70 mm Tenet

[David J Hilsgen]

We we just got the confirmation on the booking at Emagine Willow Creek in Plymouth, Minnesota

[Stephan Shelley]

Grand Lake had a letter last year stating we were too.

[Mark Lensenmayer]

70mm TENET opens 8/31 at Gateway Film Center in Columbus. Website says it has one of "only 10 prints in the world".

[Brad Miller]

I think they made 20-30 prints. (<---That is not an absolute fact, just what I understood to be the case.)

[Emiel de Jong]

Any news (like shortly discussed in the "70mm presentations in Dallas" thread) about wether these prints are fully digital intermediate, or not?

[Allan Young]

I think they made 20-30 prints. (<---That is not an absolute fact, just what I understood to be the case.)

Thomas Hauerslev's site is currently listing 34 5/70 prints and 7 15/70 prints.
https://www.in70mm.com/news/2020/tenet/index.htm

Any news (like shortly discussed in the "70mm presentations in Dallas" thread) about wether these prints are fully digital intermediate, or not?

Given Christopher Nolan's track record of keeping things in the photochemical realm as much as possible, I'd have thought this would be unlikely.

[Marcel Birgelen]

From what I've heard, this was an entire photo-chemical process, just like Nolan's previous releases. No digital cameras have been used during the recording of the movie and digital special effects have been limited to a minimum.

Looks like the BFI IMAX in London will be the only one opening in 15/70 IMAX coming week... Strange new world...

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Doesn't much matter unless you got a print that was struck in G.B... Fotokem has consistently churned out some pretty marginal 70mm prints. This quote is from another site.

"
In principle I agree with the statement that the older Eastman Color negatives before 1975 were more grainy.
And even more so, I can agree that the re-release copies of older classics from the 50s and 60s seen in the last 18 years were unsatisfactory in the vast majority of cases.
But these films did not look that bad at the time of their premiere.
(Except perhaps "Around the world in 80 days", which was shot with 16 DIN on the very first Eastman Color negative).
"2001" was already half duplicates in 1968 because of the visual effects. In the course of the 2000/2001 and 2017/2018 duplicates, the original negative was no longer copied, but new internegatives. So the film has since been made of "double" dups on 65mm and will never again be seen on any medium and in any version as it was seen in the premiere copies (have seen them all to exhaustion).

And already in 1988, with "Lawrence of Arabia" and subsequently also with "Spartacus" and "My fair Lady", duplicate Intermediates were done and necessary via interpositive and internegative for a higher number of new serial copies. Despite the statements of the filmmakers, who were highly satisfied with this, the differences to premiere copies, which had still been pulled by the OCN, are immediately apparent. I have both 70mm versions lying here, but have not yet managed to scan the images.
In addition, the print material has also changed since the mid-70s. If you go back to an older negative of the 60s, this brings about changes.
Some classics such as "Hello Dolly", "Lord Jim" or "Patton" were again copied directly off of the OCN 15 or 20 years ago, but appear somewhat grainier than before. We could still see influences from the Kodak Vision material playing a role.
At the time of its introduction in the 90s, we didn't find Kodak Vision print material very convincing in the labs, but it was circulated due to customer requests and resulted in a slight increase in colorfulness, but also too warm and yellow flesh tones. It took months of convincing Fox, which had made firm contracts with Kodak, that we would rather copy the current films with Fuji material.

It is therefore understandable that in a newer film negatives like "Dunkirk" the grain is more fine-grained. However, the 70mm film copy was a disaster: fine-grained, yes, but totally washed out, exhausted, not really sharp and also greenish. In addition, every second or third shot is completely out of focus: the film absolutely lacks the depth of field of the old classics, the relief-like lighting, according to which people and objects in the room looked like sculptures. This immersion effect was rightly described at the time as "You are in the Show with Todd AO". And the older films were in their time either natural or deliberately artificial, at least of the beautiful colors.

Nothing has remained of that! Hardly anyone would be able to prove why films on 70 mm are so special at the current production stage. The peculiarity no longer exists and is based on pure imagination.

Therefore it is urgently necessary to change the production process. Valuable film that has ended up in the hands of the wrong people..."

[Marcel Birgelen]

I've seen Dunkirk in 70mm in Amsterdam, I didn't get to talk to the projectionists, so I don't know where the print was struck.

I agree that the colors looked faded and desaturated, there was almost no film grain, I guess the film having been shot entirely on 65mm helped in that aspect, compared to other Nolan features that often swapped directly between 15/65 IMAX and 35mm anamorphic. The soft focus and lack of depth of field was very much noticeable. But, I've seen the movie in 4K digital too, the same "problems" are there as well. So, I somehow doubt it really was just the lab's fault, but probably more an artistic choice.

I don't know yet what to expect from Tenet. Despite Nolan's preference for old-school photo-chemical processes, it often feels like his features aren't always the best examples of what a format like 70mm can do at its best. On the other hand, the way we film movies has changed over the years. While I love stable, wide-screen beauty-shots of landscapes, city-scapes and the likes, those often don't fit well in the often fast-paced movies we expect today.

[David J Hilsgen]

Getting my print Wednesday for emagine Willow Creek Plymouth, mn,so what's going on with the Alamo draft houses anybody know I don't see any of them on the list ,and then how about play dates in Texas being that look Cinema closed up?

[Gary Wachter]

"2001" was already half duplicates in 1968 because of the visual effects.

Not necessarily. Most of the special effects were done in camera to avoid the dupes and maintain sharpness. Different scenes were shot, sometimes a year apart, stored and reloaded later for another layer of exposure. This allowed for ZERO error. Pretty gutsy. The sets had already been stuck and if there was any problem with registration, exposure, processing, etc. it was a total loss.
You can see a time error on the Orion Space Station docking sequence. The display monitors (16mm film) shows alignment has been achieved when the view out the shuttle window that it was still matching rotation.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Back then almost all SFX was done in camera because that was the only way to do it. But you could not tell unless you looked at it under a microscope. Perhaps they took all the live action stuff through one dupe so it looked all the same. What ever they did it came out really nice.

[Mark Ogden]

There are no actual interpositive-based optical dupes in 2001. For optical effects the 65mm camera negative was used to create black and white YUV separation elements which were then bi-pack printed to negative stock in Linwood Dunn's 65mm optical printer, said to be the only one in existence at the time. I don't know if strictly speaking this counts as a "generation" since no real interpositive was made, but it does account for the flawless grain matching between optical shots and on-set photography.

You can see a time error on the Orion Space Station docking sequence. The display monitors (16mm film) shows alignment has been achieved when the view out the shuttle window that it was still matching rotation.

There are plenty of errors like this in the film. One of the most interesting is during the chess match with Poole, when HAL calls out a move in the wrong chess notation from what is shown on the screen (he calls out Q-B3 but the move shown is Q-B6). I remember having a discussion about this with another fan; is it a simple continuity error, or is HAL dropping a hint that he is malfunctioning, or is he testing to see if Poole picks up on the error?

[Gary Wachter]

Sorry - not meaning to hijack this thread. Kubrick wanted the effects to be flawless and he was not satisfied with the procedures of the day. Multiple runs through the printer and blue screen for mattes were out of the question. Trumbull and the effects department pioneered new techniques from direct front projection to hand painted travelling mattes in specially modified Mitchell 65 cameras to handle dual thicknesses of film. If they weren't perfect, they had to be done over and over again (if they could). Some of these ingenious methods are outlined in Taschen's Making of 2001.

One famous story: The slow flowing camera movements outside the Space Station took weeks and weeks. To get the depth of field, very long exposures were needed for each frame before the camera and object were moved ever so slightly for the next exposure. Always running behind schedule, Kubrick needed the sequence finished which required weekend work. This never did go over well with the strict British unions, especially with the Soccer championship coming up. He made a concession that a TV set would be allowed on set while the robotic gears were at work making the exposures. When Kubrick screened the results a few days later, it all flowed smoothly until the end when there was very visible shaking. A furious Kubrick demanded an explanation and it was determined at the time of the shaking, England had won the championship and the crew was jumping in celebration. No more distractions on set after that.

[Marcel Birgelen]

There are plenty of errors like this in the film. One of the most interesting is during the chess match with Poole, when HAL calls out a move in the wrong chess notation from what is shown on the screen (he calls out Q-B3 but the move shown is Q-B6). I remember having a discussion about this with another fan; is it a simple continuity error, or is HAL dropping a hint that he is malfunctioning, or is he testing to see if Poole picks up on the error?

I remember exact that same discussion as it's also on the IMDB goofs list.

In all honesty, I think it started out as an error in the dialog part of the script, but was left in there on purpose, because of the potential controversy. The scene itself would've been "relatively easy" to re-shoot at the time (at least if they caught the error on-time).