Don't hold your breath...film stock is dead

It's economics. Theaters cannot stay in business...the cadre is too small. Plus film stock is disappearing. Aesthetics, sadly, will not save the old methods of making/viewing movies.

"Don’t Worry About the End of Film"

by

Richard Brody

January 14th, 2014

The New Yorker

It’s already known that most so-called “films” are shot on video, and then released and projected as video. The news that Paramount has stopped shipping film prints of its movies is of symbolic importance—except, of course, to the operators and patrons of the eight per cent of theatres that haven’t made the digital conversion. My colleague Sky Dylan-Robbins made a video about the problem several weeks ago. One participant is the director James Gray, whose new film, “The Immigrant,” is one of the few recent features that was shot on 35-mm. film. The question remains how many theatres will be projecting prints of that film, rather than a digital copy of it.

I just got word of an international petition campaign supporting a call by the cinematographer Guillermo Navarro for UNESCO to declare film “a World Heritage”: “We must fight to keep the experience of watching a film that was made on film projected as film alive and available in at least one cinema in every city in every country. We must act quickly to safeguard the future of the film print by supporting cinemas that choose to continue projecting 35-mm. film prints alongside digital projection.” I’m not sure about the campaign’s bureaucratic implications, but it certainly is a good idea for movie lovers in the age of digital projection to know what film projection looks like.

The virtue of film is its imperfection. A print of a film is a living thing—it’s different each time it’s projected, thanks to new scratches and new splices, dust and hair and wear and tear. Its age shows, just as the age of a 78-r.p.m. record does, just as the age of a book from a library does. Through use, a film degrades and bears the traces of its popularity. That’s why restorations of classic films, while offering the pleasure of visual clarity, often feel denatured, as if the original virginity of an unscreened print represented a filmmaker’s intentions. A print that goes into the world takes its lumps; some state between the immaculate and utter ruin is an accurate representation of the experience that moviegoers had in the age of film projection. (That’s why some inexpensive, off-label DVDs featuring unretouched transfers of prints peculiarly and, incidentally, conjure the sense of a theatrical screening better than some high-quality restorations.)

A print also feels wet—it bears the psychic traces of the chemical bath that produced it—and it is three-dimensional, with the thickness of the strip of film. Most of all, it has an air of finality to it, and that’s where the aesthetic distinctions between film and video come in. Here’s a remarkable example: a video, issued by the special-effects house Brainstorm Digital, showing transformations that some scenes of “The Wolf of Wall Street” (which is Paramount’s first digital-only release) underwent in the editing process.

The photographic medium has, from the start, been recognized as an imprint of physical reality—and, nearly from the start, has been subjected to manipulations so as to realize impossible visual fantasies. The ostensible authenticity of the analog image is itself the product, and the production, of fantasy. Even a movie made without special effects doesn’t show anything exterior to the artifice of the set (the lights, the riggings, the crew hovering just outside the frame) and, for that matter, doesn’t show the artifice of the set itself (its balsa-wood doors, false fronts, pinned-back costumes, body doubles). It shows appearances that resemble an idea of reality. Moreover, the ostensible authenticity of movies shot on location under trying circumstances is still dependent upon the director’s artistic conception. Movies made in studios by directors with better ideas can convey a deeper notion of existence than one made with the presumption to immediacy but lacking in psychological depth or complexity of imagination.

In the mid-fifties, when André Bazin argued in favor of a cinema of reality that repudiated effects of editing, Jean-Luc Godard responded in Cahiers du Cinéma with a radical idea that he expressed even more starkly at the time of the release, in 1960, of “Breathless”: the making of a single image is already and necessarily an act of editing, because it puts together many disparate elements (such as an actor, her costume, the many components of the set, or even the choice of backgrounds on location) in a single frame. Each image is an act of editing; editing is implicit in the act of shooting.

With video, the equation is turned around: the shoot is continuous with post-production, the editing is a continuation of the shoot by other means. It’s of no concern that Scorsese didn’t actually record some of the physical settings and actions depicted in the movie; what matters is that he achieves an idea of reality that is (to use a word at the very core of the film) persuasive. When James Gray shoots on film, he fulfills a vision of tragic loss; his subject is the irreparable, and the decisive finality of the film image is its incarnation. In its perfection, he rues and adores its flaws. When Scorsese shoots a grand fresco of degradation and ecstasy, of a world after the fall, his blend of video and film fills the bill: the illusion of limitless power is itself a part of his tragic sense.

That’s why, ultimately, what matters is not film or video but the idea. If it’s powerful, its essence comes through in the image—whether projected on film or digital video, whether viewed in a theatre or on a computer screen or an iPod. Yet, sheer pleasure counts for something, and those of us who have known the experience of watching projected prints and feeling the totemic power of their fragility ought to preserve at least the idea of it. Godard’s 1993 film “Oh, Woe Is Me,” a film on the subject of the transmission of divine ideals and myths, opens with a passage from Martin Buber’s “Tales of the Hasidim” that applies to the vanishing of film prints as well: “We no longer know how to light the fire, we no longer know the prayers, we don’t even know the place in the forest. But we do know how to tell the story.”

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Deceased--Run Run Shaw

Run Run Shaw
November 23rd, 1907 to January 7th, 2014

Not as well-known as Harry Cohen, Samuel Goldwyn, or Louis B. Mayer but Run Run Shaw was just as important and influential in the Asian motion picture history. A fascinating life history.

"Legendary Producer Run Run Shaw Dies at 106"

by

Clifford Coonan

January 6th, 2014

The Hollywood Reporter

Born on Nov. 23, 1907, in Ningbo, south of Shanghai, in the waning days of China’s last imperial dynasty, Shaw was the youngest of six sons of textile merchant Shaw Yuh Hsuen.

By the late 1960s, Shaw had risen to the status of media mogul unrivaled in Asia, growing his family’s theater chain, film studio and television network Television Broadcasts Ltd. (TVB) into a multibillion-dollar empire that helped launch the careers of some of today’s biggest Chinese stars, including Maggie Cheung, Andy Lau and Chow Yun-fat.

In addition to amassing the world’s largest library of Chinese films and helping to ignite a global kung-fu craze in the 1970s, Shaw also backed Hollywood hits such as director Ridley Scott’s 1982 science-fiction classic Blade Runner and had untold influence on directors ranging from Quentin Tarantino (Kill Bill) to Andy and Lana Wachowski (The Matrix).

"With his vision and energy, he had built the station to become Hong Kong's premier television station and a world leader in the Chinese-language television industry," TVB said in a statement.

Raised in China, Shaw received his education in American-run schools. In 1925, his elder brothers founded Tianyi Film Productions in Shanghai with the movie New Leaf. At age 19, during his 1927 summer vacation, Shaw followed his third elder brother, Run Me Shaw, to Singapore to start a film market and establish a Southeast Asia distribution base.

Recognizing the strength of the Chinese diaspora, they set about distributing Chinese opera films from Shanghai. By 1934, the elder Shaw brothers had established a Tianyi office in the British colony of Hong Kong, calling it Unique Film Productions, where Run Run would not assume control of production until 1957. Shaw Brothers was founded in 1958 with Run Run Shaw as president.

In 1966, Life magazine published an article on Shaw’s Movie Town studio, and in 1967, Shaw Brothers had a true hit when The One Armed Swordsman fought its way to the top at Hong Kong’s box office -- then the region’s richest -- to become the first movie to earn more than HK$1 million in local ticket sales, propelling star Jimmy Wang Yu to fame.

Seeing room for growth, Shaw immediately established TVB, the first over-the-air commercial station in Hong Kong, on Nov. 19, 1967.

In 1973, Five Fingers of Death, starring Lo Lieh, set U.S. and European box office records, igniting a kung-fu craze around the world that would propel stars like Bruce Lee to global fame.

By the mid-1970s, Shaw Studios was producing 40 movies a year, and some 250,000 people per day went to see them at 143 Shaw-owned theaters from Hong Kong to Jakarta, plus thousands more in Chinatowns around the world.

Soon Shaw Brothers was co-producing films with Warner Bros. (Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold) and putting $16 million into MGM’s production of the film version of James Clavell’s best-selling novel Taipan, shot in Hong Kong at Shaw Studios in 1986.

Through the late 1970s, Shaw often made movies for $300,000 each without a soundtrack, dubbing them later into English, Italian, French and Mandarin Chinese. Often films were shot in three versions: the racy “hot” one for the U.S., Japan and Europe; a “cold” one, showing no flesh at all, for Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan; and a “medium” one for the Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong audience.

Shaw had four children with his first wife, Wong Mei Chun, whom he married in 1937. Wong died at age 85 in 1987, and Shaw Studios stopped filming in the same year. Ten years later, in 1997, Shaw remarried, taking Mona Fong Yat-wa as his bride in Las Vegas. Fong became a deputy chairman of TVB in 2000.

Also in 2000, Shaw agreed to the sale of his unique library of 760 classic Chinese movie titles for $77.37 million to Celestial Pictures Ltd., a Hong Kong-based company owned by Astro All Asia Networks of Malaysia.

In the early 2000s, Shaw Studios entered a new era with Shaw’s own majority investment (made through his various holding companies) in the $180 million Hong Kong Movie City project, a 1.1-million-square-foot, full-service studio and production facility in Tseung Kwan O in eastern Hong Kong.

In 2007, coinciding with his 100th birthday, Shaw was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Hong Kong Film Awards. Although his direct involvement in film had diminished, his legacy lived on in the careers of many stars he helped launched through TVB’s steady stream of beauty pageants, soap operas, variety shows and dramas. The annual TVB Music Awards remains one of the most widely watched television events around Asia.

Also in 2007, TVB posted revenue of $559 million. That same year, Forbes estimated the worth of the Shaw media empire at $3.5 billion.

Reflecting at the peak of his fame in 1976, Shaw told Time magazine, “A small screen can never compare with a big screen. Movie houses will carry on. People like to go out, they like to be in a crowd...as long as the Chinese population in Asia is big, I will get back my investment. Besides, I make movies only for entertainment, never politics.”

In December, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) presented a special award to Shaw in recognition of his outstanding contribution to cinema.

Not one to hoard his wealth, Shaw donated billions of dollars to charity over the years, most recently contributing $13 million for disaster relief after the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake. His name adorns many hospital and school buildings in China and Hong Kong.

In 2004, 40 years after Chinese astronomers named an asteroid after him, Shaw established an annual international science award, the Shaw Prize, giving $1 million each to three people doing promising research in the fields of astronomy, mathematics and life and medical science.

Shaw is survived by four children and nine grandchildren. Shaw’s granddaughter Soo-wei Shaw was appointed head of the Hong Kong International Film Festival in 2008.
 

"Run Run Shaw dies at 106; filmmaker built Asian entertainment empire"

Run Run Shaw churned out more than 1,000 films over 50 years from his sprawling 'Hollywood East' studios in Hong Kong. His empire grew to include theaters, amusement parks and TV.

by

Julie Makinen

January 7th, 2014

Los Angeles Times

In 1957, when he was nearly 50 years old, Run Run Shaw made a grand bet on his movie dreams. He bought 46 acres of hilly land in a remote part of Hong Kong — paying the British colonial government just 45 cents per square foot because of the poor topography and the Communist threat looming over the border with Mao Tse-tung's China — and set out to build his dream factory.

By the time Shaw Movietown officially opened in 1961, the mogul had 1,200 actors, directors and other employees on site, many of them living in dormitories. Visitors including Rock Hudson, Peter O'Toole and the Beatles came to see what was billed as "the busiest movie studio in the world" — a facility with 80,000 costumes, 12 soundstages and 16 permanent sets, including Chinese palaces, gardens and not least of all, a reproduction of the Great Wall.

Life magazine also came calling, chronicling Shaw's morning regimen of tea, noodles and qigong exercises, followed by a five-minute drive in his Rolls-Royce from his mansion down to the studio, where he would churn out up to 50 films a year. Shaw's movies — particularly his martial arts pictures — won over audiences not just in Asia but around the world in the 1960s and '70s, and influenced filmmakers from John Woo and Ang Lee to Quentin Tarantino for decades afterward.

"He set up Hollywood East when he built that big studio," said USC professor Stanley Rosen, an expert in Chinese cinema. "He was really the mogul of Hong Kong."

Shaw, who died Tuesday at 106 in Hong Kong, was the "end of an era, the end of a dynasty in Asian film," said Stefan Hammond, author of several books on Hong Kong film, including "Sex & Zen and A Bullet in the Head" and "Hollywood East."

Shaw's studio, which he ran with his brother, Runme, produced more than 1,000 films over more than five decades. He also co-produced American movies, including Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner."

But his empire went much further, extending to movie theaters, amusement parks, magazines and later a sprawling television operation, TVB, that now produces thousands of hours of programming a year. TVB's school has become well known for training top Chinese actors and directors, including Chow-Yun Fat and Andy Lau.

Starting in his 70s, Shaw became a major philanthropist, donating hundreds of millions of dollars to schools and universities, primarily in Hong Kong and mainland China. In 2002, he established the Shaw Prize, which awards $1 million each year to researchers who have made breakthroughs in three areas: astronomy, life science and medicine, and math.

But movies remained his core passion. A 2003 profile of him in Variety recounted that at age 96 he was still watching films at night in his home screening room.

"In the film industry, one walks a tightrope, with all its thrills, satisfactions and dangers," Shaw said in a 1977 interview. "That is perhaps why the business of making movies has given me the pleasure, the excitement and the fulfillment which I have always craved."

Born in 1907 to a Shanghai textile merchant, Shaw was one of eight children. He joined his elder brothers Runje and Runme in the film business in the 1920s.

Runje Shaw had a silent film studio, and his brothers were dispatched to Singapore and Malaysia to buy and build cinemas to show their brother's movies and other pictures that were being made in Shanghai — then the center of the Chinese filmmaking world. By the mid-1930s, they owned more than 100 theaters.

World War II and the Communist revolution in China, however, left the Shanghai industry in tatters. The Shaws, frustrated with the quality of films available to show in their theaters, decided to greatly expand what had been a temporary production base in Hong Kong. Run Run Shaw moved to the territory in 1957, and with his Movietown, shifted the creative center of gravity of the Asian film world to the British colony, Hammond said.

"They chose Hong Kong because it was the only place they had the freedom to make the films they wanted to make," he said.

According to a history of Shaw's company featured on its Singapore website, the new studio was funded by "all the gold, jewelry and cash into which the Shaws had converted their assets prior to the war and literally buried away."

David Desser, an emeritus professor of film at the University of Illinois who now teaches at Chapman University, said the Shaw Bros. "modeled themselves after the Hollywood studios of the 1930s, with even greater control.... Run Run was like a Louis B. Mayer-type — he had a very paternal attitude toward his stars."

(Even the Shaw Bros. logo, with the initials SB over a shield, looked much like that of Warner Bros. Viewers of Tarantino's film "Kill Bill Vol. 1" may recall seeing the SB logo in the opening credit sequence, accompanied by the words "Shaw Scope" and a trumpet fanfare.)

Actors and directors — not just from Hong Kong but also Taiwan, the mainland and even Japan — were put under contract. The studio spent significant sums on their movies, working in color and widescreen. "Every penny they spent, you could see on screen," Hammond said.

But Shaw was known for keeping a close eye on the bottom line; one famous story had him refusing employees' requests for some extra buns to eat. "Films are an art, but they're also an industry. Forget that a moment and you have a money loser on your hands," he said in a 1981 interview with Signature magazine.

By the early 1960s, the Shaw Bros. were producing the most popular movies in Asia, particularly romances, dramas and musicals such as the 1963 hit "The Love Eterne," from star director Li Han Hsiang. Their films were also starting to attract notice in Europe and the U.S.: In 1962, "The Magnificent Concubine," about a Tang Dynasty beauty, became the first Chinese film to receive a prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

But Shaw's turn toward martial arts pictures starting in the mid-1960s would bring the company its greatest fame.

King Hu's "Come Drink With Me" (1966) helped usher in the era, and Chang Cheh's 1967 hit "The One Armed Swordsman" broke box office records for the studio, luring audiences with violence and bloodletting.

(Shaw's penny-pinching, however, would cost him the chance to work with Bruce Lee. Turning down what he considered a low-paying offer from the Shaws, the then-green Lee in the early 1970s took up with the Golden Harvest studio, founded by former Shaw executives Raymond Chow and Leonard Ho.)

Eventually, rivals such as Golden Harvest would come to eclipse the Shaw Bros. But well into the 1970s, the Shaws expanded their global reach by setting up theaters in places with significant populations of Chinese emigres, including San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles.

"I make movies to satisfy the hopes and desires of my audience; and the core of my audience is Chinese. What they desire to see on the screen are folklore, romances and popular subjects in Chinese history with which they are already familiar," Shaw said in a 1967 interview. "They miss the homeland they have left behind and the cultural tradition they are still cherishing."

The Shaw Bros.' martial arts movies did more, though, than attract multiple generations of Chinese American families, Desser noted. They drew in film buffs and cineastes, popularizing the kung fu genre stateside.

"The influence of their martial arts movies is almost impossible to overstate," Desser said. "There are almost no fight scenes in Hollywood movies today that don't rely on Asian martial arts. And that's directly attributable to these martial arts movies that the Shaw Bros. brought over in the 1970s."
Just as kung fu began to explode, Run Run Shaw began moving into the then-infant business of television in Hong Kong, launching TVB in 1967 and largely exiting the film business by the late 1980s. TVB now operates five channels and is one of the biggest private producers of Chinese programming in the world.

But even Shaw's move to television, Desser noted, had an influence on film, as TVB trained and gave opportunities to a new generation of directors, many of whom like Wong Kar-Wai would become key players in the Hong Kong New Wave cinema of the late 1970s and early '80s.

More recently, TVB's acting training program has graduated a slew of performers who have gone on to fame, including Tony Leung, who was named best actor at Cannes in 2000 for Wong's "In the Mood for Love."

Shaw himself continued working with TVB, giving up his chairman title at age 104. Celestial Pictures acquired rights to the extensive Shaw Bros. film library in 2003 and has released scores of its titles on DVD.

Shaw, who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1977, had two daughters and two sons. His first wife, Wong Mei-chun, died in 1987. Survivors include his wife, Mona Fong, TVB's deputy chairwoman, whom he married in 1997.
 

"Run Run Shaw, Chinese-Movie Giant of the Kung Fu Genre, Dies at 106"

by

Jonathan Kandell

January 6th, 2014

The New York Times

Run Run Shaw, the colorful Hong Kong media mogul whose name was synonymous with low-budget Chinese action and horror films — and especially with the wildly successful kung fu genre, which he is largely credited with inventing — died on Tuesday at his home in Hong Kong. He was 106.

His company, Television Broadcasts Limited, announced his death in a statement.

Born in China, Mr. Shaw and his older brother, Run Me, were movie pioneers in Asia, producing and sometimes directing films and owning lucrative cinema chains. His companies are believed to have released more than 800 films worldwide.

After his brother’s death in 1985, Mr. Shaw expanded his interest in television and became a publishing and real estate magnate as well. For his philanthropy, much of it going to educational and medical causes, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II and showered with public expressions of gratitude by the Communist authorities in Beijing.

Mr. Shaw enjoyed the zany glamour of the Asian media world he helped create. He presided over his companies from a garish Art Deco palace in Hong Kong, a cross between a Hollywood mansion and a Hans Christian Andersen cookie castle. Well into his 90s he attended social gatherings with a movie actress on each arm. And he liked to be photographed in a tai chi exercise pose, wearing the black gown of a traditional mandarin.

Asked what his favorite films were, Mr. Shaw, a billionaire, once replied, “I particularly like movies that make money.”

Run Run Shaw was born Shao Yifu in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, on Nov. 23, 1907. As a child, he moved to Shanghai, where his father ran a profitable textile business. According to some Hong Kong news media accounts, Run Run and Run Me were English-sounding nicknames the father gave his sons as part of a family joke that played on the similarity of the family name to the word rickshaw.

Evincing little interest in the family business, Run Run and Run Me turned instead to entertainment. The first play they produced was called “Man From Shensi,” on a stage, as it turned out, of rotten planks. As the brothers often told the story, on opening night the lead actor plunged through the planks, and the audience laughed. The Shaws took note and rewrote the script to include the incident as a stunt. They had a hit, and in 1924 they turned it into their first film.

After producing several more movies, the brothers decided that their homeland, torn by fighting between Nationalists and Communists, was too unstable. In 1927 they moved to Singapore, which was then part of British colonial Malaya.

Besides producing their own films in Singapore, the brothers imported foreign movies and built up a string of theaters. Their business boomed until the Japanese invaded the Malay Peninsula in 1941 and stripped their theaters and confiscated their film equipment. But according to Run Run Shaw, he and his brother buried more than $4 million in gold, jewelry and currency in their backyard, which they dug up after World War II and used to resume their careers.

With the rise of Hong Kong as the primary market for Chinese films, Run Run Shaw moved there in 1959, while his brother stayed behind looking after their Singapore business.

In Hong Kong, Run Run Shaw created Shaw Movietown, a complex of studios and residential towers where his actors worked and lived. Until then, the local industry had turned out 60-minute films with budgets that rarely exceeded a few thousand dollars. Shaw productions ran up to two hours and cost as much as $50,000 — a lavish sum by Asian standards at the time.

Mr. Shaw went on to plumb the so-called dragon-lady genre with great commercial success. Movies like “Madame White Snake” (1963) and “The Lady General” (1965) offered sexy, combative, sometimes villainous heroines, loosely based on historical characters. And by the end of the 1960s, he had discovered that martial-arts films in modern settings could make even more money.

His “Five Fingers of Death” (1973), considered a kung fu classic, was followed by “Man of Iron” (1973), “The Shaolin Avengers” (1976) and many others. Critics dismissed the films as artless and one-dimensional, but spectators crowded into the theaters to cheer, laugh or mockingly hiss at the action scenes. To ensure that his films were amply distributed, Mr. Shaw’s chain of cinemas grew to more than 200 houses in Asia and the United States. “We were like the Hollywood of the 1930s,” he said. “We controlled everything: the talent, the production, the distribution and the exhibition.”

Other Hong Kong producers, directors and actors called Mr. Shaw’s methods iron-fisted. In 1970, Raymond Chow, a producer with Mr. Shaw’s company, Shaw Brothers, left to form his own company, Golden Harvest, which gave more creative and financial independence to top directors and stars.

Mr. Chow’s biggest success, and Mr. Shaw’s most notable loss, was his decision to bankroll Bruce Lee. Mr. Lee initially approached Shaw Brothers, which turned down his demand for a long-term contract of $10,000 per film. Golden Harvest then offered Mr. Lee creative control and profit-sharing.

“The Big Boss,” better known as “Fists of Fury” (1971), was Mr. Lee’s first film with Golden Harvest, and it broke all Hong Kong box-office records. Other big-name actors and directors flocked to Golden Harvest, breaking Shaw Brothers’ virtual monopoly.

But Run Run Shaw had already expanded beyond the film industry. His investments in the new phenomenon of Asian television were to prove even more lucrative than his movie productions. In 1972 he began Television Broadcasts (TVB), and he soon gained control of 80 percent of the Hong Kong market. TVB churned out 12 hours of its own programming a day, much of it soap operas and costume dramas that riveted Chinese television viewers on the mainland and throughout Southeast Asia.

As his fortune grew, Mr. Shaw donated generously to hospitals, orphanages and colleges in Hong Kong, for which he was named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1974 and awarded a knighthood in 1977. In 1990 he donated 10 million pounds to help establish the Run Run Shaw Institute of Chinese Affairs at Oxford University, where his four children had studied. In 2004 he established the Shaw Prize, an international award for research in astronomy, mathematics and medicine.

As Hong Kong’s days as a British colony dwindled, Mr. Shaw stepped up his philanthropy in China. He contributed more than $100 million to scores of universities on the mainland and raised money in support of Chinese victims of floods and other natural disasters. Chinese leaders toasted him for his generosity at banquets in Beijing.

Mr. Shaw’s philanthropy did not extend to the United States, but he was once viewed as a white knight in New York. In 1991, when Macy’s was on the verge of bankruptcy, he bought 10 percent of its preferred shares for $50 million, becoming one of the largest shareholders in R. H. Macy & Company.

The investment had a personal aspect. Ten years earlier, Mitchell Finkelstein, the son of Macy’s chief executive, Edward S. Finkelstein, had married Hui Ling, a Shaw protégée who appeared in many of his movies. Mr. Shaw met the older Finkelstein at the wedding, and they became friends.

In later years, the aging mogul himself seemed in need of help to keep his media empire intact. Concerned with the rise of cable and satellite television, he sold a 22 percent stake in TVB to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation in 1993.

Mr. Shaw had intended to maintain control over his media business by balancing his one-third share in TVB against Mr. Murdoch’s 22 percent and the 24 percent held by Robert Kuok, one of Hong Kong’s richest entrepreneurs. But the balance of power shifted when Mr. Murdoch sold his equity to Mr. Kuok shortly afterward. Then, in 1996, in Hong Kong’s first case of a hostile takeover, Mr. Kuok forced Mr. Shaw to sell him his shares in TVE, the lucrative publishing, music and real estate subsidiary of TVB. The deal reduced Mr. Shaw’s TVB stake to 23 percent.

Mr. Shaw’s business situation was also hindered by his inability to groom credible successors. His sons, Vee Meng and Harold, were at one time heavily involved in the family enterprises, but their relationship with him had become strained.

Mr. Shaw’s first wife, Wong Mee Chun, died in 1987. He married Mona Fong, a former singer and actress, in 1997. She survives him. Other survivors include his sons and two daughters, Dorothy and Violet, also from his first marriage.

Even after turning 90, Mr. Shaw maintained a powerful presence in the Hong Kong film world through his control of Shaw Studios. But a newer generation of independent producers came to dominate the Hong Kong market with their own violent brand of police and gangster films.

Run Run Shaw [Wikipedia]

Celluloid vs digital...it's economics

"Oscars: Cinematography nominees discuss film versus digital"

Janusz Kaminski shot 'War Horse' on film; Jeff Cronenweth used digital for 'Dragon Tattoo.' As technology changes, cinematographers adjust to new realities.

by

Mark Olsen

February 19th, 2012

Los Angeles Times

This year's Oscar nominees for cinematography present a particularly varied cross-section of contemporary filmmaking at a time when the very infrastructure of how movies are made and seen is in transition. Consider: 35-millimeter film prints are being phased out in favor of digital projection. Consumer still cameras can be used to shoot high-definition digital video. Video on demand is becoming a popular viewing option. Even the venerable Eastman Kodak, which produces the film stock on which many movies are made, recently filed for bankruptcy protection.

The Scandinavian-modern "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" was shot with digital cameras; the World War I-set"War Horse" was shot on film."Hugo" was shot in digital 3-D to portray 1931 Paris, while"The Artist" was shot on color film, then transferred to black-and-white to evoke the end of the silent film era in Hollywood."The Tree of Life" used footage shot both on film and digital and integrates nature photography into its storytelling. (That three-on-film, two-on-digital split is likely an approximation of Hollywood production overall, though changes are evolving rapidly.)

As this moment of transition challenges distributors, exhibitors and even audiences, cinematographers are on the front lines of those responding to the changes. Many of them recognize just what a unique window this particular time presents.

"I think this is a wonderful time for a cinematographer," said Emmanuel Lubezki, who shot "The Tree of Life" and is a four-time previous nominee. "You can have 65-millimeter, 35, 16 and so on, and then you have all the range of incredible digital cameras that are not like film but allow you to create wonderful images."

The only vocal anti-digitalist among this year's nominees is Janusz Kaminski, nominated for Steven Spielberg's "War Horse." The Polish-born Kaminski won Oscars for Spielberg's"Schindler's List" and"Saving Private Ryan," and though he recently shot in digital for the first time while working on a commercial, he decried digital as a harbinger of "the death of the cinematographer." "Generally speaking, I don't have respect for digital media just yet," he added.

His concern is that the cinematographer is no longer allowed to fully control the image as other technicians become a larger part of the process and that digital monitors create a laissez-faire attitude on-set toward image-making. "If you see the image on the digital screen I think people become lazy, they get satisfied with just seeing the image, they're not going for visual panache, not getting the story through metaphors," he said. "With film there is still mystery."

In the finale of "War Horse," a soldier returns home. Shooting outdoors in rural England against a vibrant setting sun with heavy use of filters to create an otherworldly glow that envelopes everyone in the scene, Kaminski suspected that audiences would likely assume the effect was achieved in post-production.

The nominated films have a distinct perspective into the past and cinema itself. "Hugo" deals directly with film preservation in its story line involving the silent filmmaker Georges Méliès. "The Artist" also invokes film history. "Dragon Tattoo" and "Tree of Life" both deal with memories and the ties of the past, while "War Horse" purposefully captures the spirit of classical filmmaking.

"It's a very intriguing group of nominees," said Stephen Pizzello, executive editor of American Cinematographer magazine. "These particular filmmakers all show how cinematic thinking can be extended with the help of modern tools, whether that means digital cameras, camera-movement systems such as the Technocrane or Steadicam, or postproduction techniques. The shaping of a solid movie still demands good 'movie thinking,' especially in terms of how new technologies are applied to the creative process."

For the look of "The Artist," a black-and-white, essentially dialogue-free film, French cinematographer Guillaume Schiffman referred to "the souvenir," the feeling of watching an old movie more than specifically wanting to directly make a film in an old style. Schiffman shot on color film stock that was timed to black-and-white in post-production because he found that he could get a broader range of gray tones in the image than if he shot on black-and-white stock (a not uncommon technique). He shot at 22 frames-per-second rather than the current standard 24 to lightly evoke the sense of watching older films.

Schiffman had previously worked with writer-director Michel Hazanavicius and star Jean Dujardin on two '60s-era spy spoofs. The method used to research and prepare those films was similar to the one used to create "The Artist," paying respect to older films without feeling trapped by them.

"We see a lot of movies, we talk a lot, we try to see the codes," Schiffman explained of the playful creativity behind their working methods, "the cutting, the lighting, the framing, the acting, and then we get all that in our minds and as soon as we start to really shoot we say, let's forget about it. We know how it should look and how they should act, let's find our own way to tell the story."

In shooting "Hugo" for director Martin Scorsese, cinematographer Robert Richardson — winner of Oscars for "The Aviator" and "JFK" — worked for the first time both with a digital camera and in 3-D. To re-create the films of Méliès in a breathtaking sequence within "Hugo," Richardson at first tried locking two old-fashioned hand-cranked cameras together, but found the only way to get the desired effect was with current cutting-edge digital systems. Throughout shooting, Richardson found himself particularly taken with how 3-D, often thought of as a tool simply for spectacular action, could be used to vividly express and bring forward emotion and the actor's performance.

"It's akin to entering into a new relationship. You don't know the boundaries," Richardson said in a professorial air of working with new formats. "It's vastly more technical than an emotional entrance, but what you find as you tap into the technical you become more accustomed to it. 3-D is in many ways the bastard child, we don't want to look at it as if it can be an art form. And I think it can be seen as something vastly superior emotionally."

Jeff Cronenweth stepped onto the set of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" on just a few days notice, answering the call of his frequent collaborator, director David Fincher, to replace Swedish cinematographer Fredrik Bäckar a few weeks into the shoot. Cronenweth, who received an Oscar nomination last year for his work on Fincher's "The Social Network," was able to get up to speed quickly by seeing all the previously shot footage online before arriving on location in Sweden.

Cronenweth, son of cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth, with whom he has worked on many projects, also worked on seven films with Swedish cameraman Sven Nykvist. Once in Sweden to shoot "Dragon Tattoo," Cronenweth immediately recognized the soft light conditions that Nykvist had always spoken of. In particular, he found shooting the film's star, Rooney Mara, in extremely low light levels remarkable as her pale skin popped out of the darkness, an effect heightened by shooting in digital.

"I think that choice is going to go away as film gets harder to get, harder to deal with, more expensive," Cronenweth said. "And don't get me wrong, I'm a huge supporter of film and I wish it would never go away. I wish I could shoot everything on film and then project it digital and have the most control and the best of both worlds."

Lubezki, the charming, Mexican-born cinematographer of "The Tree of Life," described how director Terrence Malick wanted to be as free as possible while shooting his powerful evocation of family, at once startlingly specific and mystically universal. Usually shooting with only available light, using hand-held cameras and at times allowing the camera to continue to run as scenes take shape are all frequent descriptions of digital productions, but Lubezki still found film the better option overall than digital.

"In a movie like Terry's it would have been catastrophic," Lubezki said of shooting only with digital. "We were trying to hold information in the highlights in the brightest clouds close to the sun and in the dark shadows of a dress in the foreground. Digital cannot do that. It will be able to, probably in a couple of years, but it cannot do it right now."

Forces outside aesthetic considerations of cinematographers likely will make the main decision for them sometime in the next handful of years. Even the issue of digital preservation and migration — having to do in part with the speed at which technologies now become obsolete — has become part of the conversation as the transition is underway.

"It's going to be less of a debate," Cronenweth added. "In all fairness, we're at the infancy stage of digital cinema."


In praise of celluloid

Celluloid film stock...an art characteristic in itself

Auguste and Louis Lumiere...the birth of motion pictures

It was on this day in 1895 that Auguste and Louis Lumiere had the first commercial movie screening at the Grand Café in Paris. An audience paid to watch their film "Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory." It was short, 46 seconds long, a single shot with a static camera. It showed a concierge opening the factory gates at the end of the day's work, from which dozens of workers poured into the street, some walking, some on bicycle. It ended with the concierge closing the gates again.

In praise of celluloid

"Steven Spielberg & Martin Scorsese: the joy of celluloid"

It's risky, imperfect, expensive – and the stuff of a thousand classics.

by

Tacita Dean

October 10th, 2011

guardian.co.uk

Steven Spielberg Director

My favourite and preferred step between imagination and image is a strip of photochemistry that can be held, twisted, folded, looked at with the naked eye, or projected on to a surface for others to see. It has a scent and it is imperfect. If you get too close to the moving image, it's like impressionist art. And if you stand back, it can be utterly photorealistic. You can watch the grain, which I like to think of as the visible, erratic molecules of a new creative language. After all, this "stuff" of dreams is mankind's most original medium, and dates back to 1895. Today, its years are numbered, but I will remain loyal to this analogue artform until the last lab closes.

Keanu Reeves Actor

The biggest difference I have found when working photochemically versus digitally on motion pictures is the length of time the takes can last. Broadly, a 1,000ft roll of 35mm film lasts around nine-and-a-half minutes before running out, while a digital tape or recording card or hard drive can last from 40 minutes to over an hour and a half. This translates to a very different rhythm on the floor; the pressure to "cut" to save film is alleviated.

Archiving digital images is a technological dilemma. The idea of that discovered shoebox of pictures, or wedding album, will not exist digitally in your camera or on your computer or in a "cloud": you should print them. I often feel a photochemical image contains the mass of the subject and dimension; a digital image often feels as if it is mass-less. This could be nostalgia or simply how I learned to see. Others will not have this learning: they will probably never experience a photochemical image. Is this loss a tragedy, a revolution, an evolution? What have we lost, and what have we gained?

I will miss walking on to a photochemical film set. It has a magic to me. When the director says: "Action", and the film is rolling, it feels like something is at stake. It feels important and intense. In a way, death is present in the rolling of that film – we live, right now – and the director says: "Cut". And that moment in time is captured on film, really.

Dick Pope Cinematographer

Film? 1974, 27 years old, first break as a cameraman, major TV documentary, stone age tribe, expedition, only three of us, director, camera, sound, no assistants, incredibly remote, hauling 500kg of gear across world, air, road, sea, river, hike deep into rainforest, scorching heat, intense humidity. Sixteen-millimetre, 200x400ft rolls, stored in coolest place, every foot used, no waste, Eclair camera, three magazines. Arms in black changing bag, open can, lift out, peel off tape, load mag, close lid, pull out arm, unzip bag, finish lacing, snap mag on camera, lift on to shoulder, turn over, shoot! Is it there, did we get it? Will it be any good? No way of knowing, just wait, see and shoot.

Three months of tribal ways, incredible life-changing experience, finish, farewells, canoes back down river, return home, 80,000ft to lab, develop and print, wait, terrible uncertainty, what if? At last: rushes, into cutting room, everybody there, stomach in mouth, print loaded on Steenbeck, blacked-out room, run it, and bang, there they are, those faraway people and places, it has come out, it is there, it's wonderful, everybody happy, waves of relief, complete and utter magic, it's film. Outside in the street private tears of relief and joy, that's it, I'm away, I'm a cameraman.

Later in the darkroom's red glow, printing my stills, black-and-white portraits of the tribe conjure up and materialise in the tray, this wondrous photochemical reaction of liquid solution, emulsion, celluloid, silver grains, gelatin and again the very same magic. It's film.

From documentaries to movies, from a crew of three to what feels like 300, and until very recently only on film and mostly 35mm. Sometimes, when I want to work with a lighter, smaller, lower profile or seek that grittier, uniquely textured image, I choose 16mm. When I photographed Mike Leigh's 2004 film Vera Drake, nobody ever flagged up or gave a damn that it had originated on the cheaper, smaller "shoestring" 16mm format, because it created exactly the right cinematic look for the film. In the end all that matters is the world created up there on the screen. This was reinforced to me with the success of The Hurt Locker in 2008 and Black Swan in 2010, both shot on 16mm, both winning countless awards, including cinematography. 16mm is very much alive and well, and it's crucial it remains so, yet its future is seriously under threat. Before too long, I fear it will be film itself that's cast out, and in the stampede towards the blinding, flashing light of the digital age, the fabulous physical and spiritual magic of it will be trampled underfoot for ever.

Dick Pope is Mike Leigh's longtime director of photography. He was nominated for an Oscar for his work on Neil Burger's The Illusionist in 2007.

Mitch Epstein Photographer

"What do you mean, 'By the hand?'" a friend asked when I told her that recently I had been making black-and-white optical prints, for which the hand was crucial. The printer's hands, I explained, not technological wizardry, manipulate light and shadow; and the hand has human limits. Each print varies slightly. The limits and idiosyncrasies of optical printing were a welcome change from the maddeningly infinite possibilities and perfectionism of digital printing.

My first pictures were made with Kodachrome slide film in the early 1970s, and were fully resolved as projected images on a white wall in a darkened room. They remain my most direct experience of photography. I later turned to colour negative film, for its greater tonal latitude and the ability to make prints directly from the negative. While I continue to shoot negative film to this day, for nearly a decade I have been scanning my negatives and modulating them in Photoshop before outputting them on traditional chromogenic colour paper. It's a hybrid process.

My greatest fear is that as a discarded medium and corporate outcast, analogue will no longer be essential to visual education. Many young people will not know the difference between hand and button, they will only know the button; and their use of technology will be constricted by their ignorance of hand work. They will not perceive the qualities of optical photography because their eyes will only know digital imagery.

When I last visited Berlin, I got lost on the way to a friend's house. While staring at my iPhone map I heard a voice call: "Mitch, Mitch!" and looked up to find him waving at me from his car as he waited for the light to change. I climbed into the car. A GPS receiver has more than once helped me out of a jam, but it is hard to describe how lovely it felt to pull my eyes off my screen and let a friend guide me.

Mitch Epstein won this year's Prix Pictet photography award for his series American Power.

Jean-Luc Godard Director

The so-called "digital" is not a mere technical medium, but a medium of thought. And when modern democracies turn technical thought into a separate domain, those modern democracies incline towards totalitarianism.

Heather Stewart Programme director, BFI

In black-and-white film, if we look at the texture and detail achievable in the velvety blacks, we can see how meaning and emotional effect are intertwined: the frightening magic of the moonlit river journey in The Night of the Hunter (1955); the ambiguity and hysteria of The Innocents (1961), underlined by Freddie Francis' brilliant cinematography; the glistening streets of Vienna in The Third Man (1949) – Harry Lime may have caused children to die, but how can we resist Orson Welles when he steps out from the shadows? Film, when used like this, achieves the "aesthetic bliss" sought by Vladimir Nabokov in fiction; a tingling contentedness, something to inspire others.

Film is an organic material: different stocks or colour processes, each with their own special characteristics, can be transformed into a work of art. Film is imperfect, not evenly sensitive, with a curve that responds beautifully to light. Film has density and weight, something missing from digital images. The ontological being of film itself – the sprockets, the afterimage created in our mind's eye, the celluloid – can all be the subject matter of film-making. The soft-edged wipes of Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1936), the motion blur of the spinning newspaper in His Girl Friday (1940), the bleached-out tableaux of Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), the gaudy lack of realism engendered by Technicolor in any of the great musicals: our eyes and brains appreciate these pleasures particular to film.

Shooting digitally, David Fincher and Jeff Cronenweth in The Social Network (2010) created a claustrophobic world of low-lit interiors and shallow depth of focus, expressive of characters at ease with computers, not people. In Alexander Sokurov's masterpiece, Russian Ark (2002), digital allowed him the artistic freedom to shoot his feature in a single shot. In Collateral (2004), Michael Mann and Dion Beebe created a digital world: modern, urban, blue-lit, nightmarish. Compelling works of art can be digital. But the qualities are not those of film. Digital can be fatiguing to watch (sometimes nauseating), as dead as mutton when not in the hands of a skilled director of photography.

Technological change brings gains and losses. I look forward to those who can transform digits into works of art, and to those who still use film in all its richness.

Martin Scorsese Director

Those incredible recreations of [Manhattan street] Mulberry Bend in [DW Griffith's] The Musketeers of Pig Alley, and of turn-of-the-century San Francisco in [Erich von Stroheim's] Greed, as delicately textured and rendered as the first photographs. The glistening close-up that introduces Anna May Wong in Shanghai Express: the richest and most brilliant blacks and whites, greys and silvers – even the air feels alive. Gene Tierney in her white robe and dark glasses and red lipstick, in the polished wooden boat on the turquoise water with the green pines behind her, in Leave Her to Heaven. Ava Gardner – the thick dark hair, the skin like perfect porcelain – in a gold dress under an emerald cape against a midnight blue sky in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman.

The cinema began with a passionate, physical relationship between celluloid and the artists and craftsmen and technicians who handled it, manipulated it, and came to know it the way a lover comes to know every inch of the body of the beloved. No matter where the cinema goes, we cannot afford to lose sight of its beginnings.


Celluloid film stock...an art characteristic in itself

Zoetrope anniversary

In 1867, the Zoetrope was patented by William E. Lincoln of Providence, R.I. (No. 64,117). The device was the first animated picture machine. It provided an animation sequence of pictures lining the inside wall of a shallow cylinder, with vertical slits between the images. By spinning the cylinder and looking through the slits, a repeating loop of a moving image could be viewed.

Persistence of vision

And. today marks another anniversary...

In 1896, the first movie shown to a paying theatre audience in the U.S. was presented using Thomas Edison's Vitascope. The movie had a series of short scenes, and were part of a program with other acts at Koster and Bial's Music Hall, 34th St, New York City. Included in the film shorts were a ballet scene, a burlesque boxing match, waves on a sea shore, and a comic allegory The Monroe Doctrine, all of which were projected at about half life size.

Vitascope

Persistence of vision

It is strange how the brain can perceive a series of still images and translate them into motion. It is called "the persistence of vision" and explained by Michael McKinney:

Our eyes are one of the five specialized ways our mind uses to form a picture of world. The eye is a remarkable instrument that has certain characteristics that help us to process the light we see in such a way that our minds can create meaning from it.

The motion picture, the scanning of an image for television, and the sequential reproduction of the flickering visual images they produce, work in part, because of an optical phenomena called the persistence of vision and its psychological partner, the phi phenomenon—the mental bridge that the mind forms to conceptually complete the gaps between the frames or pictures. Persistence of vision also plays a role in keeping the world from going pitch black every time we blink our eyes.

Whenever light strikes the retina, the brain retains the impression of that light for about a tenth of a second—depending on the brightness of the image—after the source of that light is removed from the eye. This is due to a prolonged chemical reaction. As a result, the eye cannot clearly distinguish fast changes in light that occur faster than this retention period. The changes either go unnoticed or they appear to be one continuous picture to the human observer. This fundamental fact of the way we see has been used to our advantage.

When we go to the movies, we know that a motion picture creates an illusion of a constantly lit screen by flashing separate, individual photographs in rapid succession. Even though the movie screen appears to be constantly lit, it is in fact dark about half the time. This flickering image on the screen gave rise to the old term “flicks” in the early days of movies. Today’s motion pictures flash a picture on the screen at flicker-free 24 frames per second.

How You See It

1936

Finally, make a zoetrope yourself:

George Eggers Page

Ruth Hayes Page

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