while Network just looks... bad.