Digital Diamonds in the Rough
A few words about '28 Days Later'
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New technology produces new ways of interacting with the world, understanding it, engaging it. It produces new relations and new modes of thought. When digital cameras arrived on the filmmaking scene, they came with the promise of liberation, from the cumbersome qualities of motion picture film and all its photochemical quirks and limitations, and from the standard economic models of movie production and distribution. Indeed, by the end of the ‘00s, a digital revolution was afoot in the world of cinema. Studios and directors were rapidly shifting to digital capture, and after Avatar, the currents bringing in the new future of digital projection had become a tsunami.
In 2022, writing for N+1, Will Tavlin laid out the failure of the digital revolution to be anything revolutionary. In his article, “Digital Rocks,” Tavlin broke down how the shift to digital occurred at the behest of studios and distribtors, the capital-holders, who saw in the new technologies of filmmaking and presentation a new avenue for consolidating control over the means of production and distribution in filmmaking. “Tellingly, the vast majority of digital films that Hollywood produces bear little resemblance to the guerrilla, made-for-nothing filmmaking that digital cinema once promised,” he wrote. Claims that digital would democratize filmmaking did not pan out in a world where making a movie is still an expensive ordeal. Liberation did not arrive, including the liberation of aesthetic thought. Films like Dancer in the Dark and Bamboozled, which Tavlin cites for their early, grody digital style, did not become the model. “Digital filmmaking, as it exists today on streaming platforms and in AMC theaters, demands the most expensive equipment with the highest technical standards that produce the same generic look,” Tavlin said. Digital production tools, by and large, have been put to use making work that either masquerades as photochemical film, or otherwise displays the sheen of Hollywood money in largely empty, sterile imagery.
This week sees the release of Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later, the long talked-about second sequel to his 2002 film 28 Days Later, which revived the zombie genre with an unexpected shot of adrenaline. Infected, rather than actual zombies, and fast-moving, all set within an England emptied out in post-apocalyptic fashion, with striking shots of a lone man walking down the streets of a deserted London lodging themselves into the collective consciousness. Its innovations were also digital. The film was Boyle’s first with cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, who’d already been experimenting with digital video on films like Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration and Harmony Korine’s Julien Donkey-Boy before the end of the 20th century. 28 Years Later took those Dogme 95 experiments in a new model of independent filmmaking and brought them into a more traditional style of studio-backed production. Shot on a Canon XL1 MiniDV camera, the film looks like nothing else. Ugly, likes its subject, but rendered with such artfulness, such beauty.
Like many in the lead-up to Years, I went back and watched both 28 Days Later and its 2007 sequel 28 Weeks Later. And like many, I had a memory of what the movie(s) looked like, only to discover that I’d not remembered—or perhaps not appreciated—just how weird they look.