Although time will be the final arbiter, it's not unreasonable to make a case in early 2008 that three of 2007's best candidates for a long shelf life are No Country For Old Men, There Will Be Blood and Zodiac. All three films are dark, ruthless visions that use past periods to serve as metaphor for our current society. As the motion picture form is going through its transition from celluloid to digital, it's interesting to look at these three pictures as utilizing technology in different ways to tell their stories: There Will Be Blood, at Paul Thomas Anderson's direction, was fiercely and defiantly classical, employing anamorphic lenses and chemical timing; at the opposite end of the spectrum was David Fincher's Zodiac, the first studio picture to capture its images directly as uncompressed 4:4:4 data on a hard drive; splitting the difference, No Country For Old Men was photographed by Roger Deakins, a pioneer of digital color-timing.

The fact that all three of these pictures used technologies in different a manner is ultimately irrelevant to the fact that they are all stories told with pictures, regardless of the chosen workflow. While they may be aesthetically different, each approach is completely legitimate. One similarity between them is a screen aspect ratio of approximately 2.40:1. What's dissimilar is the manner in which that widescreen image was achieved: No Country For Old Men used the Super-35 process, by which the entire camera negative is exposed while the image is composed for and later masked at 2.40:1; Zodiac was shot with the Viper FilmStream and arrived at its aspect ratio by altering the shape of the recorded digital pixels; There Will Be Blood did it the old-fashioned way by employing Panavision anamorphic lenses that optically squeezed the photographed image and subsequently stretched it back out during projection.

Each approach to achieving a widescreen image rendered a different looking image. Super-35 is often considered "flat," while anamorphic, because of the nature of its optics, is considered to be "round" -- and this distortion is very visible to the viewer if he knows what to look for (Wes Anderson also exclusively uses anamorphic lenses). Each format has positives and negatives: anamorphic has less depth of field and requires more light, Super-35 tends to pick up grain once transfered to an optical anamorphic print for projection. Digital widescreen deals with the same issues that all digital does, in that the image inherently offers a greater depth of field than film, yet that image tends to be flat at the same time.

The cinematographers of the three pictures -- Harris Savides (Zodiac), Roger Deakins (No Country for Old Men) and Robert Elswit (There Will Be Blood) -- all went for varying degrees of naturalism. Savides, who still prefers film, struggled with digital and its latitude, even going so far as to cease using his light meter, lighting the movie by eye from the HD monitor; his work was often enhanced in post-production through compositing. Deakins was previously Oscar-nominated for his work on O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the first feature to be entirely digitally color-timed; as with all his work since then, he photographed on film, then proofed the images in a DI suite. Elswit was the only DP to retain his images on celluloid from start to finish, both at the creative request of Paul Thomas Anderson, but also, because he found that unlike Super-35, anamorphic images tended to become coarse once brought through digital intermediate.

While some critics might argue that Anderson's approach is a more pure form of cinema, this is obviously contrasted by appreciations of Zodiac based on its ability to create near-seamless compositing of live-action and CGI elements. I think both arguments hold sway -- there's something beautiful about Blood's simplicity just as there's something exciting about Zodiac's innovation. Lost between the dueling positions is the reality that very often the greatest films are those that exploit the medium's technology to its fullest. While scholars might innately focus on the FX of King Kong or 2001: A Space Odyssey, when dealing with Citizen Kane they tend to focus on the narrative and visual approach of it as opposed to its use of optical effects (multiple exposures, rear projection, models).

In the end, what matters most is whether the visual approach suits the storytelling. And that is not a technical issue but a creative one.

--Jamie Stuart