On the decline of sumptuousness in cinema

Part 2: Polyester, Pink Floyd and props.

^FIRST
a

C L A R I F I C A T I O N

In this series of posts, “sumptuousness” refers to high-density information in a Shannon-inspired sense: not just the volume of data, but the amount of surprise it contains. A signal informs to the degree it resists prediction.

Today we have the means to capture huge amounts of information, but, just like much of our food is less nutrient-dense than before, there is less and less of it on the screen.

^{Phantom Thread (2017)}

This post is more speculative than part 1 because I’m in pre-production for a short film as writer/director/producer. It’s my attempt at translating vibes and gut feelings into heuristics I can use to maximise visual impact on a limited budget.

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Having looked at camera and lighting, let’s turn to what was actually in the frame.

CONTENTS

TEXTILE
1 (A): Fibre
1 (B): Pile

DYES
2 (A): Were materials actually brighter back then?
2 (B): Black

PROPS
3 (A): IKEAfication
3 (B): Conglomeration of function

… SO WHAT?

LOSSES AND GAINS

… AND WHAT NOW?

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TEXTILE

1 (A): Fibre

Film-makers from the mid-to-late 20th century knew that the camera was not indifferent to the world: it had feelings, and it loved natural fibre – especially silk.

^{(Source: Oliver Meckes of Eye of Science)}

Silk shimmers thanks to its triangular prism-like structure. Though smooth to the touch, it has an organically irregular texture and is made up of millions of minute crystalline microfibrils embedded in an amorphous protein matrix. When light enters a silk fiber it bounces off these microfibrils, producing volumetric scattering. It is volumetric scattering that gives light a deep multi-dimensional look.

^{(400x magnification. Source: Penn State University, I guess?)}

Polyester is a synthetic polymer usually manufactured by extrusion through tiny circular holes, resulting in an ultra-smooth uniform round cylindrical shape.

^{(Source: Microlab NW Photomicrograph Gallery)}

Polyester’s cylindrical shape grants it a property shared by convex mirrors: reflected light concentrates into a single continuous specular highlight that runs the length of the thread, producing a harsh white “plastic” glare. And because the surface is so smooth, light bounces straight off without entering the fibre – so the highlight carries the colour of the lamp and not the dye. The result is spatially narrow light.

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Polyester’s uniform nature relates directly to the definition of sumptuousness I provide at the top of this post.

A signal informs to the degree
it resists prediction.

A polyester filament is identical along its length, and identical to its neighbours. They are clones extruded by the same die. Sample one mm² and you’ve sampled the lot.

^{Phantom Thread (2017)}

Silk never repeats itself. It is an extension of the natural world, and its chaos cannot be perfectly predicted. The capacity for surprise is vast. With just a few variables you can hang up fabric and set up lights, and you won’t know what to expect.

I’m dealing with this exact problem right now as I prepare for my shoot. One setup features a large amount of fabric on screen lit by tungsten. We’re going for a luscious look; in a perfect world such a look would be accomplished using natural fabrics only, but silk is expensive, so I’m considering fabrics of varying composition.

Above is an unedited photo of the samples I’ve collected: 100% silk, 100% polyester, and a mystery silk/polyester blend. See if you can guess which is which.

Below are the same fabrics in direct sunlight, which makes some of their special two-tone features (all but the emerald green swatch!) a little more apparent:

My cinematographer Felix brought along a small tungsten light to the fabric store and shone it at two of the above fabrics: the shimmery red-blue and two-tone red-green.

The shimmery blue-red is 100% polyester, the red-green a polyester-silk blend. The red-green has a finer weft, but you can see a difference in the quality of reflected light: the blue-red has a rougher, “crunchier” look that goes to white very quickly. We’ve yet to test a 100% silk sample (the yellow-pink that Felix and I are currently keenest on).

One of Maggie Cheung’s legendary outfits in In the Mood for Love (2000) is a dress made from what looks like red-green dupioni. It’s a silk considered to be low-grade due to shorter fibres, but its fine organic irregularities mean it still contains more information than smooth polyester.

But silk doesn’t just give us beautiful reflections – it can also gobble light up.

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1 (B): Pile

Black silk-based velvet used to be cinematographers’ go-to material for turning parts of the frame (or shiny areas just outside the frame) into featureless voids, granting greater control over the shape of light.

^{2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Models (and humans) were shot on a background of black velvet. The exposed film was wound back then exposed again, this time filming the “starfield” (light shone through tiny holes in metal sheets).}

The best silk-based black velvet is capable of absorbing close to 100% of visible light.

Velvet is a pile weave: a technique that creates a raised three-dimensional surface. It consists of millions of microscopic fibre stalks standing perpendicular to the backing fabric, so that when light hits the surface, it travels into the gaps between these stalks, where almost all of it is absorbed by black dye. The remaining unabsorbed light is captured through the geometric light trapping properties of vertical pile.

Whether silk velvet reflects or absorbs light depends on dye colour, fibre length and angle (the “nap”, i.e. directional grain of the fibres), fibre density, and other properties.

^{Anton Walbrook’s splendid dressing gown in The Red Shoes (1948)}

Synthetic velvet reacts to light differently: just like polyester’s cylindrical fibres respond with a convex-mirror-like glare along their length, here the fibres’ curved tips catch the light and bounce it right back at the lens. The blacks are kinda grey.

Silk-based velvet has never been cheap, and today’s synthetic polyester-based alternatives look similar enough, and are more durable, easily washable, and 5-10 times cheaper. Their less stringent production demands usually lead to further cost-cutting when it comes to dye quality and fibre density; an all-around downgrade.

With synthetic fibre now ubiquitous, many people – especially younger professionals – will never know what they missed out on.

^{PTA’s respect for real velvet in Phantom Thread (2017)}

The speed and low cost of polyester production provided another way to cut costs: printing patterns onto fabric rather than weaving them.

^{Crops of suspiciously flat detailing from The Witcher (2019)}

A woven pattern is a physical structure. Its design is the geometry of the threads themselves, causing a complex response to light depending on angle and intensity.

A printed pattern is data laid onto a surface: a flat projection with artificial volume. It’s a kind of ornamental skeuomorph: a design that represents a once-functional feature, but with none of its history. The information of its creation is void.

It’s a copy of a copy of a copy.

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Before moving on to dyes, I’d like to make a callback to part 1, which described how the transfer from hot power-guzzling tungsten lights to LEDs made for a huge visual difference to both the intensity and shape of light, and its quality (light spectrum).

The reason that the quality light matters (apart from level of illumination) is because it changes the way surfaces respond: tungsten on natural fabrics like velvet produces an enormous range of looks, because both the light and the fabric tolerate extremes.

Bright LEDs on polyester produce a narrow one: the dynamic potential shrinks to a sad, inoffensive medium.

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The “sumptuous” images in my posts come mostly from well-known and modern classics. You might argue that they’re cherry-picked big-budget productions, that my point is no more relevant today than in the past. But today’s PTAs, Tarantinos, Nolans are titans who can afford to escape having to shoot digitally, as over 90% of major releases now are, or rely on polyester (now 59% of all fibre produced on Earth!!!).

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DYES

2 (A): Were materials actually brighter back then?

As stated in part 1, Technicolor was expensive – hardly a mass-market standard – but film negative chemistry and processing are not the only variables at play.

An obvious suspect here is the switch from natural to synthetic dyes – but that story ended before cinema’s began. Every sumptuous film you can name used synthetic dye.

Polyester is hydrophobic. Its fibres are largely impenetrable to standard dyeing processes and require the application of heat and pressure. Not only that, but printed fabric often skips dye altogether: pigment particles are glued to the surface with plastic binders. And as we saw earlier in this post, the structure of polyester fibre causes light to mostly bounce off the surface, producing little internal scattering.

^{It’s expensive to look so cheap. The Electric State (2025)}

Synthetic fabrics thus lose to natural ones on multiple levels:
1. The quality of light is spatially narrow (the white “glare”)
2. Uniformity of fibre makes for a homogenous surface of little complexity
3. Shallower range of luminance: less difference between lights and darks
4. The same colourant looks duller on polyester because less light penetrates.

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2 (B): Black

To the human mind, black is less a colour and more a signal of the absence of light. Before the introduction of synthetic dyes, getting clothing to take on a deep black colour was a major challenge, requiring multiple dye baths of different colours.

A deep black requires light to enter and never come back. Failure at any stage – surface reflection, fibre/material penetration, subpar absorption – will return grey. You can see how this is problematic for a synthetic fibre like polyester.

^{Emilia Pérez (2024)}

Setting aside the ugly colour grade (Mx. Colourist, I’m sorry, I know it wasn’t your fault!), you might spot a few tell-tale signs of synthetic fabric:

1. High convex-mirror-like reflectivity takes on the colour of ambient light…
2. … that bounces straight back into the lens
3. Reflected light is spatially narrow; no volumetric scattering
4. Lacking a “true black” in the frame, lifting exposure for faces drags blacks up as well
5. Many synthetic black dyes reflect near-infrared. Under ND filtration (a lens filter used to reduce light in bright circumstances), digital sensors can register "black" as brown-magenta. Cinematographers need special IR-cut filters to fight a colour the eye can't even perceive.

:-(

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PROPS

and the information they carry.

3 (A): IKEAfication

^{(Source: IKEA stuff on TV)}

It’s fun and maybe a little weird to spot your IKEA bookcase or lamp when visiting a friend for the first time – even if they live on another continent. The Scandi aesthetic knows no borders, so IKEA makes sense as a goldmine for prop masters the world over. But that moment of recognition – that bit of surprise – is always the same bit.

Once you’ve seen the object in one frame, you’ve seen it in every frame. Nothing about it locates you or tells you who owns it.

Ancient coins were minted one by one: a hot blank disc of metal wedged between two designed “dies”, then struck by hammer. Two coins might have shared the same dies, but each coin would still emerge unique. No two objects were ever the same.

It seems unlikely that our ancient ancestors gazed with wonder at their coinage, and, given the comfort and reliability that mass markets have brought us, romanticising the past is naive. But homogenisation sucks. Through producing Gesamtkunstwerks, cinema functions as a kind of snapshot of the past, and it’s hard not to feel a pang of sadness when a giant vision of a more sumptuous past glows right before our eyes.

When Adrian Maben directed Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii in 1971, he arranged for a camera track (see above, along the bottom). Camera tracks cost extra and take time to build – uneven surfaces cause camera wobble – so the camera operator used the track at every given opportunity; just like videographers would have done today.

In getting the biggest bang for his buck, Maben accidentally captured aura: the casual signature of one of the greatest musical acts of the 20th century. No instance of “PINK FLOYD. LONDON” is the same as another.

^{[On that note: the 2025 restoration of Live at Pompeii is outstanding.]}

3 (B): Conglomeration of function

The “Show, don’t tell” maxim used to be easier to follow. Alarm clocks, rotary phones, rolodexes – their forms immediately broadcast their function, which simplified the transmission of meaning from frame to frame.

The smartphone swallowed dozens of objects and replaced them with a black slab.

^{2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)}

The loss of information is double here. The first is on a visual level: the smooth, featureless rectangle is void of detail when switched off. When switched on, the phone’s resolution cannot compete with the resolution of the physical world.

The second loss is everything the smartphone displaced. Where a character uses a phone was once a scene where they were reading a love letter, taking a photo of Bigfoot, prank calling the school principal. Each object demanded the actor honour its purpose – to reveal a truth about the character and how they relate to the world.

Great actors are magicians who alter reality, and the mana is dwindling.

^{Back to the Future (1985)}

If you ever get the chance, I recommend dropping by a prop warehouse and wandering around it as if it were a museum.

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… SO WHAT?

Why should a normal person care about “information density”? What is it to the eye, the mind, the soul?

I hypothesise that there are links here to predictive processing, and information theory, and the Platonic idea of beauty. I’m not totally sure.

All I can say is that, following a couple of decades of multi-disciplinary work across both analog and digital domains and several years of independent study of the perception of audio-visual information, philosophy, media theory and personal experimentation, what I write about here feels important; it feels like one of the most beautiful things I make contact with.

For all of that has become prohibitively expensive or vanished entirely with the close of the 20th century, I sense opportunity; that if one can take the time to define limits, one might be able to go past them. I can almost see, feel, hear, touch it. It’s coming.

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LOSSES & GAINS

LOST: information about light, texture and provenance; a wide spectrum of surprise.
GAINED: safety, fewer boiled silkworms, washability, and cost.

Ultimately the history of film is the history of technology: every film is a demonstration of the state of the arts – including the state of our fabrics, our dyes, and our things. The inconvenience of life makes up much of its richness.

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… AND WHAT NOW?

As I explained above, this series isn't purely nerdy passion, but my attempt at putting some pet theories down on paper. I'm in pre-production on a short film shooting in Vienna this summer, and we’re going to project tungsten light onto fabric we can barely afford (I’m picking up 8 metres tomorrow!!!) while sweating in the AC-less European heat – just because I believe that we’ll capture something special.

The short is a step towards my debut feature, a psychological thriller called The User Illusion. If you'd like to be involved – as associate producer, executive producer, or in some other capacity – write to me: olga@cinedelic.pictures

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That’s it for now. Thank you very much for reading!

Parts 3, 4, and possibly 5 will follow at some point in the future. In them I’ll address post-production and delivery, and maybe put together a concise summary of what I’ve shared to date.