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Forgetting Celluloid?

wulbert

wulbert

pfm Member
I was very struck by the comments below a You Tube video of Led Zeppelin backstage at Madison Square Garden in 1973. Posters were amazed at the "HD" quality of the (film) footage. They had trouble believing that image capture was that good 40 odd years ago. Comments like:

"The camera quality is insane"

"It feels kinda strange knowing that this vivid footage is from over 45 years ago Robert Plant and Jimmy Page were so young back then...
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIwAaVUZ-MCmteRudEL5k-g
"Not gonna lie, I like older HD cameras better than new ones. They just look so cool, I can’t describe it."
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCR5LCz9tVZ0-vk6KsctSOIA
"This footage is from 46 years ago, but it looks like its from 2023"

It made me wonder if younger people today have lost the knowledge that celluloid film even existed and was capable of producing high quality images many decades ago?

I saw this effect when I showed my own kids the "Apollo 11" movie (shot on 70mm film). They refused to believe it was real at first. Could not understand how something that old could look so good. I think they see "old" digital video from the 90's or before; shot on phones, handycams, amateur video gear etc and just extrapolate backwards that any moving picture capture more than 15 years old must be grainy, fuzzy rubbish. It kind of annoys me for some reason.

How do they think the old, classic Hollywood films shown on TV were made?
 
Try showing them "Lawrence of Arabia" in a real cinema! They have no idea of the quality, the tactile depth that film, in its many forms could have. There is, of course, the constant brainwashing that everything new is by definition better, so people will keep buying loads of shoddy crap. Enough!
 
Try telling a millennial that 35mm film has a resolution way in excess of their beloved 4K.

...as for 70mm? Careful, their brains may explode.
 
As a regular b&w film user to this day, I was pretty amazed at the quality of the 1964 "Hard Day's Night" film shown on standard definition BBC4 a week or so back.
 
narabdela said:
Try telling a millennial that 35mm film has a resolution way in excess of their beloved 4K.

...as for 70mm? Careful, their brains may explode.
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I don't think this is true any more. Digital photographs, especially with professional equipment, have very high definition these days. But definition is not everything, and images on film have, for better or worse, a quality about them that is completely different from digital. You could never make prints like Penn's portraits and still lifes with digital; or you could, but they would be very different. The same goes for films.
 
narabdela said:
Try telling a millennial that 35mm film has a resolution way in excess of their beloved 4K.

...as for 70mm? Careful, their brains may explode.
Click to expand...

If it did, they might.
But it doesn't.

I have shot a lot of film types and speeds over the decades using a variety of cameras and lenses - my very humble 10 year old 12mp digital camera leaves 35mm in the dust, let alone modern cameras and sensors capable of 4K resolution.
Digital fails on other counts - but resolution is not one of them, and hasn't been for some time
 
narabdela said:
1949/50 to be more accurate. Though todays safety film is still often described as celluloid.
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Celluloid is a trade name, not sure if it is still made. The end in 49/50, I suspect, may have been the legal end to movie films on cellulose nitrate films, because of the fire risk.
The first place that I worked was built very shortly after WW2, to make cellulose acetate films for Ilford, because until they built that factory, the plastic film had to come from the US (Kodak) or Europe (Agfa), and Europe was not an ideal source at that time as WW2 had just ended. I am pretty sure that the Ilford aerial surveillance film and lots of other films were acetate through the war, and certainly the place where I worked, never made nitro films. (I am unsure how the UK Kodak factory at Harrow(?) figured in the mix, maybe not built until after WW2????? It absolutely certainly made plastic film base for photo' films)

So far as resolution etc. are concerned, working for approaching 20 years in an associated industry, very early digital photographs were passed around, and they failed to impress because the pixels were distributed entirely regularly, whereas silver halide crystals in silver films are random. 20:20 hindsight is a wonderful thing, but everyone was foolishly inclined to dismiss the possibility of the VAST increase in pixel count that would be necessary to loose the very obvious pixel pattern.
 
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Vinny said:
Celluloid went out of use pre WW2 ;)

A great deal of what still exists is junk
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Forgive me. I should have said "film". Celluloid has become a generic term, well for folk my age anyway. Out of interest what is "film" made from then? e.g. Kodachrome. Is it just plastic?
 
PaulMB said:
Try showing them "Lawrence of Arabia" in a real cinema! They have no idea of the quality, the tactile depth that film, in its many forms could have. There is, of course, the constant brainwashing that everything new is by definition better, so people will keep buying loads of shoddy crap. Enough!
Click to expand...

Yes. What I particularly miss in so much modern film-making is long-ish shots of a beautifully lit scene. ( My kids are 20yrs & 22yrs so I have watched a lot of whizz-bangery CGI over the years).

I've watched films with my son where I swear there were several minutes of shots that never lasted more than a couple of seconds at most and no tripod used in the entire film. Made my 'kin head spin. Maybe if they show a scene for too long we can see the joins in the tech.
 
miktec said:
If it did, they might.
But it doesn't.

I have shot a lot of film types and speeds over the decades using a variety of cameras and lenses - my very humble 10 year old 12mp digital camera leaves 35mm in the dust, let alone modern cameras and sensors capable of 4K resolution.
Digital fails on other counts - but resolution is not one of them, and hasn't been for some time
Click to expand...

Fair comment. What annoys me, I think, is the automatic assumption that all image capture was crap in "the old day"s. It wasn't. Early consumer digital was poor, but we did have ways of making beautiful pictures (and sound) before digital.
 
wulbert said:
Fair comment. What annoys me, I think, is the automatic assumption that all image capture was crap in "the old day"s. It wasn't. Early consumer digital was poor, but we did have ways of making beautiful pictures (and sound) before digital.
Click to expand...

Having said that. It was good fun watching them get their heads around the quality of the NASA Apollo 11 footage shot at the time. 1969 was it? And explaining to them that lenses matter, still matter and were highly developed by the 1960's (and earlier).
 
What most people know as photographic film base has been, presumably still is, plasticised cellulose triacetate for a very long time.

Celluloid is plasticised cellulose nitrate. Cellulose nitrate is highly flammable and under the right conditions, explosive - nitrate it a little more than the grades used for (celluloid) films and you have gun-cotton.

(The very great majority of cellulose esters are made from cotton linters - hence gun-cotton.)
 
It's a little known fact that the movie Blow-Up was shot on explosive celluloid film.


Actually, I just made that up. I have no idea.

Joe
 
wulbert,

wulbert said:
I saw this effect when I showed my own kids the "Apollo 11" movie (shot on 70mm film).
Click to expand...

I picked up Apollo 11 on blu-ray a while ago and concur. The image quality is exceptional. It's also an awesome documentary. I liked it so much I bought an Apollo 11 fountain pen, which I'm using right now to write this post. (OK, I made up the last bit, but it's a cool pen.)

12160-Apollo.jpg


Joe
 
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