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Are Digital Cameras Changing the Nature of Movies?

A landmark use of deep focus in film: The young Charles Foster Kane—in the background, but still in focus—is sent away by his poor parents in Colorado to live with a wealthy banker in New York.Mercury Productions / RKO Radio Pictures

This is part one of a three-part series about the movie industry’s switch to digital cameras and what is lost, and gained, in the process. Part two runs tomorrow; part three runs on Friday.

inema is a blend of art and technology, working together to capture light, one frame at a time, to create the illusion of motion. Sometimes the captured, the spectacular wide-screen landscapes shot by Freddie Young in , or the super-slo-mo “bullet time” cinematography of . Sometimes it’s the apex of simplicity, a technique so transparent it appears almost artless, as in the black-and-white compositions of Robert Bresson or the free-form streetscapes of Richard Linklater’s .

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