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Comment by cmiles74 | Hacker News Reader

The comparison to paintings in an art gallery struck me as the most compelling argument for viewing film in a theater, rather than a digital copy in a nice viewing room. That is the medium the art was made in, therefore there's an intrinsic value in viewing it in the way the artist intended it to be viewed. I hadn't thought if it that way and he's right: no one tries to pass off a print as being the same thing as the actual painting.

I also found Nolan's rejection of the term "consume" interesting. Here's a term that the industry has been really pushing, likely to keep in line with the view that watching a film is a single use thing, and he dismisses it out of hand.

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"Consume" and "Content" are the two most disgusting words I can think of in the context of art and more generally entertainment. They are words invented by advertisers to reduce artistic works into commodities and people into passive zombies. They are a misanthropic conception of the way that people interact with artistic works, and we seem to put up with it because they make great DB column names.

"Consume" for media is a wrong word. After you consume something it should be gone. You can be consumed by disease, meaning you're becoming less due to it.

Movies, books, songs are not less when you enjoy them.

Instead of saying you "consume" art, you can say you "spend time with" art.

Well they is when you view something as art. I consume a lot of movies, but I spend a lot more time with Christopher Nolan's film, and rewatch time in some cases multiple times.

The analogy of seeing an original painting in a gallery vs. looking at a print is appealing, however, I can't help think that we're comparing apples and oranges here: paintings are 3d objects and prints are 2d reproductions. All image projections are reproductions, and the colour and textural properties inherent in photochemical film processing are subtle and trivial to reproduce digitally.

I'm fairly certain Nolan himself could be fooled in a double blind test between 4k digital and a 70mm (assuming he didn't oversee the transfers haha).

This is more about _knowing_ how the picture was produced, and that it was reproduced faithfully, and the excitement that comes from that for those who care. The placebo effect is real :)

No, it's pretty easy to tell on a big enough screen. What's impossible to distinguish in a double blind test is FLAC vs good lossy compression or high end reel-to-reel against high end digital.

So then does the argument come down to a question of bitrate? Can we push digital projections beyond the point of human visual discernment, like we have with audio?

Yes, but I don't see many 16K projectors around.

That is not how high the cinema ever gets. The focus plane never completely aligns, the backgrounds shift, the projector vibrates and its lenses have edge artifacts. The scanable 16k film would look way better in Oculus VR than reprojected.

I wouldn't use the optics of commercial VR headsets as any kind of quality benchmark.

That argument would perhaps be valid, if someone went to through the trouble of creating a super-hi-rez simulation of the film theatre experience. To my knowledge, no one has done that.

There are paintings that are meant to be viewed in galleries, but they are relatively recent. Historically, most paintings were commissioned by individuals and institutions...i.e. the were painted for patrons. There's about three centuries between painting the Mona Lisa and the opening of the Louvre. Or to put it another way, Renaissance paintings in an art museum are somewhat analogous to 2001 on an iPad and a person could make an argument [1] that part of what makes modern art modern is that it is painted for a world in which art gets displayed in museums.

[1]: I'm not making that argument. The argument I am making is that a person can make that argument.

I get the attractiveness of seeing this particular film in a form that is as close as what the director wanted the audience to see as possible. But the analogy only goes so far. Much of chemical film photography goes through the digital domain for manipulation. Almost all magazine photography goes into a digital production process. Many artists digitize their paintings and sell "giclée" prints to hit lower price points and extract a lot more revenue from popular paintings.

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