The early 21st century has seen the ‘death of film’ where commercial feature film production and projection has moved wholesale from celluloid to digital, following the transition in broadcasting and other moving image production away from film via analogue video to a wholly digital workflow. Cinemas across the UK transitioned from 35mm projection to the Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI) technical architecture proposed in 2002, projecting films from data collected in Digital Cinema Package (DCP) format. The three major manufacturers, Panavision, ARRI and Aaton quietly ceased production of their film cameras. Bill Russell of ARRI explained to journalist and industry commentator Debra Kaufman:
The demand for film cameras on a global basis has all but disappeared. There are still some markets–not in the U.S.–where film cameras are still sold, but those numbers are far fewer than they used to be. If you talk to the people in camera rentals, the amount of film camera utilization in the overall schedule is probably between 30 to 40 percent. (Kaufman, 2011)
ARRI wholly transitioned into manufacturing a hugely successful range of digital cinematography cameras, having only produced film cameras to special order from 2009. The founder of the French manufacturer Aaton, Jean-Pierre Beauviala, added “Almost nobody is buying new film cameras. Why buy a new one when there are so many used cameras around the world?” (Ibid.) Beauviala’s comment acknowledges that there were still users of professional film cameras who could purchase used examples, and this remains true today. Remarkably, commercial analogue movie production is still viable in the third decade of the 21st century, with the necessary resources: stock, cameras, processing and so on.
At the same time, there has been a grassroots revival in celluloid filmmaking with practitioners using the technology for its inherent qualities and associations. British filmmakers Ben Rivers and Mark Jenkin have had success with 16mm production using hand-processing of their film stock, the latter winning a 2020 BAFTA for Outstanding Debut by a British director for Bait (Jenkin, 2019), a feature-length film shot with black and white stock using a vintage hand-wound Bolex SB 16mm camera. Noted British visual artist Tacita Dean continues to work with film and campaigns for its survival, helping to steer SAVEFILM.ORG.