Digital video is poised to alter the cinematic landscape forever. Lower the flags to half-mast.

By Mike D'Angelo

Serves me right, really. Back when compact discs first began to establish a foothold in the market, I had no patience for what seemed to me the nostalgic, self-congratulatory complaints of hard-core audiophiles, who argued that vinyl offered a richer, warmer and essentially more human sound than these newfangled coasters with their precise sequences of ones and zeros. Even if that were true—and my teenage self couldn't hear the slightest difference, frankly—what these crackpot Luddites failed to understand was that the new format's advantages handily outweighed any piddling loss of fidelity. No more skips, crackles or pops! Random access at the touch of a button! A bedroom blissfully free of old milk crates! Only a whiny, dangerously obsessive loser, I felt, would be so churlish as to resist this amazing technological advance.

Now, fast-forward a decade and a half—much quicker and easier with a CD, isn't it?—to a new millennium and another marvel of the electronic age: digital video. Granted, that's a recording medium rather than a playback medium, so the analogy isn't perfect; both examples involve the shift from analog to digital, however, and DV, like the CD, is superior to its clunky, antiquated predecessor in several important respects. In addition to the traditional benefits of video—lower cost; smaller, lighter equipment; instant "dailies"--digital suffers no degradation in the copying process, allowing it to be endlessly manipulated without looking like your typical fourth-generation dupe. Random access makes editing a snap. Footage can be shuttled over the Internet. In short, digital video is nothing less than a tool of the devil, engineered by the CIA in conjunction with the IMF and the Illuminati in order to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids, and Congress should immediately pass a constitutional amendment forbidding its use.

Okay, maybe not. But I don't like DV, and if that makes me a whiny, dangerously obsessive loser (not to mention a hypocrite), so be it. I have seen the future, in such films as Timecode and Chuck & Buck and Signs & Wonders, and it looks a lot like my mental conception of the Middle Ages: ugly, muddy, alarmingly unstable. Isn't it supposed to look more like Blade Runner or—ahem—2001? Shouldn't the next stage in the medium's evolution inspire awe and wonder, rather than the desire to attack the screen with an economy-size bottle of Windex and a dozen rolls of paper towels?

Granted, DV has been a godsend for nonfiction filmmakers, who generally work with minuscule budgets and tend to care much more about content than style (Errol Morris excepted); it's hard to begrudge these noble workhorses its benefits, even if it means that documentary becomes synonymous with eyesore. But I shudder to think of what The Godfather or Red Sorghum or—ulp—Lawrence of Arabia would have looked like had they been shot with today's video cameras. Even the handful of truly excellent DV features—Dancer in the Dark, say, or Thomas Vinterberg's The Celebration—would arguably have been even more impressive had they been shot on film. Dogma 95 and digital video tend to be lumped together, but the movement's "vow of chastity" specifies only that the camera must be handheld; those wondering whether traditional film cameras could achieve a similar effect need only look at early Cassavetes.

To my surprise and dismay, however, few critics have expressed any real concern, and some have even gone to bat for the format. "If the grainy imprecision of digital video images has ever bothered you," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek of The Anniversary Party, "you need to see the creamy texture that [cinematographer John] Bailey achieves here." With all due respect to Ms. Zacharek—generally a perceptive and discerning critic —I submit that her eyes must rarely have strayed from whatever actor or object loomed in the foreground, because everything in the distance, as usual, was an indistinct, pixelated wash of gray. The Anniversary Party is a movie about actors, which means that it's shot largely in close-up—and in close-up, DV looks fairly tolerable, though it still can't match film for clarity and contrast. But depth of field simply doesn't exist for these cameras, and so the sense that there's a world beyond whatever drama may be unfolding—so crucial to the work of Welles, say, or Antonioni—is utterly and unforgivably lost.

Of course, that may well change. George Lucas, who shot the next Star Wars installment using a new high-definition camera that captures 24 progressive frames per second (thus mimicking the appearance of film), has aptly noted that "this is like 1895"--meaning that DV is still in its infancy, bound to improve dramatically. But even if video eventually achieves the visual magnificence of film, movies may never look quite the same. A 35mm camera, after all, is a big, heavy object, difficult to move—you have to think about where to put the damn thing, about which angle and exposure will best capture whatever mood or action or emotion you hope to convey. With a small, lightweight camera, the temptation to simply follow the actors around—as Mike Figgis did in last year's audacious but fundamentally misguided Timecode—is often impossible to resist. Some terrific movies have been made using the shakicam aesthetic, to be sure—from early Cassavetes to Jean de Segonzac's brilliant handheld work in Laws of Gravity—but it's rapidly becoming a lazy default technique, and I suspect the day will come when we'll miss the restrictions those behemoths once imposed.

Is this all a bit Chicken Little? Perhaps. Similar bitching and moaning accompanied the transition to sound in the late '20s, and while the medium experienced a transitional period, with the art of composition regressing for a time, it quickly bounced back. The Anniversary Party, in a way, gives me hope, demonstrating as it does that digital video and classical framing can coexist; apart from the aforementioned background fuzziness, it looks more or less the same as the Altman films it's working so hard to emulate. Maybe, if we're lucky, the cinema of the 21st century won't appear to have been shot by an overcaffeinated groupie through a dirty sponge. Still, the next time I see some sad-eyed audiophile lovingly fondling his near-mint original Swan Song issue of Physical Graffiti, I'll be much less likely to sneer.*