Film is the magic gateway between reality and myth

The most successful art form of the past century is storytelling on film. But why is this? What makes film (as opposed to video or digital cinematography) different? Why has film thrived through generations of technical progress to remain the gold standard of cinema?

Film is alive, of the Earth in ways digital can never be. Silver halide particles – the “grain” of film are scattered on emulsion. The particles are not only of different shapes and sizes, but they are different on every single frame. The animated tactility of these particles gives film its life. And moving at 24 frames per second, the mind must fill in the gaps. We partner with film. We tell the story together.

David Dodson

One of the most powerful things in human experience is metaphor. It’s the capacity to have one thing stand in for another thing and, in so doing, gather up infinite meaning and emotion. We look at the worlds of Van Gogh, Morisot, Pissarro, and Renoir and they move us, not because they look exactly like life, but because they capture a truth about life that is told in the metaphor of pigment and oil.

Film is the same.

David Dodson

Unlike video or the binary world of ones and zeroes encoded on a hard drive, film transforms reality through the Promethean collision of light and chemical in the same way painters transform the world before them. This is why storytelling on film has been so successful and, sometimes, transcendent. When telling a story, I default to film because I’m not interested in reality; I’m interested in truth – or at least in the challenge of finding truth.-David