CINEMA HAS BECOME the medium of choice for more and more young storytellers. While there is no lack of first-time novelists today, there's also no doubt that many who might have gone the literary route a generation ago find the moving image more compelling. And the arrival of digital video (DV) technology has meant that the old downsides of moviemaking--cumbersome equipment, expensive film stock--no longer apply. Cheap and lightweight, the pint-sized digital camera is revolutionizing the moviemaking process; wielding a video camera is becoming as flexible and direct a method of expression as writing in a notebook or a laptop computer. The advent of digital video represents no less than 'the democratization of the moving image,' according to Cis Bierinckx, curator of film and video at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.Perhaps most significantly of all, these little cameras can turn out beautiful images. The once grainy, somehow cheap look of digital video has evolved (and continues to evolve) into pictures that are nearly as sharp, vibrant, and lustrous as celluloid. DV looks so good, in short, that it's not easy to distinguish between a low-budget student film and a sky's-the-limit commercial one. (And more and more Hollywood films are being done on video before being transferred to celluloid for exhibition--like George Lucas' blockbuster Star Wars: Episode II and Steven Soderbergh's Full Frontal, with Julia Roberts.)No wonder, then, that a slew of relatively low-budget, well-received independent films have used the technology, including Nicole Holofcener's Lovely and Amazing, Miguel Arteta's Chuck and Buck, and Zacharias Kunuk's sublime The Fast Runner, an epic set in a small Inuit community north of the Arctic Circle. (It may seem odd to record one of the world's oldest oral cultures using new technology, but, as Kunuk told the Minneapolis weekly City Pages, digital filmmaking, with its casual adaptability, moderate technical demands, and openness to improvisation, is a revival of the communal storytelling tradition.)But not everyone is delighted at the prospect of this new moviemaking technology. A recent Film Quarterly article on digital video, full of subheads like 'Nihilistic Tendencies' and 'Back from the Abyss,' warns of 'the demise of film.' According to Jean-Pierre Geuens, professor of film at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, 'the very difficulty of shooting a film . . . is what demarcates film work: the sense of magic that permeates the shoot and the sense of accomplishment that comes from working out miracles in the face of incredible odds.' Critic Roger Ebert cites a perceptual psychology theory that celluloid images create a 'reverent' state of consciousness, while projected video creates a 'hypnotic' one--presumably turning viewers into digital zombies instead of film worshippers.Even legendary French director Jean-Luc Godard, whose use of the then-new handheld camera for the 1959 classic