Around the year 2000, digital cinematography was introduced to mainstream cinema. However, most directors treated digital camera either as a tool to create decidedly lo-fi, mundane imagery (see: most of the Dogme 95, and mumblecore movements; the found footage horror genre), or, on the other end of the spectrum, tried to conform the digital look to the look of film-shot movies (with its mushed colors, prevalence of grain, wide dynamic range--and, as a result, low contrast, etc.) as close as possible. The latter is the path the mainstream Hollywood, including postmodernist auteurs like Steven Soderbergh, and David Fincher, disappointingly took after the year 2010.
A handful of directors around the world actually embraced the unique technical quality, the idiosyncrasies and…
Around the year 2000, digital cinematography was introduced to mainstream cinema. However, most directors treated digital camera either as a tool to create decidedly lo-fi, mundane imagery (see: most of the Dogme 95, and mumblecore movements; the found footage horror genre), or, on the other end of the spectrum, tried to conform the digital look to the look of film-shot movies (with its mushed colors, prevalence of grain, wide dynamic range--and, as a result, low contrast, etc.) as close as possible. The latter is the path the mainstream Hollywood, including postmodernist auteurs like Steven Soderbergh, and David Fincher, disappointingly took after the year 2010.
A handful of directors around the world actually embraced the unique technical quality, the idiosyncrasies and quirks of the digital camera, and the universe of video effects that were considered cheap and vulgar at the time, and strived to create newly awe-inspiring images, attacking the viewers' senses in ways impossible without the digital technology, and therefore never seen before in cinema.
We're calling those directors, who bravely began a new, wholly separate from the traditions of film photography, visual aesthetic, the first digital modernists. This list as an attempt to mention the essential movies combining the ethos of old school modernism, and the newly found digital technology (from Lucas' green screen soundstage and Rodriguez' 3D glasses to Sokurov's Paris drones and Baker's iPhone 5)--so imperfect, yet already existing far beyond the constraints of film photography that still enslave most directors in the mainstream.
A careful reader will notice a disproportionate number of Japanese movies on this list. One theory explaining this phenomenon is that early digital modernist movies made in Hollywood ("Attack of the Clones", "Ultraviolet") were ridiculed and heavily critisised, and so the next generation of American directors developed a digital complex of sorts, and tried to restrain themselves more. The same critisisms simply never arose in Japan, and the digital modernist cinema had every opportunity to prosper there.
(The movies are listed in chronological order. Some film-shot movies, like "300", created their iconic look using post-production digital effects, others, say, "The Lawnmower Man", went fully digital only for a smaller portion of their runtime--both definitely deserve an honorable mention here. However at the moment we're sticking to feature films actually shot on digital cameras. Also, some other movies by the directors already on the list deserve a mention, but in order to stick to the very essentials, we decided to only list up to two or three movies by a single director.)