The new life of celluloid: Oppenheimer, Asteroid City to home-grown independent films

A celluloid movie screening at Harkat Studios, Mumbai

Sean Baker, 52, is an indie filmmaker with eyes and heart for the subaltern American experience — at least, what America considers “subaltern”. In 2015, he directed his first empathic gem, Tangerine, a comedy about sex workers at Christmastime. Two years later, he made The Florida Project (2017), which delves into poverty in the shadows of Disney World, and it got actor William Dafoe a Best Actor Oscar nomination.

Filmmaker and cinematographer Sean Baker.

Baker’s films, including the wonderfully amoral Red Rocket (2022) about a man who is, by all standards reprehensible, always capture a vibe, a milieu, a hustle. In Red Rocket, a former porn star and eternal hustler returns to his Texas hometown and bonds with an adolescent girl who runs a donut store with benefits in mind. Baker’s films are a lot about location, and in Red Rocket, shot on a grainy Super 16mm camera, Texas is toasty as well as sci-fi neon in turns. The Texan town’s chimney smoke hangs dense over it, making the sky invisible.  The frames are oversaturated, the hustler and his young friend stand out amid the engulfing surroundings. In one key scene, the sound and vision of a passing train obliterates the dialogue, while the voice of Donald Trump provides background TV noise (Red Rocket is set in the days leading to the 2016 American elections).

Considering its visual robustness and signature, it’s difficult to imagine Red Rocket to look any different. Its 16mm feel is part of the experience of watching — just as, say, Wes Anderson’s latest film, Asteroid City, shot on Kodak 35mm, which is impossible to imagine without its cold blue colour scheme, evoking familiarity and strangeness at the same time.

A still from Christopher Nolan's 'Oppenheimer'.

When I watched Nolan’s Oppenheimer as soon as it released in India, I was particularly keen to see what a 70mm black-and-white negative looked and felt like. Kodak made this particular reel just for Oppenheimer — and why wouldn’t they? After all, Nolan and a few small group of Hollywood directors are responsible for Kodak’s existence today. Nolan is the world’s most visible and heard advocate of the film camera or celluloid.

So has the film negative become a privilege of few influential Hollywood biggies? Was it nostalgia that had transmuted to being a privilege? As in most countries around the world, Kodak shut shop in India in 2012. Digital, always versatile, was making the filmmaking enterprise easier, with perfectly predictable outcomes. The lone film processing lab in Mumbai now is Filmlab India, which, its owner Sanjay Patel told me, may not function beyond a year or couple of years.

I reached out to Sean Baker on Instagram to know why, after having shot Tangerine on an iPhone, he declared he was going back to shooting on film and why he shoots his films on celluloid. He was willing to be interviewed, being another Hollywood director who is articulate about keeping celluloid alive — but in the indie space. His take, like Nolan’s, is unequivocal: “I do believe there is a revival of shooting on celluloid. I see a rise in shooting on 16mm specifically. And I love that Generation Z is embracing film. I don’t think there will be a revival in cameras until they begin being manufactured again. The last film cameras were made close to 20 years ago. We should not abandon the medium that created this wonderful art form just because a cheaper and “easier” option came along. Digital should be an additional option, not a replacement. And there is no doubt that shooting on film elevates the project in market value and in my eyes, aesthetic sophistication.” He emphasised in the interview that there are characteristics of an image caught on film that he believes are unobtainable with digital.

In celluloid, a roll of light-sensitive reel is placed in the camera. When the shutter of the camera is open, the film is exposed to light and an impression is captured. After the exposure is made, the photographer rolls the film forward so a fresh section of unexposed film is ready for the next photo. The entire reel goes through a long processing routine and the final look is visible only thereafter. So for a filmmaker, there is not way of knowing what his frames looks like during the time of shoot. All they have is rigorous pre-shoot planning. Celluloid is also more expensive. A standard 35mm reel with a length of 1,000 ft can cost anywhere from around Rs5,000 to Rs10,000, so it demands economical shot-taking from filmmakers. Digital can spoil any artiste — you know exactly what to achieve with settings, and can take the same shot over and over again until you are satisfied.

A still from Celine Song's debut 'Past Lives'.

So why are smaller filmmakers choosing celluloid over digital. After the second decade of the 2000s, the digital camera promised not only control over the look of a shot, but also democratisation of the medium itself. Anybody could shoot a film. Around the time Oppenheimer released in India, PVR released an indie gem that was wowing cinephiles around the world: Celine Song’s debut film Past Lives. The 35-year-old South Korean-Canadian director and writer chose 35mm over digital. The film doesn’t have much talk. It has eloquent silences, distances and absences. The slightly grainy texture of 35mm lends a viscerally atmospheric air to the love story at its heart — of a love that’s as romantic as it is platonic. It is about the reestablished connection between two childhood friends. Song has explained in an interview why the whole time she was shooting Past Lives in New York, she knew she had to finish her location exteriors with the last shot of the film: The camera follows friends since childhood Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), as they walk along a Village street. They say good-bye. He grabs an Uber. She walks all the way back to her apartment, where her husband Arthur (John Magaro) sits on the stoop. It’s filmed in one long take of six minutes and 26 seconds. The 35mm texture adds an entire dimension to the pull of lost love that Song delicately immerses Past Lives in.

A still from Wes Anderson's 'Asteroid City'.

There are many recent and forthcoming examples of films and TV series besides Asteroid City and Past Lives that are shot on either 16 or 35mm: HBO productions starting with Westworld, followed by Euphoria, Succession and the forthcoming The Idol; Martin Scorsese’s first Western Killers of the Flower Moon, which releases in India on 20 October; Marc Foster’s Tom Hanks-starrer A Man Called Otto; Jesse Eisenberg’s When You Finish Saving the World; M Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin; Benjamin Caron’s thriller Sharper on Apple TV, and several others. All of Noah Baumbach’s films, including The Marriage Story (2019), is shot on celluloid. The website of Kodak has interviews with many cinematographers and filmmakers about their preference for celluloid. Euphoria cinematographer Marcell Rйv said, “With digital, you’re always trying to fight this cold and distant look. …I like the vibe it creates on set — it’s a more focused environment — and I like the unpredictable nature of it, that you have to wait a day to see how it came out. I’ve been shooting film for at least 10 years, and it surprises me every time… and usually, it’s a very good surprise.” Anrej Parekh, a cinematographer for Succession was quoted as saying, “35mm, helped to give Succession a special visual platform that is markedly different — dirtier, with more texture and feeling — than most audiences have been used to with modern digital-originated shows.”

A still from HBO series 'Succession'.

This year, even Formula 1 was shot on film. Photographer Eric Liner who shot the Miami Grand Prix on film wrote a piece on the lessons from shooting in film on gearpatrol.com, in which, he says, “Yes, it’s scary and difficult and a fairly large pain in the ass. But then again, isn't that part of why we shoot film in the first place?” The images capture speed in a way in which the speed becomes somewhat of a visual element.

2023 Miami Grand Prix was shot on celluloid.

Celluloid isn’t likely to fade soon, at least, in the West.

*****

In India, I spoke to about 10 filmmakers and cinematographers, and they seem to agree that to find a producer who genuinely believes in investing on the creative visions of his or her directors or cinematographers is rare. India embraced digital with such urgency and enthusiasm that celluloid died. Raam Reddy, director of the well-acclaimed Thithi (2015), is currently completing his second feature film, Patron Mein, on the Super 16mm format. Neither Reddy nor his cinematographer Sunil Borker reveal more about the film than that it is “about magic realism”. One of the last big Bollywood films shot on 35mm was Rajkumar Hirani’s PK (2014) and it is now part of the National Film Archives of India (NFAI) collection. Around the same time, Shankar’s Tamil film I was shot on 35mm by cinematographer PC Sreeram, who also said at the film’s pre-release press conference that it was an emotional moment for him because I could be one of the last Indian films to be shot on celluloid.

Cinematographer Vikas Urs.

Cinematographer Vikas Urs, who studied his art at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune, is currently shooting Natesh Hegde’s film Tiger’s Pond — set in the Sirsi region of the Western Ghats of Karnataka. The team is unwilling to give out details of the film, except their motivation behind going for 16mm — a choice they had to be absolutely sure of before starting shoot. Urs says, 16mm is a format which is neither like the conventional digital nor like the more evolved 35mm film format. 16mm perfectly balanced our aesthetic, technical and budgetary constraints to help evolve the kind of imagery that is true to our vision. It is textural, evocative and poignant, all combined.” Technically, a less refined format than 35 or 65, 16mm film stock is both fine grain and yet not. It holds a wonderful duality in itself. Its a format which evolved over the decades of early cinema as a leftover, a relegated option of mainstream film practice and that’s its beauty. The texture is coarse, which makes it alive.

A persistent and passionate advocate of the film format in Mumbai, also known as analogue or photochemical film practice, are the folks running the Harkat Studios — a a multi-disciplinary arts practice studio with diverse projects. Filmmaker Karan Talwar, 37, who assisted director Prakash Jha earlier, and has been promoting, showcasing and nurturing work in the 16mm format, started the annual 16mm Film Festival a few years ago. In October, he begins shooting his first feature film on 16mm, a story of a father and a son which has elements of Partition in it. With the film, Talwar takes forward his fascination for ordinary objects, objects from the past with vintage value as art. “The root of the story is more on objects, it is spiritually related to something like a museum of ordinary objects. I am riffing on the idea that objects can evoke stories,” says Talwar. Like any other celluloid evangelist, Talwar believes the pedestalised value of the film camera doesn’t always serve the purpose of keeping celluloid alive. There is no government support and there are no vibrant arthouse communities in the city that can help with efforts like these. “Analogue is demanding. The process is as important as the final outcome. You have to have a strong grasp on fundamentals. Cinematographers would have to be invested even in the biochemistry of the reel,” Talwar says.

Harkat Studios, Mumbai

Harkat Studios began small in  2016. It was a fringe performance space.  Once Talwar stumbled upon a 16mm projector and got every interested in it. He got some reels from Mumbai’s eternal flea market Chor Bazaar and got to watch many films that resonated. The idea for a community of 16mm efforts and experiments by emerging filmmakers and artists began there. The 16mm Film Festival is now seven years old — they curate films from the world over and also presents 16mm work done at the Harkat Studios. Harkat is part of a global network of filmmakers Navire Argo, a French organisation that combines an artist-run film lab and a cinema open to the public, and is dedicated to contemporary and future photochemical film practices. Both Navire Argo and Harkat share the conviction that it is important to bring back intent to creating an image. “All of cinematic history is based on this medium, you can’t just transcend it,” Talwar says.

The same sentiment about history is something that cinematographer Swapnil Sonawane (Sacred Games; Monica O My Darling), also an analogue/celluloid lover, share with Talwar. Parts of one of Sonawane’s ongoing projects, the Reema Kagti directorial Superman of Malegaon, based on the film industry that churns films in Malegaon, Maharashtra and makes money out of them, are shot on Super 16mm. Sonawane’s studio has several models of the analogue film camera. He develops the reels himself, and during the pandemic, made his own analogue camera. Sonawane grew up in Pune, where his father owned a film processing lab. Sonawane started working in Bollywood around the time digital was going away. But something changed around six years go when he stumbled upon an analogue camera called Husselblad Expand — “a unicorn of a camera,” he says — and started shooting with it whenever he would go out. He has discovered analogue’s capacity to make you slow down, and why not knowing an outcome can teach you something. Sonawane processes his own reels at the studio.

For 28-year old filmmaker and cinematographer Karthikeya Garg, who regularly experiments with celluloid, the film format was an extended part of his study of cinematography at a Prague film school. Before he left for plague, he bought a Vivitar V3000S, an SLR camera, and started shooting stills. “It was meditative,” Garg says, “As soon as I reached Prague, I got my hands on various film stocks and cameras and I started experimenting with those.” He agrees with Nolan’s view, articulated over years now at various platforms around the world, that there is no digital equivalent even today to the amount of detail that film reels capture. “The whole photochemical process that film is, it’s actually about physically capturing light, capturing that moment in real time over just capturing data.” He says among his contemporaries, there is a definite interest in analogue and celluloid. Garg spells out the zeitgeist cautiously: “We are having this conversation of shooting stuff on film, not the mainstream things maybe, but music videos or experimental films/videos. There are quite a few groups of upcoming filmmakers who shoot stills on analogue film and share the results or discuss different film stocks, their characteristics and looks.”

A couple of months ago, I was watching a Netflix chick-flick kind of series called Survival of the Thickest. The protagonist Mavis (Michelle Buteau) is a maverick stylist in New York City and a photographer she regularly works with is seen following models around with a Bolex H-16 in his hand — a primitive celluloid camera that was invented in 1935.

Analogue is privilege, nostalgia and the zeitgeist all at the same time.

And that’s why some efforts to revive it in India haven’t found any support from either the filmmaking community or the government.

*****

Filmmaker Shikha Makan and founder of The Celluloid Project, Mumbai.

I happen to share workspace with a passionate filmmaker, 43-year-old Shikha Makan, founder of The Celluloid Project. Makan, who has directed the documentary Bachelor Girls on single women facing housing discrimination in Mumbai because they are “unmarried’ and a story in the Amazon Prime Video anthology Unpaused (2021), started The Celluloid Project with a few others — an initiative to raise awareness and support celluloid filmmaking. Makan is attracted to the format’s rigour as well as aesthetics or the quality that she believes makes the image invested in and expressive of a film’s emotional centre. “I wrote to Christopher Nolan through Kodak because we knew nobody can champion the cause of celluloid better than him,” Makan says. It was a battle for this group. “It is about having the option of shooting in celluloid and the access to quality processing in India. Filmmakers now have to get reels from the US and only one processing lab exists in Mumbai now — and that’s not known to give you optimal resolution in your image. It is expensive for smaller filmmakers who still love the format and want to work on the format,” she adds. In 2018, when Nolan came to Mumbai, The Celluloid Project couldn’t meet him despite several attempts.

The group decided to take things in their own hands. One of the members of this group was filmmaker, curator and artist Madhavan Pillai, whose passion for the art form began when he started researching the earliest photographic process known as the Daguerreotype. To champion non-digital photography, he, along with a couple of other artists established the Goa Centre for Alternative Photography (Goa CAP).

When the closure of the Kodak Lab was imminent, the group, which also included the Mehernoz Mallo, once the head of Kodak India, rallied for support through a successful fundraising campaign, we managed to  rescue the lab from its impending demise. With professional help, they disassembled the entire Kodak laban transported the machines to warehouses in Goa. After a couple of years, when financial support did not materialise either from the filmmaking community or the government, they had to let go of the lab and The Celluloid Project. They distributed portions of the equipment to individuals and organizations that expressed interest in utilising it for smaller-scale lab set-ups. Pillai says that in the last couple of years he has encountered young filmmakers interested in celluloid’s revival. “This resurgence of interest in analogue methods suggests that while celluloid might not regain its former scale, it is finding a niche among individuals who value its artistic possibilities. These individuals are drawn to the unique visual and emotional qualities that analogue methods, like celluloid film, can offer,” Pillai says. Maloo, who was with Kodak for 25 years, and left after the company closed its India chapter as country manager remembers a time when he would having meetings running up to several hours with the biggest directors of Bollywood — “Yash Chopra was very economical with film stock, Rajkumar Santoshi was very liberal.”

All celluloidians and Nolan fans agree that celluloid offers a tangible connection to the origins of the craft. The method it requires can lead to a more profound connection between filmmaker, the subject, and the audience. The imperfections and nuances inherent in celluloid contribute to the creation of a genuine, raw, and evocative visual experience that resonates on an emotional level. Embracing celluloid in the present day, as an available filmmaking option, is a bridge between today’s image-saturated world and the roots of image-making and storytelling.

The Filmlabs in Goregaon, Mumbai.

The Filmlabs office in Goregaon, Mumbai, spread over a few floors is now more a museum. A few surviving staff member, and few experimental celluloid projects in a year. The machines and the chemicals celluloid processing requires still require a few lakhs to maintain — they let you travel in time and marvel at the precision it requires to arrive at a single celluloid frame.