Whatever success or failure George Lucas's upcoming Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith enjoys at the box office, in one sense it has already failed. Lucas filmed both this movie and its predecessor, Attack of the Clones, wholly on digital video, sure that by now most cinemas would have gone digital. Instead, the sprocket still lives. But not for much longer.
Over the next few years, the long-expected change-over will finally begin. Avica, a US-based company that sells digital projection systems, has just announced that it will convert all 500 screens in Ireland's 105 cinemas over the next year, at a cost of €40m (£27m). The UK Film Council, meanwhile, is building a network of 200-odd digital screens, to go live at the beginning of 2006. In the US, the Landmark group of 100 art houses have announced plans to install digital projection. The revolution is beginning, and will speed up as the quality of the technology becomes established.
The reason is simple: economics. No matter how nostalgic film buffs get about the look of light through film, the noise of sprockets running through a projector, the slight projector motion at the top of the screen, or the glitches as the projectionist changes reels, film is expensive. A print of an ordinary 35mm film costs approximately £1,000 to make. The finished product takes up six, 2,000ft-long reels of film, each in a plastic can, and all secured in a big metal packing case for transport at yet more expense. Making and shipping those prints is the single biggest cost in film production after advertising. Worse, as they travel the country from theatre to theatre, the prints get scratched, broken, spliced, faded. If you like classic movies and revisit your favourites frequently, sometimes you get to know the flaws in the few prints in rotation.
But romance and nostalgia die hard. In a 1999 essay, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American film critic Roger Ebert wrote: "I have seen the future of the cinema, and it is not digital." He went on to say: "At the end of the [film industry's] first century, it shouldn't be so cheerful about throwing out everything that 'film' means. And it should get over its infatuation with the 'digital' buzzword." Ebert was quick to see the internet's potential, and had a searchable online database of his reviews available as early as the mid-1990s. But he has held firm to his views: "Digital projection is better than it was, but it's still no match for film," he says.
Perhaps that's true in the best of all possible worlds, where the prints and viewing conditions are perfect, and the cost of shipping all those reels of film is no object. But that world is arguably as much a fantasy as the flames engulfing Atlanta in Gone With the Wind, recently digitally restored and projected at the NFT.
"I had that conversation with Roger," says Bernard Rose, the British director of Candyman and Ivansxtc. Rose was a guest at Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival in 2004, when they showed the 1970 film Patton to highlight the little-seen 70mm large-screen format. The festival had a terrific theatre, a pristine print, and a rehearsal. "I was sitting right next to Roger when it happened. The curtains opened and there's Patton walking out in front of that giant American flag. It's a great optical illusion - except there was a huge great scratch right down the middle of the picture that had happened between the rehearsal and the screening."
Given the speed with which technology develops, any perceived lack in digital as compared to film is likely to be made up in time. The groundwork for the big change was laid in 1987, when a scientist at Texas Instruments invented a new type of chip to power projectors. Designs using these chips have been available for several years, but until the current generation of projectors, the quality wasn't quite good enough. Cinema-quality projectors use three of these chips - one for each of the three primary colours in refracted light. These light beams are recombined and steered to the projector's lens by an array of tiny, independently moving mirrors. From the lens, the light is projected on to the cinema screen as an image.
But comparing picture quality may be beside the point. The New York-based independent film-maker Michael Bergmann says: "One sees a difference, but I don't think it's worse. I think at some point the pristine quality of the image makes up for any lack of depth or tonal range." Besides, he adds, "There are great beauties in the film image, but artists find ways to create beautiful works in any medium."
David Hancock, a senior analyst with Screen Digest, says that the average consumer couldn't care less. "They're still seeing films. People remember their first kiss and so on. The fact that it's digitally delivered is not going to change those experiences." But, he says, "What hopefully will change is the range of programming."
Digital delivery will make it possible to put on special screenings and short runs of movies that are currently unecononic. This is exactly what the UK Film Council's initiative is all about. "It's an opportunity for independents to get their films on to screens where they couldn't before," says a spokesman.
Ironically, the big squabble that's holding digital back is economic: who pays? The people who are going to save money by using digital are the studios and distributors. The people who have traditionally paid projection costs are the theatre owners. But for them, there's little benefit in spending the £70,000 or so that it costs to convert to digital projectors. Only 25 per cent of a theatre's profits come from selling movie tickets. About half comes from concessions, and the remaining quarter from screen advertising. Ultimately, despite all our great movie memories, from the exhibitor's point of view the movie is merely the driver that pulls together an audience to which it can sell other things.
"Personally, I would want to be the one who pays for it," says Hancock, "because letting someone else pay for it means they control it." From this point of view, the economics heavily favour digital, and the aesthetics are probably now about even. What finally tips the balance towards digital is its flexibility, something film can't match.
One thing that digital can do is to increase the number of frames per second, says Rose: "The next systems will operate at 60 to 70 frames per second rather than 24 or 25. Ironically, if you look back at the silent days people were happy with 18 frames per second, but now when we look back we see a pronounced flicker. I think that future generations will find 20th-century films flicker the way we think silent films flicker. Eventually, within our lifetimes, we will see the digital recording device sample in a way that's continuous."
The first new horizon that digital is likely to open up, however, is probably 3D, which has recently been demonstrated at industry shows. In the film world, 3D would need a special projector for its 48 frames per second; today's digital projectors need no such adaptation, though audience members still have to wear the coloured glasses. Lucas is already talking about converting all the Star Wars movies to 3D. The Force will be popping out of a screen near you before we know it.
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