IN the beginning there was light that hit a strip of flexible film mechanically running through a camera. For most of movie history this is how moving pictures were created: light reflected off people and things would filter through a camera and physically transform emulsion. After processing, that light-kissed emulsion would reveal Humphrey Bogart chasing the Maltese Falcon in shimmering black and white.
电影肇始之时，是一道光束投向摄影机内传动着的柔软胶片。在电影史的大部分时间里，画面就这么动起来的：从人和物上反射而来的光，经过摄影机的过滤，对感光剂进行物理性的改变。在经过这么一段反应过程后，被光亲吻过的感光剂会在微弱的黑白光影中显现正在争夺马耳他之鹰的亨弗莱·鲍嘉。
More and more, though, movies are either partly or entirely digital constructions that are created with computers and eventually retrieved from drives at your local multiplex or streamed to the large and small screens of your choice. Right before our eyes, motion pictures are undergoing a revolution that may have more far reaching, fundamental impact than the introduction of sound, color or television. Whether these changes are scarcely visible or overwhelmingly obvious, digital technology is transforming how we look at movies and what movies look like, from modestly budgeted movies shot with digital still cameras to blockbusters laden with computer-generated imagery. The chief film (and digital cinema) critics of The New York Times, Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott, look at the stuff dreams are increasingly made of.
然而，越来越多的电影开始部分或全部通过电脑进行数码化制作，最后存在硬盘里，送到你家附近的影院，或者传输到你指定的大小屏幕上。你现在看到的是一场电影革命，其影响之深远，堪比当年有声片、彩色片以及电视的问世。无论这些改变是不知不觉还是显而易见，数码技术都已经给我们看电影的方式以及电影本身带来了变化，从用数码相机拍摄的低成本电影，到满是电脑生成画面的豪华大片，无不是这场革命的产物。《纽约时报》首席电影评论人曼诺拉·达吉斯(Manohla Dargis)和A·O·斯科特(A. O. Scott)，对这个越来越重要的造梦工具做出了自己的观察。
A. O. SCOTT In Jean-Luc Godard’s 1986 movie “Keep Up Your Right” a movie director (played by Mr. Godard) declares that “the toughest thing in movies is carrying the cans.” Those once-ubiquitous, now increasingly quaint metal boxes contained the reels of exposed celluloid stock that were the physical substance of the art form. But nowadays the easiest thing in digital movies might be carrying the hard drive or uploading the data onto the server. Those heavy, bulky canisters belong to the mechanical past, along with the whir of the projectors and the shudder of the sprockets locking into their holes.
A·O·斯科特 ：在戈达尔的1986年作品《导演的坚持》里，一位电影导演（由戈达尔先生本人饰演）表示：“拍电影最难的地方，就是扛盒子了。”那些人们曾经习以为常、如今渐渐被当成古董的金属盒子是用来放置已经曝光过的胶片的——胶片是这种艺术形式的实体存在。然而在现今的数码电影里，带着硬盘到处走，或者把数据上传到服务器，恐怕是再容易不过的事情了。那些笨重的胶片盒，属于机械化的过去，它跟放映机的嗡鸣、输片齿轮的震颤一起封存了起来。
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杰昆·菲尼克斯与菲利普·塞默·霍夫曼在电影《大师》中，影片拍摄于70毫米胶片上。
Should we mourn, celebrate or shrug? Predigital artifacts —typewriters and record players, maybe also books and newspapers —are often beautiful, but their charm will not save them from obsolescence. And the new gizmos have their own appeal, to artists as well as consumers. Leading manufacturers are phasing out the production of 35-millimeter cameras. Within the next few years digital projection will reign not only at the multiplexes, but at revival and art houses too. According to an emerging conventional wisdom, film is over. If that is the case, can directors still be called filmmakers? Or will that title be reserved for a few holdouts, like Paul Thomas Anderson, whose new film, “The Master, ” was shot in 70 millimeter? It’s not as if our job has ever been to review the coils of celluloid nestled in their cans; we write about the stories and the pictures recorded on that stock. But the shift from photochemical to digital is not simply technical or semantic. Something very big is going on.
我们是该哀叹、庆贺还是无所谓呢？前数码时代的玩意——打字机和唱片机，也许还可以算上书本和报纸——往往是漂亮的，但它们的魅力不足以扭转被淘汰的命运。而无论是对艺术家还是消费者，新玩具都有其诱人之处。主流制造商正在逐步停止35毫米摄影机的生产。接下来几年里，数字放映机不但会在大型影院普及，还会进入老片和艺术片院线。目前正在形成一种共识是，胶片的日子已经到头了。如果真是这样，导演还可以叫“电影摄制者”(filmmaker)吗？或者这个头衔是不是该留给那些坚守传统的人，比如在新片《大师》(The Master)中使用70毫米胶片拍摄的保罗·托马斯·安德森(Paul Thomas Anderson)？他们的盒子里是不是真卷着一盘盘胶片，这不关我们的事；我们的文章是关于胶片上记录着的故事和画面的。然而，从光化到数字，并非只是技术或语义上的转变。一系列巨大的变革正在发生。
MANOHLA DARGIS Film isn’t dead yet, despite the rush to bury it, particularly by the big studios. Film does not have to disappear. Film isn’t broken —it works wonderfully well and has done so for a century. There is nothing inevitable or natural about the end of film, no matter how seductive the digital technologies and gadgets that are transforming cinema. A 16-millimeter film camera is plenty cool. A 35-millimeter film image can look sublime. There’s an underexamined technological determinism that shapes discussions about the end of film and obscures that the material is being phased out not because digital is superior, but because this transition suits the bottom line.
曼诺拉·达吉斯 ：胶片还没死呢，虽然有人急着要把它埋葬，尤其是大制片厂。胶片没有必要消失。胶片没有完蛋——它非常好用，一百多年来一直很好用。数字技术和工具正在改变电影，但无论它们多么诱人，都不至于让胶片的退出成为必然或自然的事。16毫米摄影机很酷。35毫米胶片的画面让人叹为观止。在有关胶片终结的讨论中充斥着一种缺乏依据的技术决定论，同时也掩盖了一个事实：这种材料之所以正在被淘汰，并非因为数字技术更优越，而是这种转换对成本控制更有利。
The end of film isn’t a just a technological imperative; it’s also about economics (including digital rights management). In 2002 seven major studios formed the Digital Cinema Initiatives (one later dropped out), the purpose of which was “to establish and document voluntary specifications for an open architecture for digital cinema that ensures a uniform and high level of technical performance, reliability and quality control.” What these initiatives effectively did was outline the technological parameters that everyone who wants to do business with the studios —from software developers to hardware manufacturers —must follow. As the theorist David Bordwell writes, “Theaters’ conversion from 35-millemeter film to digital presentation was designed by and for an industry that deals in mass output, saturation releases and quick turnover.” He adds, “Given this shock-and-awe business plan, movies on film stock look wasteful.”
胶片的终结不单纯是个技术上的必然；还有经济上的考量（包括数字版权管理）。2002年，七家大制片厂联手成立了数字电影倡导组织(Digital Cinema Initiatives)——其中一家后来退出了，该组织的使命是“建立和记录数字电影开放式体系结构的推荐规范，确保统一的、高水准的技术性能、稳定性和质量控制”。这个组织成功地制定了一套技术参数，要求所有打算和制片厂合作的人——从软件开发者到硬件制造商——必须遵守。正如理论家戴维·博德维尔(David Bordwell)所说，“影院从35毫米胶片到数字格式的转制，是针对一个需要大量输出、饱和覆盖、迅速周转的行业设计的。”他进一步提到：“在这种震慑战式的商业策略下，把电影放在胶片里似乎是一种浪费。”
SCOTT Let me play devil’s advocate, though I hope that doesn’t make me an advocate for the corporate interests of the Hollywood studios. If there is a top-down capitalist imperative governing the shift to digital exhibition in theaters, there is at the same time a bottom-up tendency driving the emergence of digital filmmaking.
斯科特： 我来做一次魔鬼代言人吧，不过希望不要把我当成好莱坞片厂财团利益的代言人。如果说影院向数字放映的转型受到了一股自上而下的资本力量驱使，那么与此同时也有一股自下而上的潮流在推动数字电影的崛起。
Throughout history artists have used whatever tools served their purposes and have adapted new technologies to their own creative ends. The history of painting, as the art critic James Elkins suggests in his book “What Painting Is, ” is in part a history of the changing chemical composition of paint. It does not take a determinist to point out that artistic innovations in cinema often have a technological component. It takes nothing away from the genius of Gregg Toland, the cinematographer on “Citizen Kane, ” to note that the astonishing deep-focus compositions in that film were made possible by new lenses. And the arrival of relatively lightweight, shoulder-mounted cameras in the late 1950s made it possible for cinéma vérité documentarians and New Wave auteurs to capture the immediacy of life on the fly.
从古到今，艺术家都是根据他们的目的来选择任何可能的工具的，他们会把新技术应用到他们自己的创作中。艺术评论家詹姆斯·厄尔金斯(James Elkins)在《绘画是什么》(What Painting Is)一书中指出，绘画史在一定程度上就是颜料化学成分变化的历史。电影的艺术革新往往是存在一个技术性因素的，这一点不需决定论者多言。我们看到《公民凯恩》中那些震撼的深焦构图，是跟新型镜头有关的，但摄影师格雷格·托尔兰德(Gregg Toland)的才华是不言而喻的。1950年代末出现了重量相对比较轻的肩扛式摄影机，真实电影(cinéma vérité)的纪录者和新浪潮的电影作者们才有机会捕捉到生活的实感。
Long before digital seemed like a viable delivery system for theatrical exhibition, it was an alluring paintbox for adventurous and impecunious cinéastes. To name just one: Anthony Dod Mantle, who shot many of the Dogma 95 movies and Danny Boyle’s zombie shocker “28 Days Later, ” found poetry in the limitations of the medium. In the right hands, its smeary, blurry colors could be haunting, and the smaller, lighter cameras could produce a mood of queasy, jolting intimacy.
在成为一个可靠的影院放映系统之前，数字技术在热爱冒险的和没什么钱的电影人心目中早就已经是诱人的玩具了。只需要提一个名字：安东尼·多德·曼特尔(Anthony Dod Mantle)，此人的许多Dogma 95片以及丹尼·博伊尔(Danny Boyle)的僵尸惊悚片《惊变28天》(28 Days Later)，在数字媒材的局限中找到了诗意。只要方法得当，那种脏乱、模糊的色彩也是可以勾魂摄魄的，更小、更轻的摄影机可以带来一种令人眩晕、震颤的亲密感。
Image quality improved rapidly, and the last decade has seen some striking examples of filmmakers exploring and exploiting digital to aesthetic advantage. The single 90-minute Steadicam shot through the Hermitage Museum that makes up Alexander Sokurov’s “Russian Ark” is a specifically digital artifact. So is the Los Angeles nightscape in Michael Mann’s “Collateral” and the rugged guerrilla battlefield of Steven Soderbergh’s “Che, ” a movie that would not exist without the light, mobile and relatively inexpensive Red camera.
图像质量的改进很迅速，过去十年里电影人在探索和发掘数字电影的美学优势，已经拿出不少动人的典范。亚历山大·索库罗夫(Alexander Sokurov)的《俄罗斯方舟》用“斯坦尼康 ”在冬宫博物馆内拍摄了一个90分钟长的单镜头，是数字技法的代表作。此外还有迈克尔·曼(Michael Mann)的《借刀杀人》(Collateral)中那段洛杉矶夜景，以及史蒂芬·索德伯格(Steven Soderbergh)的《切》(Che)中的山区游击战场——后者的拍摄完全倚靠轻盈、机动且相对廉价的Red摄影机。
Digital special effects, meanwhile, are turning up this season not only in phantasmagorical places like “Cloud Atlas” and “Life of Pi, ” but also in movies that emphasize naturalism. To my eyes the most amazing bit of digital magic this year is probably the removal of Marion Cotillard’s legs —including in scenes in which she wears a bathing suit or nothing at all —in Jacques Audiard’s gritty “Rust and Bone.” While movie artists of various stripes gravitate toward the speed, portability and cheapness of digital, which offers lower processing and equipment costs and less cumbersome editing procedures, consumers, for their part, are suckers for convenience, sometimes —but not always —at the expense of quality.
与此同时，数字特效的崛起并不仅限于《云图》(Cloud Atlas)和《少年Pi的奇幻漂流》(Life of Pi)那些幻异的场面，强调自然主义手法的电影同样会用到它。在我看来，本年度最神奇的数字魔术可能是雅克·欧迪亚(Jacques Audiard)在《锈与骨》(Rust and Bone)中把玛丽昂·歌迪亚(Marion Cotillard)的腿抹掉——包括一些她身穿泳衣或者什么都没穿的场景。大大小小的电影艺术家都在转向迅捷、轻便和廉价的数字技术，它能降低工艺和设备成本，简化剪辑流程，而消费者是挡不住便利性的诱惑的，哪怕有时候——不一定每次——要牺牲质量。
I love the grain and luster of film, which has a range of colors and tones as yet unmatched by digital. There is nothing better than seeing a clean print projected on a big screen, with good sound and a strong enough bulb in the projector. But reality has rarely lived up to that ideal. I spent my cinephile adolescence watching classic movies on spliced, scratched, faded prints with blown-out soundtracks, or else on VHS —and also not seeing lots of stuff that bypassed the local repertory house or video store. I’d rather look at a high-quality digital transfers available on TCM or from the Criterion Collection, and more recently (very recently) at a revival theater like Film Forum in New York. Like anyone else of a certain age I have fond memories of the way things used to be, but I also think that in many respects the way things are is better.
我爱胶片的颗粒和光泽，它的色彩和色调范围至今仍是数字电影无法比拟的。用一台音质卓越、灯泡光能强劲的放映机，把一部干净的洗印片投射到大银幕上，还有什么比这更让人开心的呢？然而在现实中很少遇到这么理想的状况。我那痴迷于电影的青春期是老片中渡过的，这些片子的拷贝经过拼接，满是刮痕，色彩黯淡，声轨也残破，要么就是录像带——另外还看了不少本地老片影院或录像租赁店都没有的东西。我是更希望去看TCM或标准收藏(Criterion Collection)提供高品质的数字片源的，还有近来（就在不久前）在纽约出现的电影论坛(Film Forum)这样的老片影院。人到了一定年纪都一样，对那些曾经的记忆，我也是格外珍视的，但同时我也认为在许多方面，今天的东西更好。
DARGIS We’re not talking about the disappearance of one material —oil, watercolor, acrylic or gouache —we’re talking about deep ontological and phenomenological shifts that are transforming a medium. You can create a picture with oil paint or watercolor. For most of their history, by contrast, movies were only made from photographic film strips (originally celluloid) that mechanically ran through a camera, were chemically processed and made into film prints that were projected in theaters in front of audiences solely at the discretion of the distributors (and exhibitors). With cameras and projectors the flexible filmstrip was one foundation of modern cinema: it is part of what turned photograph images into moving photographic images. Over the past decade digital technologies have changed how movies are produced, distributed and consumed; the end of film stock is just one part of a much larger transformation.
达吉斯 ： 我们现在说的可不是某种材料的消失——油彩、水彩、丙烯或水粉——而是一种本体论和现象学意义上的深刻转变，是要改变一种媒介。你可以用油彩或水彩创作一幅画。电影则不然，自诞生以来，电影在绝大多数时间里都是通过摄影机中机械传动的感光胶片（起初为赛璐珞）进行拍摄的，胶片经过化学处理后变成洗印片，然后在发行商（和影院）的全权掌控下，用放映机在影院里为观众放映洗印片。柔软的胶片、摄影机和放映机一起成为现代电影的基础：就是这部分把静态的照片变成运动画面的。在过去十年里，数字技术改变了电影的制作、发行和消费方式；胶片的终结只是一场大规模转型的一部分。
I’m not antidigital, even if I prefer film: I love grain and the visual texture of film, and even not-too-battered film prints can be preferable to digital. Yes, digital can look amazing if the director —Mr. Soderbergh, Mr. Mann, Mr. Godard, David Fincher and David Lynch come to mind —and the projectionist have a clue. (I’ve seen plenty of glitches with digital projection, like the image freezing or pixelating.) I hate the unknowingly ugly visual quality of many digital movies, including those that try to mimic the look of film. We’re awash in ugly digital because of cost cutting and a steep learning curve made steeper by rapidly changing technologies. (The rapidity of those changes is one reason film, which is very stable, has become the preferred medium for archiving movies shot both on film and in digital.)
我不反对数字技术，不过我更喜欢胶片：我爱胶片的颗粒感和画面的质感，只要不是太差劲，都会比数字片更有吸引力。是的，只要导演——我能想到的有索德伯格先生、曼先生、戈达尔先生、大卫·芬奇(David Fincher)和大卫·林奇(David Lynch)——和放映师是行家，数字片也可以很精彩（我遇到过多次数字放映的故障，比如画面停住或出现锯齿）。我讨厌很多数字电影在视觉上有种不易察觉的丑陋，包括有些会去模仿胶片的效果。由于成本压缩，以及从业人员跟不上技术变化的脚步，我们已经淹没在丑陋的数字片里（无论是用胶片还是数字技术拍摄，状态稳定的胶片始终是电影保存的首选媒材，数字技术的多变性就是导致落选的其中一个原因）。
We’re seeing too many movies that look thin, smeared, pixelated or too sharply outlined and don’t have the luxurious density of film and often the color. I am sick of gray and putty skin tones. The effects of digital cinema can also be seen in the ubiquity of hand-held camerawork that’s at least partly a function of the equipment’s relative portability. Meanwhile digital postproduction and editing have led to a measurable increase in the number of dissolves. Dissolves used to be made inside the camera or with an optical printer, but today all you need is editing software and a click of the mouse. This is changing the integrity of the shot, and it’s also changing montage, which, in Eisenstein’s language, is a collision of shots. Much remains the same in how directors narrate stories (unfortunately!), yet these are major changes.
那种单薄、画面不干净、出现马赛克或者轮廓突兀的电影，我们实在看了太多了，它们都没有胶片的那种丰富的密度，色彩往往也不理想。我对灰不溜秋的肤色已经烦透了。数字电影的影响还包括手持拍摄手法的大量使用，这一点至少在一定程度上是因为数字器材有相对较好的便携性。与此同时，数字后期制作和剪辑还导致叠画(dissolve)的数量大幅提升。叠画原本是在摄影机内进行的，或者用光学打印机，但现在你需要的只是一个剪辑软件，点一下鼠标就完成了。这改变了镜头的完整性，同时也改变了蒙太奇——用爱森斯坦的话说，蒙太奇就是镜头与镜头的碰撞。在导演的叙事方面基本上还是一成不变（这真是不理想），不过现有的改变已经够剧烈的了。
SCOTT I agree that digital has introduced new visual clichés and new ways for movies to look crummy. But there have always been a lot of dumb, bad-looking movies, and it’s a given that most filmmakers (like most musicians, artists, writers and humans in whatever line of work) will use emerging technologies to perpetuate mediocrity. A few, however, will discover fresh aesthetic possibilities and point the way forward for a young art form.
斯科特： 数字技术已经形成了新的视觉陈规，新方法来拍出的电影感觉不高级，这一点我同意。但是大烂片任何时候都会有，多数的电影人（和多数的音乐家、艺术家、作家以及其他任何一种“家”一样）会用最新的技术去实现一如既往的平庸，这一点是亘古不变的。然而，有那么一些人发掘出了新的美学可能性，推动这个年轻的艺术形式向前走。
An interesting philosophical question is whether, or to what extent, it will be the same art form. Will digitally made and distributed moving-picture narratives diverge so radically from what we know as “films” that we no longer recognize a genetic relationship? Will the new digital cinema absorb its precursor entirely, or will they continue to coexist? As dramatic as this revolution has been, we are nonetheless still very much in the early stages.
这里有一个有趣的哲学命题：这种艺术形式是否——或者说在多大程度上——还是原来的那个形式？用数字技术制作和发行的电影叙事，是否会大幅偏离我们原本熟知的“电影”，以至于看不出两者之间存在任何亲缘关系？这种新型的数字电影是会把旧电影彻底吞没，还是继续保持两者的共存？虽然变革已经很剧烈，我们在相当程度上还是处在一种初级阶段。
DARGIS The history of cinema is also a history of technological innovations and stylistic variations. New equipment and narrative techniques are introduced that can transform the ways movies look and sound and can inspire further changes. Does taking film out of the moving image change what movies are? We don’t know. And it may be that the greater shift —in terms of what movies were and what they are —may have started in 1938, when Paramount Pictures invested in a pioneering television firm. By the late 1950s Americans were used to watching Hollywood movies on their TVs. They were already hooked on a convenience that —as decades of lousy-looking home video confirmed —has consistently mattered more to them than an image’s size or any of its other properties.
达吉斯 ： 电影的历史，就是一部技术革新和风格变换的历史。新设备和叙事技巧的引入，改变电影的视觉和听觉效果，从而激发进一步的变革。把胶片淘汰出去，是否会对电影本身带来改变？我们不知道。从电影自身的前后差异看，也许1938年的那次转变要更剧烈，也就是从派拉蒙公司决定投资一家开风气之先的电视公司那一刻开始。到1950年代末，在电视上看好莱坞电影对美国人已经是家常便饭。他们已经习惯了电视的便利——家用录像那几十年未曾改善的烂画质证明了这一点——这种便利变得越来越重要，已经超越了画面尺寸或其他任何一种特性。
From there it’s just a technological hop, skip and jump to watching movies on an iPad. That’s convenient, certainly, but isn’t the same as going to a movie palace to watch, as an audience, a luminous, larger-than-life work that was made by human hands. To an extent we are asking the same question we’ve been asking since movies began: What is cinema? “The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent, ” the philosopher Roland Barthes wrote. “From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here.” A film image is created by light that leaves a material trace of something that exists —existed —in real time and space. It’s in this sense that film becomes a witness to our existence.
在这个基础上，现在的变革只是一次技术性的跳跃，直接跳到用一台iPad看电影。这当然是很方便，但跟去影院看电影是两码事，在那里你是作为一名观众坐在一部由人手制造出的、释放着光芒的宏大作品前。有一个问题可以说是从有电影开始就一直在问的：什么是电影？“影像不过就是被摄物体发出的光，”哲学家罗兰·巴特(Roland Barthes)写道。“那里的一具真实的躯体，放射出能量，最终触及这里的我。”电影影像是光的造物，是某种在真实的时空中存在——既存——的东西留下的物质痕迹。通过这样的方式，电影成为我们的存在的见证。
Then again, I learned from the great avant-garde artist Ken Jacobs —who projects moving images that he creates with shutters, lenses, shadows and his hands —that cinema doesn’t have to be film; it has to be magic.
我再一次从伟大的肯·雅克布斯(Ken Jacobs)那里学到一个道理，这个用快门、镜头、阴影和自己的双手创作运动影像的先锋艺术家告诉我们，电影不一定是胶片；但一定是魔法。
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