I saw Carol at Plymouth Art Centre cinema sat in the centre of the front row. The auditorium in Looe Street is quite small, and the 2pm matinee screening was almost completely sold out with the venue’s fairly senior regular clientele. I wouldn’t normally sit in the front seats as the screen is quite close (maybe 4m?) but today it worked out perfectly. The visual experience was intense at such close range, the image grain was almost tangible.
Richard Brody compares the sensory affects of viewing Carol (Haynes, 2015), directed by Todd Haynes – which was shot on grainy Super 16mm film – once from the rear of the auditorium then a second time close enough to the screen in the cinema to visually experience the grain structure of the image: “They’re not effects of the actors’ skin but of its appearance on the second skin of the film stock (the French word for “film” is “pellicule,” meaning little skin) which lends the actors’ theatricalized immobility an illusion of shivers” (2015). These medium specific qualia (the experience of the projected grain images) are an example of ‘haptic visuality’ – a method of sensory analysis which is located in the viewer’s body, although it does not depend on the presence of literal touch, smell, taste or hearing. It is a concept of embodied spectatorship that situates the phenomenology of cinematic experience as synaesthetic and interactive: an exchange between two bodies.
Although the film was shot on Super 16 it went through the DI (digital intermediate) process in postproduction and was projected from a DCP. Adding grain in postproduction is common both for a ‘film look’ and also to reduce banding when using 8-bit for delivery – the latter not relevant for cinema workflows. I wonder whether shooting on a Super 16 crop of a digital sensor and using the same lenses to match the Arri 416 film camera, then adding grain in postproduction would produce a discernible difference?
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/carol-up-close [Accessed 9 December 2015].