The Early Years of Digital Cinema, From Some of the People Who Made It ⇥ bfi.org.uk

Samuel Wigley of the British Film Institute:

An HD cam filming driver-passenger conversations from the dashboard – an impossible space to fit one of your old-school movie cameras (Abbas Kiarostami’s 10). An unbroken 90-minute take gliding through St Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum – an impossible length of time to capture in one go on 35mm (Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark). A nine-hour documentary that embeds us in the slow decline of a Shenyang industrial district, all shot by a crew of one (Wang Bing’s West of the Tracks). In the spring of 2002, Attack of the Clones wasn’t the only world premiere using digital cameras to recalibrate our expectations of what a film could be.

I was glad to see a brief mention of Michael Mann’s “Miami Vice”. It was shot almost entirely digitally, and its visuals now feel grainy and blocky, yet retain that Mann-specific cinematic feel.