Last night I re-watched Michael Mann‘s Public Enemies, and on the good old 65″ HDR Sony OLED it looked ultra-sharp and exceptionally crystal clear. I’ve only seen it once in a theatre, and that was 17 years ago — Thursday, 6.25.09 in Manhattan. Somewhere on the upper west side.
Those who were there will no doubt recall what a shock it was to hear just before the screening that Michael Jackson had died. I’ve always suspected that Jackson’s demise adversely affected Public Enemies reviews, at least among those critics who attended that night..
The main reason Public Enemies seemed so visually striking that night is that the projected image didn’t look like film but super high-def video. This was how digitally-shot films, still a semi-exotic concept in the late aughts, appeared at the time. Nearly all feature films were still being shot on celluloid.
Public Enemies was shot on five or six different film / digital cameras — ARRIFLEX 235, ARRIFLEX 435, Sony CineAlta F23, Sony HDC-F950, etc.
I remember what a big deal it was five years earlier when Mann announced that large portions of Collateral (’04) had been shot on digital.
The big changeover happened in April 2010 with the introduction of the Arri Alexa, a digital motion picture camera system developed by Arri. It was the company’s first major transition into digital cinematography, and from pretty much that point on features shot on this camera looked like 35mm film when projected upon movie screens. The Public Enemies video look had became a thing of the past.
Jackson was officially pronounced dead at 2:26 pm Pacific daylight time (or 5:35 pm NYC time). It only took about an hour or so for the news to get out. It was just after 7 pm when I heard.
Public Enemies opened nationwide on Wednesday, 7.1.09.
