Long Live Film

It's 8:30 in the morning and I'm holding back my yawns since I've been up since 4:30. I'm wearing a jean jacket and tie-dye shirt my parents gave me for Christmas as I browse the shelves in a local bookstore once, twice, three times until...."Cut!" The director walks over to the leading actor and goes over the next line of dialogue while the cinematographer is positioning the camera in the right position and making sure the lighting is just right. As for me, I'm still browsing through the books as if the camera was still rolling until the director tells me I can take a break.

My first day as an extra; it may seem like nothing since I had no dialogue, I wasn't hobnobbing with any major actors, and I wasn't looking at the camera waiting for Mr. DeMille to give me my close up, but it was an eye-opening experience as a film critic feeling the pulse of the ever beating heart that is film. I mention my minor venture on the set of an undisclosed film because in the last few weeks, I have heard nothing but the end of film.

As broad as a statement as it has been by several members of the film industry, such as those at the Technical Awards ceremonies in the past month, which have honored the technological and scientific achievements in film, the medium is still thriving yet polarized by those who hold a high regard to celluloid versus digital film. Richard Edlund stated to the Hollywood Reporter that "this year may be the last full year that the movie labs are going to be running."  Sure, it might be an end to celluloid as the definitive object for filmmaking versus the abundant use of digital cameras, but let's not think that the filmmaking process is dead. If anything, film is more alive as it has been at the ripe age of 136 since Edweared Muybridge shot "A Horse in Motion." If we're talking about film as an object, it is fading, but as a collective partnership between people with ideas and stories being recorded for all to see, then it continues to grow.

When the director told me to take a break, I pushed myself back into the corner of the store where the film was being shot and watched the monitor as the director pressed forward along with the rest of the crew as they managed to get the film done and my heart expanded as my eyes did by watching great art being made. I felt the same sense of joy and wonder as Cameron Crowe did when he went on tour with Led Zeppelin as a young reporter for Rolling Stone or Norman Mailer watching Muhammad Ali defeat George Forman by the side of the ring. It's not enough to just sit and watch a film as it is to watching the process of a film being made, which is something very special. As the wheels of technology, such as life, keep spinning, so does the process of filmmaking.