“You remind me of a poem I can’t remember... and a song that may never have existed... and a place I’m not sure I’ve ever been to.”
- Grandpa Simpson

 It’s mid-August and Chasing Cow’s first feature Brink by Brink is in its final fortnight of post-production. What had been a grand collaborative effort has, in these last days, been whittled down to mostly me, bleary eyed in front of a computer screen at 3am, as I attempt to add those final touches that one knows no one will notice – a refined cut, the smoothing of a wobbly pan – but that one prays just might make a (or even the) difference. All of a sudden, however, I come to an impasse – do I artificially add some ‘film grain’ to give our digital movie a more ‘filmy look’? In some ways, doing this would be no different to any of the other stylistic choices – black and white, absence of dialogue – that we made for a film that is all about the juxtaposition of past and present. Yet something about this particular act, so consciously mimicking a piece of technology that we didn’t even use, seemed dishonest, in bad faith. And this got me thinking – this film grain was a skeuomorph.

For those who haven’t been privy to nerdish discussions about desktop design in recent years, a skeuomorph, as described in a 2013 Time magazine article, “refers to an element in an object's design that's no longer functionally necessary but has been retained anyway for ornamental purposes''. As intimated, the word skeuomorph is mostly used in computing where items brought in to help usability, like folder icons in the shape of traditional document wallets, are now seen as a hindrance to neat, efficient desktops (itself obviously a skeuomorphic word). The debate plays out between those (usually younger) people who want to catapult personal computing into a realm of abstracted forms of infinite potentiality and those (usually older) people who just want to successfully enter an online meter reading. Since this debate takes place on online tech blogs, it’s a bit skeued towards the former camp.

Away from nerdville though, one can find skeuomorphs all over the place; anywhere a designer has left or added something of the old in order to make the new more palatable – for instance, the first cars retaining the spokes and wooden wheels of their horsedrawn forbearers. Some skeuomorphs die out when people realise they’re garbage (wooden car wheels); others, meanwhile, live on as ghosts of the object’s history, eventually reaching the point where no one remembers why they’re there (the spokes on car wheels). Indeed, skeuomorphs, like invasive species or sociopaths, are one of those things that, once you learn about, you start to see everywhere. This can send one along not particularly productive trains of thought: “Wait – does my pen only look that way because it’s mimicking a quill, which is mimicking a stick, which is mimicking the finger of a distant cave-dwelling hominid?” But to stay (relatively) on track, the incident with the film grain led to an epiphany (epiphanies are much smaller and more niche these days) about just what a skeuey artform filmmaking is.

Right from the start, filmmaking was contending with skeuomorphism. This was a brand new medium after all, and film began by presenting itself as a kind of carnival magic trick, with toured entertainments such as the Lumière brothers’ The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (1896), whose title is about as long as the film itself. Even when it ventured into more interesting narrative terrain, film did so skeuomorphically, as editor Ralph Rosenblum explains: until 1902, a film “was a continuous, unbroken piece of action [...] inherited from theatre”. It took projectionist Edwin S. Porter to move things on when he discovered that you could ‘cut’ between different shots (e.g. a wide and close shot) in the same scene without confusing the audience. From Porter’s discovery grew an entire grammar of filmmaking as the medium left its skeuomorphic beginnings and became a narrative artform, separate from stage plays and carnival tricks.

Recently, however, the rapid move to digital filmmaking and computer-based technology has seen skeuomorphs reenter the moviemaking world. High resolution cameras, digital colour correction, and super-smooth gimbals have meant that films look sharper and slicker than ever. The only problem is people don’t like it. They say these technologies create a look that feels harsh, un-poetic, and more like cheap TV. Peter Jackson found this out when his first Hobbit film, initially released in a higher, less blurry frame rate, ended up feeling like a trashy Middle Earth soap opera (admittedly, this wasn’t solely because of the new frame rate). Such reactions have meant that analogue imperfections – poor contrast, light leaks, camera shake – have been getting reluctantly reintroduced to help viewers feel more comfortable when watching digital films. But one has to ask, are these anachronisms holding the medium back? Does the sharpness and hyperreality of digital footage only feel creepy because we’re not used to it? After all, the way an analogue camera renders the world is no more ‘natural’ than the way some souped-up 8k, 3D camera thing does. There is moreover something duplicitous in pretending that digital film is something that it’s not – I fear the philosopher Baudrillard (see Tom Beed’s article) would find the practice of adding artificial film grain the perfect sign that we have entered an age of pure simulation, where technologies are emulating technologies and ‘the real’ has finally receded into a tissue of endlessly deferred allusions... So surely we should get over our sentimentality and do away with skeuomorphs in filmmaking as the Silicon Valley nerds want to do away with them in computing?

The answer ultimately lies in the difference between these worlds – filmmaking, unlike computing, is not about technological advancement but about affecting people emotionally. Much as it might perplex companies who run on the logic that because a camera is newer we should enjoy it more, skeuomorphs help give films a sense of familiarity, historical continuity and nostalgia (even if it’s a ghostly nostalgia for something that may never have been directly experienced). As long as skeuomorphs work on this emotional level, they’ll have a place in the filmmaker’s vocabulary. New technology will continue to influence how films look, but savvy filmmakers will realise that this is only ever a tool to help storytelling. If they adopt technology for technology’s sake all they are doing is, ironically, taking cinema back to the days when it was merely a carnival curiosity.

Oh and with Brink by Brink, I hedged my bets and added a layer of grain so fine that I couldn’t even tell if it was there. But who knows, maybe on some emotional, unconscious level it made all the difference...

Fred Warren is a writer, filmmaker and founding member of Chasing Cow Productions.