Are we losing certain cinematic looks because older film stock is gone?

roxics

roxics

Veteran
I've been watching some films lately from the 1970s and I can't help but feel like we're losing some looks we can't duplicate anymore.
This isn't true so much in the world of painting or other art forms. If you're talented enough you can still make what looks like a Renaissance painting. The materials still exist.
Since most audio gear has been electronic and at worse the consumable is tape that can be reused, you can still find the older gear and use it today to get that sound.
But the same isn't so true in cinema where older film stocks no longer exist or can be reused to create that look anymore.
Digital hasn't been able to duplicate those looks either.

I feel like we are losing something valuable. I would love to shoot a film today that looks like it was shot in the 70s and given a modern HD scan.
I love the color and texture of those films. The skin tones, the subtle flickering of the image, the grain.
I wish someone would build a digital camera that could emulate that right off the camera with the same kind of quality.
 
I would settle for every film not looking the same/ultra processed. It's not just the digital thing. . .plenty of TV material looks pretty "natural" as far as colors, contrast, etc., but seems like every film has all the dials cranked to 12. Go back and look at stuff even up to the early 2000s and you see a lot less of that.
 
Digital can pretty much imitate anything ( provided you know what you are after in post processing ) so I would not worry that any kind of look is disappearing any time soon.

When I think of the look of 1970's films the first thing that comes to mind is over-lit shots that do not look natural at all. From my perspective film lighting has been getting better decade after decade, to the point where we can now blend artificial lighting with natural lighting and often it looks seamless.
 
TheDingo said:
Digital can pretty much imitate anything ( provided you know what you are after in post processing ) so I would not worry that any kind of look is disappearing any time soon.

When I think of the look of 1970's films the first thing that comes to mind is over-lit shots that do not look natural at all. From my perspective film lighting has been getting better decade after decade, to the point where we can now blend artificial lighting with natural lighting and often it looks seamless.
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I agree. And Josh Bass has a point too: the overly cleaned up look these days feels pretty flat to me. Lack of character. It's like what's happening to music production, where the digital capabilities have led people to clean up the sound so much that there is no soul left in it - no character. I don't think it's just nostalgia talking - though maybe there's that too - but more about how the human brain works: the brain needs a context, a bed of sound/visual background. When you are in nature, you rarely have dead silence, or extremely uniform look (although that can happen in extremes: think deep in Antarctica). But mostly, you are surrounded by what sound pros call 'ambient atmosphere' 'room tone' etc., and if it's completely lacking, as in modern production, where real instruments are often completely absent, you can generate tracks that have nothing but pure sound devoid of any sound bed. I'm not used to seeing a close up of people's skin pores as if I'm looking at their magnified faces from 2 inches away. A certain amount of blur or font smoothing is more pleasant to look at than the super clinical digital look. But it's like any new technology - we have new powerful tools, and it takes time to find the optimal way of using them. Right now we've swung away from "noise" too far, and we'll eventually rebalance as we always do, in pursuit of a better overall effect. We still don't have total mastery over our digital tools, but they're extremely powerful and I'm very, very optimitic about the future for artist expression.
 
Different people have different tastes.
Not just the 70s, but in the 80s also, I like the look of 35mm that was common then but I don't recall seeing now.
TV shows such as Airwolf, The Greatest American Hero and many others had a similar film "look" with skin tones and such that I think looks good.
Today so many have a colored "digital" processed look which seems to try to help blend all the fake CG work with life action footage. So the whole thing ends up with a processed look to me.

There are other factors too such as impossible camera angles and lack of real physics. You cannot explain to a talented CGI artist what it really is like to hang out of a vehicle with a camera in the elements affected by the force of a blast or another vehicle whizzing past you if they've never been there and experienced it. The way things affect things in reality often don't allow for these seamless perfect things we see on screen. Put it all together and it seems we've lost something in all these advancements
 
roxics said:
I've been watching some films lately from the 1970s and I can't help but feel like we're losing some looks we can't duplicate anymore.
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Digital hasn't been able to duplicate those looks either.
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I don't know why you think that. From what I can tell, you can pretty much push for the 1970s film look in post. That is, you can add film grain, you can match the colors, tonality, saturation, and the lack of color and detail in the shadows, you can even add in gate jitter if you want.

But none of these things says 1970s to me. What that was, was lighting. And tastes in lighting have changed (quite a bit) since the 1970s. And this is in (large) part because of the strengths of digital cameras, particularly their low light performance. In general, this has led to a more subdued and more motivated and natural lighting technique. Given what we can do now, I don't see why anyone would want to go back.

This isn't that much different than the way film has changed since the 1930s. When film was B&W, and had an iso of like 3, and lights were carbon arcs. All of that... got you the "film noir" look. And we've completely lost that now. But... does anyone really want to go back huge carbon arcs just to get that look again? And that, is why we lost it.
 
great thread, thanks for the conversation.

here is a short film that i saw last week that had a real 70s vibe:

https://vimeo.com/193573986

i'm leaning towards bruce's pov that with digital we have the tools.

but i do appreciate roxics' concern that too many films look the same.

be well.

rob
smalltalk.productions
 
What has been lost is the lighting expertise that was evident in so many great films and even the not so great B films. Another factor is the less imaginative blocking that may be a problem from having more mobile cameras and less apparent need to spend time on it prior to shooting. One thing about the studio system is that it provided a way for entry level people to watch and work with the masters and to develop their craft.
 
robfilms said:
great thread, thanks for the conversation.

here is a short film that i saw last week that had a real 70s vibe:

https://vimeo.com/193573986

i'm leaning towards bruce's pov that with digital we have the tools.

but i do appreciate roxics' concern that too many films look the same.

be well.

rob
smalltalk.productions
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It's a cool look, but it still feels too digital to me. Like digital trying to emulate film.
There is a certain subtle vibration in film, combined with what I've heard some people call a thicker image. The color as well as a certain degree of softness in the image.

I have yet to see this be duplicated and not look like a cheap knock-off.

For example, the kind of film look I'm talking about:

 
roxics said:
I've been watching some films lately from the 1970s and I can't help but feel like we're losing some looks we can't duplicate anymore.
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I take it that you watched them digitally, not in a movie theater from a film projector. So it is possible, technically, to reproduce the look, since it is just a matter of getting the right values for R, G, and B per pixel. Easier said than done, I know. The easiest way of course would be to shoot 1970s film stock and then scan it. But surely it is technically possible to do it with a digital camera and the right LUT.

That being said, I agree with you that you just don't see it. Okay, maybe people don't often want to reproduce the 1970s look. The late 80s, though --- maybe it's partly my nostalgia talking --- I think the high-end 35mm-originated commercials, for Apple, AT&T, Pepsi, United, had a softness and a beauty to their colors and highlights that's seldom matched.

 
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Bruce Watson said:
But none of these things says 1970s to me. What that was, was lighting. And tastes in lighting have changed (quite a bit) since the 1970s. And this is in (large) part because of the strengths of digital cameras, particularly their low light performance. In general, this has led to a more subdued and more motivated and natural lighting technique. Given what we can do now, I don't see why anyone would want to go back.
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Not just the 70's, even well into the 90's. You can watch films from the same genre from the 80's and 90's and compare them to "modern" versions and so many of the 80's and 90's films are lit extremely flat compared to today.
 
To me, 1960's and 1970's were more about the "natural", gritty look of "Man and Woman", the "Conversation", "Bullit", the "Graduate", "Mean Streets", "Taxi Driver", etc. Spielberg brought the "classic" look back with "Close Encounters", "ET" and the 1980's were all about garish makeup, MTV style editing and Tom Cruise.

But this is the 70's (and it looks nothing like that short).

 
Film stocks have also changed a lot since the 70's. Not to mention the introduction of Digital Intermediate processes introduced in the 90's that helped evolve the film workflow. But even without digital cameras, current and recent film stocks look very different than they used to. More color, better dynamic range, and so-on. But I know that, for a price, you can purchase vintage film stock for specialty purposes...although I don't really know much about that world.

But nowadays, shooting 16mm film with some top of the line glass and all the other perks (lighting, art and performance) can give an incredible look. Clean, great colors and all the things that come along with working in film. And if you compare it to the rental budget of an Alexa and master primes with everything that you would have to put in place for such a shoot, shooting 16mm is not really that expensive.
 
NorBro said:
2017 --> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEuM4IUFWu8&t=1s

lol
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So, we go from Tarkovsky's two minute long continuous shot to Vin Diesel/DJ Caruso's two tenth of a second "continuous" shot. The next step -- cuts quicker than the shutter speed. Despite using Phantom Flex.

Oh and here's that Tarkovsky's train scene from the 1979 "Stalker" (which, in the old USSR and still, as a legacy title, was pronounced "Stol-ker" ... blame their English)

 
I think these looks can be duplicated in post. Are we sure we aren't just romanticizing the past? Same thing happened in the stills world... people pining away about how the look of film is gone, and digital capture is too "plastic"...but when offered both ways to work, nobody likes scanning film, nobody likes mixing chemistry, nobody likes the smell, the cleanup. Nobody wanted to remember what the limitations were to using "fast" 400ISO film.

What I personally miss most about film, was the ability to shoot it, then hand it off to someone else while I socialize and enjoy the location. With digital tools, most people (except very high-budgets) are expected to do a lot of post work.
 
Also, remember that the holy grail in film was grain-free images, bright punchy colors, and sharp sharp images. Now we have that and we romanticize soft images, faded pastel colors, and grain and grittiness. I definitely think it's the romantic emotional feel we had watching old movies.
 
abreu-canedo said:
But I know that, for a price, you can purchase vintage film stock for specialty purposes...although I don't really know much about that world.
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You have to know a guy who knows Juan and will give you his address. When you show up at the door he'll ask you if you're cool and if you say yes, he'll say he doesn't know what you're talking about and close the door on you. You have to say "no, I'm feeling groovy" and then he'll let you in and sell you the vintage stock. When you get inside you'll see a bunch of his thugs sitting around packing Eclairs and Aatons with fully loaded magazines. Don't freak out or they'll know you're an amateur.

Seriously though, that's kind of what I'm talking about. A lot of that older film stock is gone or hard to find and will only become moreso in the future. Which means we lose that look. Again people keep saying you can duplicate it in post, but the best I've seen looks like a cheap knockoff that still screams digital.

I don't want to shoot film going forward. I love the ease and cost of digital. What I really want is a digital camera that can mimic those older film stocks to a 99% accuracy or pretty close. I know that filmmakers is the past were going for super clean and grain free. We have that these days. I'm looking for the dirty images that lend themselves well to that classic look that's great for horror or gritty crime drama or some classic sci-fi.
 
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