Quentin Tarantino pans digital screenings at Cannes

Veteran director laments that cinema as he knew it is dead.

CANNES:

Screening films in digital is tantamount to forcing audiences to watch television in public, cult director Quentin Tarantino told the Cannes Film Festival on Friday, adding that the lush 35-millimetre cinema he grew up with was “dead.”

Tarantino is not competing in this year’s event, but he spoke to journalists and film critics before a 35mm screening of his hit Pulp Fiction on the beach on Friday night. “Digital projections – that’s just television in public. And apparently, the whole world is okay with television in public, but what I knew as cinema is dead,” said Tarantino.

Digital formats and distribution have swept the world of cinema, largely because of cost – most of the films in Cannes are now projected that way. But aficionados still sing the praises of the old-school film reels in the same way that music buffs hold on to their vinyl Long Play records over compact discs. “The fact that most films now are not presented in 35mm means that the war is lost,” said the director of the cult hit Reservoir Dogs.

Fans obsess about the warmth and fineness of the 35mm grain and its ability to record the darkest of shadows and the brightest of lights. “I’m hopeful that we’re going through a woozy romantic period with the ease of digital and am hoping that while this generation is completely hopeless, the next generation that will come out will demand the real thing,” he added.



Known for the energy and violence of his films, Tarantino acknowledged that digital has some advantages. “The good side of digital is the fact that a young filmmaker can actually now just buy a cell phone and if they have the tenacity to actually put something together, they can actually make a movie,” he said.

Prior to the advent of digital, the barriers to getting a film made were so great that it was like a “Mount Everest that most of us couldn’t climb.”

Tarantino said he has a “pretty terrific” collection of 35mm prints at home, and an even bigger 16mm one, which he screens all the time. “I’m always watching movies,” he said.

“One of the nice things about my life is that doing fairly well in cinema has afforded me a chance to almost live an academic’s life and so, my feeling is I’m studying for my professorship in the history of world cinema and the day I die is the day I graduate,” said the industry heavyweight.

Tarantino was asked about his win of Cannes’ top Palme d’Or prize in 1994 for Pulp Fiction. “Winning the Palme d’Or, as far as laurels are concerned, is my single absolutely, positively, greatest achievement,” said Tarantino. “Of all the trophies that I have won, it is the one that has the biggest place of honour in my house. It’s the one I want another one of, maybe, someday, before they turn out the lights.”

An idea currently intriguing Tarantino is turning his 2012 western Django Unchained, starring Jamie Foxx and Leonardo DiCaprio, into a four-part mini-series for cable, using extra unseen footage. 

Published in The Express Tribune, May 25^th, 2014.

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