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Revisiting David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007) on 35-millimeter the other day significantly deepened my admiration for the movie. Like all of Fincher’s work, Zodiac is full of digital effects—and it’s all the more remarkable for appearing to contain none. The movie exactingly re-creates the look of downbeat American crime movies from the late 60s through the late 70s, evoking at various points The Boston Strangler, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Don Siegel’s movies from Dirty Harry on, and the original The Taking of Pelham 123. Yet the allusions are also illusions: Fincher and cinematographer Harris Savides shot Zodiac on HD video and employed all sorts of computer trickery in postproduction to make it look like it was shot on celluloid.
Within a generation, the very idea of digitally shot movies transferred onto film will feel like the byproduct of a transitional era. I predict that Zodiac, like Godard’s In Praise of Love (2001), will be seen as one of the works that took full advantage of the transition to create textures unlike anything movies offered before or after.
