PARK CITY, Utah -- Dot-coms grabbed the spotlight at the Sundance Film Festival in 1999. In 2000, digital projection took center stage, and last year, digital features were the rage. In each of the past few years, much of the hype at the most influential event for American independent moviemakers was focused on digital cinema.
But the 2002 Sundance Film Festival, which opens here Thursday, looks to be relatively free of new-tech buzz. Press releases trumpeting the latest digital video innovations -- a fax-jamming feature of Sundances past -- have slowed to a trickle, and the Sundance press office seems to be barely keeping track of which films are digital and which aren't.
Why aren't people talking about digital filmmaking? Because, some say, the battle has been won. Digital cinema, nearly everyone agrees, is here to stay. Discussion over. The journalists who come to Sundance to unearth the latest trend will have to look elsewhere.
Ian Calderon, Sundance's director of digital initiatives, is grateful that the hot light of the news media isn't focused his way. Too often, he says, writers pitted digital video against celluloid as if it were a prizefight.
"The only thing that matters is the results ... the way creative people use the technologies," he says. "I never really understood all of the silly rhetoric -- 'film is dead' and all of that. I saw (the digital tools) as opportunities.
"It's not about the paint or the brushes, it's about the process of creation. The digital tools are in place, and people are building on them."
For the record, Calderon notes a marked increase in the amount of digital content at Sundance 2002; he guesses that more than a third of the 200 or so films that are playing were either shot on digital video or will be digitally projected. In 1998, the number of digital video films could have been counted on one hand.
For 2002, Sundance's sidebar programming also will be heavily weighted toward the digital. He says the Sundance Digital Center, a showcase venue for new technologies, is more active than ever, featuring eight panel discussions on digital cinema.
And Calderon describes his latest project, the Sundance PDA Project, as a kind of wireless mini-festival within the festival. Movies from the Sundance Online Film Festival will be beamed, via six towers in Park City, to festival goers' handhelds.
For the swarms of journalists who descend on Sundance, the PDA Project might not have the sex appeal of, say, the giant dome AtomFilms built in downtown Park City for the 2000 festival, or the installation of digital projectors -- the eventual replacement for today's film projectors? -- in Sundance's theaters that same year.
If not focused on the "death of film" controversy, Internet cinema or the latest digital-video gadget, where will Park City's hype-meisters and trend trackers turn?
Peter Broderick, president of Next Wave Films, suggests they take a look at a quieter cinematic revolution -- one of style and content -- that is under way. Now that digital tools have allowed independent filmmakers to toss out the moviemaking rulebook, he says cinema is beginning to look and feel more different than ever before.
"At first, people learning about digital production were struck by its affordability," says Broderick. "Making a feature for a couple of thousand dollars became a possibility. Now, perhaps, people will become interested in the ways that movies themselves will change because of these new tools."
Jonathan Wells, festival and editorial director of the Res Media Group, which produces Res Magazine and Resfest, also hopes the focus turns to content.
"When the digital filmmaking revolution reached its peak, we heard a lot about the first digital film from Poland, or the first one transmitted by satellite," he says. "It wasn't about quality, it was about being first. Luckily, we are past that phase. The question now is, 'Is the film any good?'"
