Breathless ushered in a whole new style of independent filmmaking, is upset. In a New Yorker profile, he manages to turn DV's ability to instantly replay scenes just shot into an almost apocalyptic evil. 'With digital,' Godard says, 'there is no past. If you want to see the previous shot, OK, you do this [taps his finger], and . . . you're there right away. So there's an entire time that no longer exists, that has been suppressed. And that's why films are much more mediocre, because time no longer exists.'The debate is, in many ways, archetypal: old versus new, insiders versus outsiders, traditionalists versus insurgents--young, brash upstarts who don't know (or care to learn) how to pay respects to the craft traditions of the old guard.'It's war,' says Rob Nelson, film editor of City Pages. 'This is a very contentious issue, and it really revolves, as most things do in the industry, around money and power. The people with money and power have a vested interest in keeping control of [digital] technology to themselves.' Ira Deutchman, founder of Cinecom and Fine Line Features, thinks the studios are purposely trying to slow down the shift to digital to maintain their monopoly on exhibition. 'Once a theater can show anything,' Deutchman recently told The Village Voice, 'it's not dependent on 35 mm, and the barrier of entry is not as difficult. The studios no longer have a stranglehold.'(Currently, most digital video filmmakers still have to transfer their movie to celluloid--an expensive process--if their goal is theatrical release. But, as the price of studio-acceptable digital projectors, which currently start at roughly $150,000, comes down, the path to a digital future will be clearer.) Besides democratizing access, digital video just might democratize aesthetics too. DV can capture everyday beauty far more easily than film, weighed down as it is by prohibitive costs, heavy equipment, and expansive crews. And everyday people increasingly will be the ones behind the camera. 'Francis Ford Coppola says that the real hope for the future is that the next masterpiece is not going to be by a D.W. Griffith or an Alfred Hitchcock or people working in the industry,' City Pages' Nelson says, 'but, as he put it, some little fat girl in Ohio with her father's camcorder who swings it around and creates something that's totally unique and beautiful.'