Best Keanu: “How do you have the pheromones get exchanged virtually?”

Side by Side is like a film class, or what I imagine a film class to be. It’s probably one of the few documentaries you’ll ever see where cinematographers, also called directors of photography (as the film teaches us), take centre stage.

It’s not just DPs. There are also colorists, who give the film that final hue that corresponds with the DP’s and director’s vision.

Yes, there are a few directors in Side by Side — some little-known names like The Wachowskis and James Cameron and Martin Scorcese. All talking about an aspect of movie-making that everyday audience members like me know nothing, and think nothing, about.

So, why is it compelling? Because it’s easy to translate the underlying narrative in Side by Side — what’s lost when an ancient way of doing something is supplanted by something new and untested — to just about anything that interests you. It made me think of a New York Times article I read online this morning that was an interactive slide show with video clips interspersed with punchy text. It was investigative journalism tailored specifically to the online format. That made me think (again) about how digital media, rich in its interactivity and images, can detract from the text. So what does that mean for the text in and of itself? What about those of us who are focused on the words and the images those words might evoke in a reader’s imagination? It seems crass to supplant whatever the mind might create by throwing in a stock photo.

It is also interesting to hear the filmmakers in Side by Side discuss their art, because, for them, it really is art — it is not mere entertainment. After watching this documentary, you can understand the difference. Of course, the primary focus of the interviewees in Side by Side seemed to be the image, and what the loss of film means to that image. The change in technology that no longer allows for the same look and feel to a film has to have lasting effects on movies as an art form.

I’m stretching here. I have to admit, I enjoyed Side by Side, and I’m glad for movie historians that it exists. But I have few thoughtful things to say about it. It did make me think of the times I’ve done background work on films and when you got seated behind the camera and could see the shot in a little screen as it was being filmed. It never occurred to me before seeing Side by Side that with old-style film they couldn’t see it on-screen as it’s happening — they’d have to wait for the dailies that were processed overnight in film labs to see what the lens had actually captured.

So I’ll just end off with a brief anecdote about the question of what happens to the communal viewing experience — a point brought up by Keanu and others late in Side by Side following a discussion of digital projection and the movement toward virtual viewing experiences.

“How do you have the pheromones get exchanged, virtually?” Keanu asks the Wachowskis. “How do you bleed and sweat and —”

“You do all that in the theatre? In your trenchcoat?” Lilly (then Andy) Wachowski responds.

“No, but laughing together and crying together,” Keanu says.

I’ve always been a solitary movie-goer, all the way back into my teenage years. But I’ve always loved going to the theatre, even if I’ve never exactly thought of it as a communal experience — but I suppose that’s exactly what it is.

Late last December, on a very cold night, I didn’t want to be at home. I walked a short distance to the cinema near my house and saw a very late showing of Matrix Resurrections, which would finish well after midnight. I’d seen the film before, of course, and knew as soon as the title sequence started, when I felt that surge of excitement and joyful anticipation, that coming to this place, late one night, when I just needed to be somewhere else, was precisely the right decision.

There was exactly one other person in the theatre with me. They were seated a few rows ahead and arrived before me, so I imagine they spent the entire showing thinking they were by themselves. At a crucial point in the movie, when Smith reveals in not-so-many-terms that the Analyst is the new Architect, the person a few rows ahead of me gasped.

I said to them, in my head, but not aloud, “it’s good, isn’t it? This movie is so good!”

After the credits began to roll, we exited, and were in the restrooms at the same time. I was this close to saying, out loud this time, “it was good, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it great?”

But I didn’t. I never said a word to this other person, or even caught their gaze. Which is a shame, perhaps, a missed opportunity. Why are you here, at 1 a.m. late in the December holidays, alone at the movies, like I am? Since we’re both here, and likely with nowhere else really to go, do you want to have a conversation?

I suppose I’ll never know. And although I’m not sure there were ever any pheromones exchanged, it’s an example of the kind of opportunity afforded by the embodied movie-going experience — one that the virtual experience couldn’t possibly replicate. At least not yet.

May 2022