![]() The image definition is so sharp that it is possible to see the texture of paint on the walls. A reverse-angle shot shows the two men entering the prison passageway, their movements framed in alternating patches of darkness and light as doors open and close. The image has the striking look and feel of a de Chirico painting. Dressed in black and filmed in extreme long shot, Dillinger and a cohort approach a vast, monochromatic cream-colored prison wall that, except for a barely visible patch of cumulus clouds, dominates the screen and the two minute figures coming toward it. Dillinger (Johnny Depp) arrives at a prison to stage a break for some of his incarcerated men. The opening scene sets the artistic standard for what is to come. Using the Sony F23 CineAlta camera system, “Public Enemies” unfolds in a display of color and light and image definition that is nothing short of exhilarating. In his account of John Dillinger’s bank-robbing days of 1933-34 and crime agent Melvin Purvis’ hot pursuit, Mann brings digital high-definition video forcefully to the screen, and in ways that I could never have imagined. It is one of those breakthrough cinema experiences, like “Citizen Kane,” that offer something so aesthetically innovative that I was compelled to return to fully grasp the artistic techniques at play. Well, it’s time to reconsider! I have now seen Michael Mann’s brilliant gangster narrative, “Public Enemies”, twice. The other, fast, blunt, immediate.Video and film each have had their own strengths, but the “now,” newsy quality of video retrievals collided with my nostalgic love of film emulsion, and that’s why I couldn’t see video ever achieving the aesthetic level of celluloid in narrative motion pictures. The difference between celluloid film images and video images is like the difference between poetry and newspaper reporting. Had the scene been shot on celluloid, the effect would have been different: less immediate, more emotionally aloof. The matter-of-fact flatness of the video has something to do with the image’s “realness”-there was nothing pretty about it. ![]() That imagery possessed an immediacy that resonated with shock around the world. Think of the video footage of Neda, the young protester in Iran, who was captured on video dying on a street in Tehran. Video, on the other hand, offers a “nowness” that celluloid emulsions somehow do not, and cannot, match. That’s not just because the screen is bigger: it’s that the film itself makes the images more luminous. We all know that films look better in a theater than on TV. Whatever the time period of the narrative-past, present, or future-films like these, shot on celluloid, have a certain formality to them, a majesty of presentation. The result is that whether it’s rendered in shades of gray or color, film imagery possesses a unique “distancing” quality.I think of films as diverse as “The Grapes of Wrath” (shot in black and white, set in the 1930s) and “Star Wars” (a full-color space extravanganza). ![]() Johnny Depp as John Dilinger in ‘Public Enemies’Film has a kind of glow, a polish-it’s the shine that originally earned movies the nickname “the silver screen.” This luminosity is literally created by light: celluloid film images are made by exposing various-sized, light-sensitive particles (which are suspended on the film in an emulsion surface) to reflected light. ![]()
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