Like audiophiles who still collect vinyl and argue for the merits of analog sound over today’s dominant digital technology, many cineastes contend that 35mm film remains visually superior to even the most advanced digital image, that the “film” look with its inherent grain and more expressive palette provides a warmer, more “authentic” experience.
But film purists need to face the cold reality that digital is here and 35mm film is declining. The leading motion picture camera manufacturers are no longer making 35mm equipment, and film labs have transitioned to digital post-production. And, as of January 2012, there are now more digital than 35mm film screens operating worldwide.
New York City’s premier repertory house Film Forum, celebrating its 25th anniversary, has prided itself on its pursuit of new 35mm prints of the classic films its audience enthusiastically supports. Over the years, it has premiered nearly 1,000 new prints and restorations. But even this bastion of 35mm devotion is acknowledging that DCPs (Digital Cinema Packages) are the future of repertory programming.
This week, Film Forum is presenting a special program of 13 classic films in DCP format, entitled “This Is DCP.” The festival kicked off on Friday, March 2, with a tutorial from Grover Crisp, Sony Pictures’ executive VP of asset management, film restoration and digital mastering—one of the top names in the field of film restoration. Crisp demonstrated the benefits of digital restoration and presentation with a comparison of the best available 35mm print of Stanley Kubrick’s classic black-and-white satire Dr. Strangelove and Sony’s 4K DCP restoration (shown with a 2K digital 
The difference was immediately apparent. While the 35mm print had an overall muted gray look, the contrast of the blacks and whites in the DCP version was dramatically higher. Scratches and artifacts in the film print were non-existent in the digital copy, and background details and even the pattern of an actress’ bikini were sharper. Still, the digital version (screened in its entirety after the demo) looked like a film print, retaining the grain of Gilbert Taylor’s masterly original cinematography.
Crisp chose Dr. Strangelove for the demo partly because it had been a film in dire need of painstaking restoration. “This film suffered the worst of all fates,” he noted. “The original camera negative was destroyed in the 1960s.” For decades, the source for new negatives and prints was two master positives made from the original negative. The meticulous Kubrick personally approved those new prints, but, Crisp attested, “he could never get what he wanted.”
For the Strangelove restoration, Sony’s first such 4K project, Crisp and his team went back to the source master positives, scanned the footage and embarked on a painstaking frame-by-frame renewal process, taking care to maintain the film look of the original.
Another restoration in the works at Sony is the 50th-anniversary revival of the Oscar-winning epic Lawrence of Arabia. Crisp confided that the David Lean classic has “one of the most damaged negatives,” caused by the intense heat of its desert shooting locations: The emulsion cracked and the flaws were sealed into the negative for some key scenes.
Film Forum’s DCP festival is also giving New York audiences a chance to sample digital versions of such classics as Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Shining, West Side Story, Rear Window, The Red Shoes, Taxi Driver, The Searchers, Goldfinger, Five Easy Pieces, From Here to Eternity, and a new restoration of The Guns of Navarone.
One of the studios most active in preserving and restoring its library, Sony has “no plans to stop print distribution” of its classics, according to Crisp. The restoration expert said it will take “many years” for its DCP activity to catch up with its print revivals, since “each project takes a year and a lot of money.” Still, the studio is already going deeper into its archives, with DCPs in the works for its pre-Code Frank Capra titles. The unspoken fear among repertory cinemas, however, is that not every studio values its holdings as much as Sony, and that decent copies of lesser-known movies will be much harder to obtain in any format in the coming years.
For longtime Film Forum director of repertory programming Bruce Goldstein, the DCP festival is acknowledgement of changing times and the fact that change isn’t necessarily a bad thing. “The intention is to introduce this format to our audience, to demonstrate that this level of digital restoration can achieve results as beautiful as in a new 35mm print, at times even more beautiful,” he stated in the media release. “We want to make it clear that DCP will not be replacing 35mm at Film Forum, especially as only a handful of classics are now available in the new format. But in the coming years, it will be impossible to rely on only one of these formats, especially in putting together the kinds of festivals we’re known for.”
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