By Katie O’Connor
The smell of chemicals hangs heavily in the air. A single light bulb casts eerie shadows on the students’ faces as they tear open bags of fixer and developer and stir them carefully into water using wooden spoons. “I can’t wait to see how this turns out,” gushes Natalie, a twenty-something girl sporting think horn rimmed glasses, as she clutches a reel of film.
It’s a gorgeous Sunday morning in February and a small group of students have gathered in a dimly lit darkroom at the offices of the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto, a co-op dedicated to the preservation of film. The students are preparing to hand process celluloid film they shot the day before using a Bolex.
There is a palpable excitement in the air and its this feeling that brings the group out early on a Sunday morning to learn something that has been called a dying medium, an archaic art. They haven’t seen what their footage looks like yet. The mystery adds to the anticipation.
Digital purists make the argument that when using digital, you see the results instantly. With film, especially for those new to it, questions of exposure, focus, lighting and angle aren’t answered until the film has been processed.
The results could be brilliant or dismal.
“The moment in the darkroom when the image starts to come is magic,” said Toronto-based filmmaker Phil Hoffman. “I don’t get that in digital. That is a thrill, an epiphany that I look for in making films. That’s why I don’t use a script, and I depend on the process and image to tell me things.”
[pullquote]“The moment in the darkroom when the image starts to come is magic.”
- Phil Hoffman, filmmaker[/pullquote]
Hoffman teaches production in the film department at York University in Toronto. Students spend their first year of the program shooting strictly on film. He has watched people who grew up on a steady diet of digital discover the world of analogue.
“What hooks them into film is the thrill of seeing what was in their head, and how it turns out,” he said. “It sometimes doesn’t work out, or it can work magically. That’s the magic of film that digital does not express in the same way.”
Hoffman believes that physical processes affect mental processes, and that in using film, the subconscious of the filmmaker will somehow become connected with the footage. “Things will start to happen that you don’t expect and those things are energetically connected with the project you need to make,” he said. “There is something different about that process that actually affects the creative process, that’s why I hold onto it.”
Digital allows an endless number of takes from various angles can be shot until the scene is just right. With film, there is a certain number of feet on a reel, limits the number of shots and takes that are possible creating a sense of unpredictability.
But some filmmakers see these limitations as a good thing. Tracy German, a Toronto-based filmmaker, has made a variety of short films and documentaries over her 14-year career, many of which were shot on film. “Limitations yield intensity,” she says. Being able to shoot hours and hours of footage takes away the preciousness of film. In having a limited amount of footage and space, filmmakers are forced to think about the shots that they are taking and what they need to form a visual narrative. “It’s about the process of being willing to go into the medium and trying to understand what you have shot and the form within it,” she says.
Chemicals to develop film - Photo by Mark Zanin
German finds that with digital, there is always the need for more. “The problem with more footage is you need more hard drive space, more high tech equipment. It’s a more more more system and nothing is good enough at a certain point.”
Coral Aiken is the community outreach co-ordinator for the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto. She teaches community workshops to kids where they use super 8 cameras to make movies. The idea is to get them used to thinking about what shots they need to take, rather than shooting everything in sight.
“If you shoot on video you can take this endless amount of footage, and when you get into the editing room it’s sort of overwhelming,” she says. “The idea of these limitations forces you to prepare a lot more and limit what you shoot.”
Shooting with film also allows filmmakers to have a physical connection with their work. With digital, the footage is shot, transferred to a hard drive, and then manipulated with buttons. Until a DVD is created, there is nothing tangible. With film, a filmmaker can physically hold their work in their hands.
They hand crank the camera to power it, use their fingers to process the images and then project the finished product, listening to the whirring of the projector as the images they so painstakingly created appear on screen.
Aiken, who is a trained dancer and choreographer, was drawn to film because of this aspect. “The physicality is really important to me,” she says. “Super 8 is on these little plastic reels, and you can just have your movie in your hand and its very tangible and physical.”
For German, there is a sense of empowerment in working with film. After graduating from film school, German spent several years in the film industry until she became pregnant with her son. As a woman and mother, she began to feel invisible to the working world. She fought this feeling by continuing to make films using a do-it-yourself approach, where she shot, edited and processed everything herself.
“Filmmaking can be a big industrial complex where you don’t have very much control over it at all. [Working with film] takes it back down to its simplest and most accessible roots. You do have absolute control over it and you can imbue the medium with your own sensibility, your own quirky aesthetic and show that back to the world.”
There is a new generation of artists turning to analogue technologies to make and show their work, to rediscover what digital is so desperately trying to replicate. “It’s all just trying to re-create film, so why not learn a little about it and see what the big deal is,” Aiken says. “If people are super interested in looking at image quality, they are going to come back to film eventually or at least experiment with it.”
For Hoffman there will never be anything like film. “It has rich tones, it looks different. It has grain so it looks like an impressionist painting,” he says. In the age of Youtube, where anyone and everyone can shoot a movie, using film allows a filmmaker to stand out among the crowd, while gaining knowledge that enhances their craft.German sums it up perfectly. “You can do things quickly with the new technology, and edit something in a day, and that can be great, but overall it takes a long time to do a good film, and it takes a lot of work. You have to fall in love with something about it to keep you going for such a long period of time. You have to fall in love with it over and over again.”
Click here to find out how to process negative black and white film in your bathroom!
