There was genuine discussion in the late 1990s about the revolutionary possibilities of digital technology. Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg‘s “Dogme 95 Manifesto”/experiment had proven that highly regarded filmmakers could tell compelling stories beyond the constraints of the industry’s machinery. David Lynch is an early in this movement, using digital cameras for his Interview Project (2009-) shorts like Rabbits (2002) which he posted on his website, and eventually his next feature, Inland Empire (2006). Mike Figgis is another digital evangelist; he made the highly inventive digital feature Timecode (2000), and wrote a how-to guide on digital filmmaking.
By the early 2000s, ‘digital’ had solidified into an aesthetic choice akin to black and white. No established filmmaker embraced the freedom of digital filmmaking with as much gusto, however, as Steven Soderbergh; he championed the RED One MX digital camera and used it to shoot Che (2008) and Contagion (2011).
It was the immediacy that appealed to Soderbergh, the ability to recreate the qualities of the traditional filmmaking method without the necessary elaborate set-up. He took full advantage of the speed and adaptability of this form of filmmaking in Full Frontal (2002), which was shot on digital video in under a month. Full Frontal dismantles the Hollywood mythos as much as it deconstructs the conventions of mainstream American filmmaking; the promise of Hollywood is revealed to be even more paltry when shorn of all its gloss. The early ‘00s marked the point at which Soderbergh decided to eschew the possibility of becoming a Hollywood journeyman, choosing instead to intersperse commercial fare with offbeat passion projects and stylistic experiments.
Full Frontal extends the satirical thrust of Robert Altman’s The Player (1992) but takes aim at the means of production. The limitations of the Canon XL-1s camera render Los Angeles in an entirely different light, casting the city in…