Dante Spinotti
The more I watched Michael Mann’s latest film “Public Enemies”, the more I was witnessing a progressive increase in the digital aesthetic of the film’s cinematography. At the beginning of the movie, the digital quality of the image is softened with warmer lights and specific camera angles to make the image look good, as well as closer to a traditional 35mm aesthetic.
The more we follow the movie, the more the digital photography becomes edgier and bolder. It leaves behind the classic inferiority complex with the 35mm film and shuns the notion that no matter what the digital does, it will never have the same quality of the traditional format. I am not saying that this idea is necessarily true, since digital HD has a completely different reaction to light quality in low light condition. What needs to be stressed, however, is the fact that Spinotti and Mann have broken free the digital aesthetics from this complex, which proves to be more mental than technical. Digital photography is not in opposition to 35mm, like B&W and color. To film digitally it means to think digitally, to use a completely different set of eyes, a different aesthetic. If digital does not look good on-screen, it is not because it is technically inferior but because the eyes thinking the image couldn’t get over a longstanding tradition of cinematography.
It is surprising then that a couple of 66 year old men [Mann and Spinotti are both born in 1943, and have worked together on The Insider (1999), Heat (1995), The Last of the Mohicans (1992) and Manhunter (1986)] were able to go well beyond “Collateral” and “Miami Vice” (both filmed by Australian DOP Dion Beebe) and give digital its own visual language, as probably only Lynch has done before with “Inland Empire“. The last scenes of “Public Enemies” appear, from a traditional idea of cinema aesthetics, like a long list of errors. The reproduction of the skin of Johnny Depp’s face is merciless in giving evidence to every single pore. The night shots are under-lit and the moving camera collects every kind of digital dirt available. The establishing shot before the last robbery is brutal in its frankness, closer to a making of rather than a standard film image. Aesthetically, these shots do not seem to make sense: they are poorly lit and go for the mistake instead of protecting the digital format from it. The film embodies what digital essence is mostly about: hyper-realism. Instead of making a film that looked like a nostalgic 30′s picture, they went for killing the romance and telling a story about Dillinger, who defied death but, in a way, was already dead, killed by a system that had different agendas. The HD image of Depp is like a death mask: too real to even convey anything else but the coldness and detachment of the skin under a microscope.
“Public Enemies” has been photographed with a Sony CineAlfa F23
A recent interview with Dante Spinotti is available at StudioDaily
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