Just sayin’

“I can say with hand on heart that I’ve never seen a digital film that can do quite what one originated on film does. (And yes, I’m aware that nearly all celluloid-originated films get transferred to digital for the editing process before returning to celluloid.) It’s not just the obvious things – inferior representation of movement, synthetic-seeming colours, the sense of that rigid, invisible bitmap that can’t swirl or flicker as celluloid grain does – it’s something ineffable, a feeling that the analogue photographic image retains a contact with its human subjects and the way the light falls that digital somehow distorts. [...] And while we’re knocking digital, let’s kill off its premiere myth, which is that its cheapness would open the door for new waves of talent. [...] Rather, it has made cinema overall seem more underwhelming and less important than it was, in part because the overall standard has fallen for the first time since the 1980s.

- Nick James, Editor of Sight and Sound, April 2009 (Volume 19, Issue 4)

“I’m old-fashioned; I’m a man of celluloid. I think it still has a depth and a precision that you do not have in the digital domain, and the digital domain has some disadvantages. When you shoot something and record it with a digital camera, you have an instant access to it – you don’t have to wait for the dailies.”

- Werner Herzog

“The evolution of the digital age [represents] the existence and transfer of informational data without the medium of human consciousness, essentially creating a simulation of the human cognitive process – an artificial being – that, as the alterego [of Aldous Huxley] comments, has “distinct memory but no resemblances”.

- ‘Acquarello’ on ‘Aldous Huxley: The Gravity of Light (1996), Strictly Film School