Clint Eastwood's Hereafter is a bad movie, even an awful one. Many critics will write brilliant, funny words about why. Few will discuss the fact that its footage has been processed and projected digitally. But this is by far and away the work's most fascinating aspect. You can tell that Hereafter print you're watching is digital for at least three reasons: The camera's continual speed and agility, the way actors keep melting-streaking in and out of focus while walking, and the ubiquitous white-blue-and-gray color scheme, which differs from the bleached-out look of a printed-on-film film like Minority Report in that the shades are less delineated. You stare at actors' faces, and see pixels.
This is not to say that film is good, digital bad. Film usually reveals itself to audiences with splices and scratches, while Eastwood has shown how DV printing and projection can look pristine. Both Gran Torino and Invictus made handsome videos, in both cases because he used a more medium-friendly darker color palette, with lots of greens and browns (no overexposure), and because he used actors and situations (Clint scowling, Morgan considering) that lacked vibrant, dynamic motion, meaning technicians didn't have to worry much about keeping the image in focus. When the action did kick up, like in Invictus's rugby games, the running camera and recurring blurs added to the thrill by making viewers feel like they were chasing the scene.
An early Hereafter scene in which characters try to outrun a tsunami is similarly exciting, and points to how DV can succeed where film might fail. The script, acting, and editing would still be terrible in either medium, but the quick proximity of digital turns the run into a visceral sprint. The overly bright bodies dissolving, though, don't play as well for scenes at the London Book Fair.
Yet Eastwood's choice of look for the film is understandable; the movie is a ghost story, and any TV show can tell you that the path to the other world is a white light. But the technology he's using doesn't serve the narrative's ambitions. This is a film about people connecting, and it's hard to convey that when actors blob out of view.
Yet the film raises larger issues than how to digitalize visuals. This major film from a major studio by the currently most acclaimed major studio director seems to understand very little about technology. Consider the way that Hereafter fails the Internet, as a character switches from one YouTube clip to another without loading time or a different capsule description appearing. Good and bad reference points immediately leapt to mind. The bad was Aaron Sorkin's claim at the press conference for the New York Film Festival's highest-profile film, The Social Network, that he knew nothing about Facebook before writing the film's screenplay, and created an account as research; the good was the moment in Film Socialism, the festival's most hotly debated film, when a cat becomes a low-res YouTube image and the woman watching it meows. The contrast suggested that Film Socialism has more insight into social media than The Social Network has, and that Hollywood studio films are less with it than other parts of the world's films are.
Both The Social Network and Hereafter use cell phone conversations primarily to advance plot, with incidental commentary on how people communicate without actually connecting. This differs from how Kiarostami handles cell phones in Certified Copy: A critic giving a lecture interrupts himself to answer his mobile, talks, hangs up, and addresses the crowd again, an incident that does nothing to advance the narrative but everything to advance Kiarostami's demonstration of how this man (or anyone with an iPhone/iPad/iPod/Blackberry/laptop) can turn the outside world on and off at will.
In fairness, The Social Network knows that people toggle between technology and nature, but the movie's look ignores this. Unlike Hereafter, David Fincher's video flows so cleanly that if you didn't know better you might think you were watching film. This is also the case in his earlier Zodiac. A work like Michael Mann's Public Enemies declares itself revisionist by shooting a traditionally filmic story, the gangster saga, on self-evident DV; by contrast, I've frequently referred to Zodiac in my festival coverage this year because I regard it as the great video film, in the sense of a video trying to pass for film—video's hunt for film mirrors the characters' hunt for the killer. (Gyllenhaal doesn't encounter the Zodiac in the film's tensest scene, but a film projectionist.) That approach doesn't work for The Social Network, though, because it's wrong to say that the wired-in world and the wired-out world are indistinguishable. Rather, people can tell the difference, but more people more often now are choosing to stay wired in.
Both The Social Network and Hereafter try and fail to depict how a technology-based culture looks, sounds, and behaves; the two films' visual styles contrast, but neither ultimately suggests that their characters are more than images. The festival's worst movies, both film and video, followed suit by failing to add any self-awareness to their proceedings, keeping them stuck in genres ranging from thriller (The Robber) to prestige epic (The Tempest) to mash-up (the multiple old movie remixes that showed at Views from the Avant-Garde). Many of the best movies, by contrast, made their self-awareness a focal point: The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauşescu stuck with as much ceremonial film footage as possible to leave you aware that you were being bullshitted about the real world; Carlos blended both 35mm color fictional and black-and-white TV news footage to suggest neither version of history satisfying; Jonathan Caouette's short All Flowers in Time, the trippiest fiddling with DV that I've seen since Inland Empire, gave its characters orange eyes, scaly skin, deep, scary voices, and split-open faces to show how hideous TV characters might actually look if they stepped off the screen—and, conversely and subversively, how hideous people look when they imitate TV.
More so than at any other New York Film Festival I can remember, the notable films from this year's lineup made the very form they took a key part of their meaning. Mysteries of Lisbon, Robinson in Ruins, and Black Venus used DV to suggest the present trying to learn an unknowable past. Shooting on film, by contrast, became a radically archaic choice, with the old-school tricks filmmakers used—Kelly Reichardt filming Meek's Cutoff in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio, Manoel de Oliveira employing primitive magic tricks in The Strange Case of Angelica, talented film and video artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul shooting the Super 16 Uncle Boonmee in as many different genre styles as he could manage—further suggesting that their movies were past artifacts flowing upriver towards the future. Certified Copy towered over the other new releases by enfolding both film and video within itself, and in the process both old world and new. In blending film and digital stock into one coherent visual whole while blending modernity and the past into a coherent thematic whole, Certified Copy nailed our current moment, conveying how people are always simultaneously themselves and images of themselves better than any other movie I know. (Many Film Socialism defenders would argue that their picture achieves the same goal, and after another few viewings I might agree.)
All of which leads us back to Hereafter, the festival's closing night show, a ghostly video that I mistakenly identified several weeks ago as a film. My error was telling; even Eastwood is printing on digital now, and few filmgoers have probably realized this, showing how ubiquitous the ongoing switch has become. That even Eastwood hasn't figured it out yet suggests how few artists actually have. But this is a good thing: It's been nearly 25 years since artists first started using DV, and the medium is still surprising them. Place Hereafter and the other works all in a row, hit PLAY, and wire into possibility.
Hmmm. I'm seeing Uncle Boonmee tomorrow and Hereafter on Tuesday. Sorry to hear it strikes out as Clint's been on a roll of later. As for Film Socialisme, am I to gather you dislike it?
Please be specific in 25 words or less.
I think it's Godard's finest achievement. I've been looking at it over and over again for a month now ever since I found a link to downloaded it off the net for free.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make about Hereafter regarding its "digital" qualities. According to IMDb, Hereafter was shot on 35mm film with Panavision cameras. (BTW, Panavision only offers one model of digital cinema camera, the Genesis.) There was a digital intermediate used in post-production, but the vast majority of Hollywood productions, and many indie productions (including No Country for Old Men), today use digital intermediates (DI). DI is used primarily to facilitate editing and color correction, as well as to smooth the workflow with visual effects. It's not supposed to impart a particular "look" onto the footage. I've seen plenty of digital projection in multiplexes, and the only difference from film projection that I can see is that the digital image is cleaner and crisper. Your comments about camera movement and focus make no sense; they have nothing to do with post-processing or projection. And I don't know why you try to compare Hereafter with movies that were actually shot digitally.
Zodiac was shot on the Thomson VIPER, the same camera that Michael Mann used for Collateral. The Social Network was shot on the RED ONE with the new Mysterium X sensor, which has a very particular look that I could identify right away. The cinematography doesn't look that much like film to me; it's too clean and smooth and lacks a certain lushness inherent to celluloid. Public Enemies has the "DV look" primarily because it uses large depth of field and non-traditional lighting, plus lots of handheld work and haphazard framing. In any case, what ultimately matters is only how the image was acquired and not how it's "printed" and projected. Just because your final product is a digital file does not mean that you're working in a new medium, which is most certainly not called "DV." Digital delivery is an aesthetic equalizer, not a differentiator. In other words, everything today ends in the digital realm, after theatrical exhibition. To try to make a point about how a major director did or did not cater his/her cinematic vision to digital "printing" and projection is exactly like analyzing how well he/she explored the aesthetic possibilities of Netflix, Hulu, DVD, Blu-ray, iTunes, etc.
Thus, the irony of your review is that while you claim that Eastwood misunderstood and/or misapplied technology in numerous ways in Hereafter, you have also demonstrated a profound lack of understanding of that which you used to make your points.
You're correct that there's a lack of clarity in my review, which I regret, and that I did misuse terms, which I regret as well. You're also correct in that Hereafter was shot on 35, and that digital prints were created in post-production (as well as 35 prints). But some things do look better on film than on a digital transfer, and vice-versa – I saw a Chameleon Street digital restoration a few months ago that I'm certain blew the original film look away. The recent Red Shoes digital restoration is probably the best that that movie has ever looked, which is saying something. But a lot of avant-garde filmmakers have also refused to transfer their film work to digital forms, rightly claiming that the properties are so different. The result would be a different movie.
Both Gran Torino and Invictus look really good on DVD, in digital transfers. Hereafter's digital result looks awful, not helping the (not good) original film image. I'd argue that the digital print is its own object, separate from film prints, and that when you watch it, you're watching something much closer to video, just as a DVD image has a separate look and feel from a film print image.
As for Netflix/Hulu/DVD/etc. transfers – I think that discussing them does matter, since that's increasingly how people view movies. The mistake of watching a DVD/Hulu/etc. image, though, is thinking that you're watching the same thing as the original, which most viewers do – a very easy conflation, and a very common one. Most of The Maltese Falcon's current viewers aren't seeing it the way viewers saw it in 1941, or even saw it up to VHS. They're watching a different object now, with different light and color properties, as well as a different sense of spatial relations and movement – digital matter innately has a different look and feel from other material, which affects the viewer's psychological proximity to the action. This is even true on the big screen, which is why it was important to me to discuss movies that were originally shot digitally and projected in their original formats as a point of comparison to Hereafter's digital version.
A friend once compared the difference between a film and its digital transfer to the difference between a painting and its reproduction. If true, you likely understand this better than I do, since your comment shows a very strong understanding of the difference between film and digital technologies. Most viewers, including pretty much every film critic I talked to after Hereafter's press screening ended, can't tell anymore. While perhaps unfortunate, this is also an exciting thing, since it points to how many different ways digital technology can look – even like film. I'm sorry that I misused the word DV, misunderstood technical terms in other parts, and made it sound like I was accusing Eastwood of something that studio technicians did. But I can say that if you place a digital print of Hereafter against a digital print of The Red Shoes against a digital print of The Social Network against the DVDS, Blu-Rays, and Internet transfers of those movies, you realize that now movies can look an infinite number of ways. Your comment helps me appreciate this better.
Yeah, this is sort of a weird point you're making Aaron. I'd push ydgmdlu's numbers even higher and say that all movies (both indie and studio) go through DI these days. You probably haven't watched a movie that hasn't been DIed in about ten years, and unless you go to some film archive, you probably never will again. There's literally no way to do a side-by-side comparison of a "pure" optical print to one that's been run through at digital intermediary, for the simple reason that that's not how movies are made anymore. The studios and post-production facilities just aren't configured for that sort of thing anymore.