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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Suddenly, for the first time, people could go to a video store the way they went to a library. Sure, you have a better chance of finding a wider selection of movies to rent if you live in a more cosmopolitan area, but outlets like Facets and newer services like Netflix have made it possible to rent virtually any DVD or video by mail. Even with the access I had to repertory houses, video was the only way for me to see many films. I no longer had to imagine movies I'd read about. This extended life for movies has been invaluable to movies with minuscule advertising budgets, limited releases (one of the greatest movies of the '90s, "Cobb," never played outside a handful of cities), or bad luck at the box office.
A few years ago a nephew of mine in Maine fell in love with Asian culture. Luckily, he lives near a good video store and his mother rented Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai" for him. He simply would not have had a chance to see it otherwise.
If we insist that movies are only meant to be seen on the big screen, then we have to be honest about the consequences of that. Specifically, we have to be comfortable with the fact that large numbers of people will not have access to movies. And some of those people are not just the potential filmmakers and critics of the future, but perhaps most important, the moviegoers whose enthusiasm helps keep movies alive.
A critic I know once got a letter from a schoolteacher in a small Australian town. He wasn't near a theater, but he was lucky enough to have access to a good selection of video and his school owned a VCR. So, as generations of Americans did with drive-ins, this man and his wife would bundle their kids into pajamas and sleeping bags, head to the school and watch the movies they'd read about in my friend's column. That's a writer's dream, knowing that your writing isn't going into the void but to an audience that can respond to you, that has a chance to see the same things you do.
Given the choice, I'd much rather see something on the big screen first. In a perfect world, that's the choice that everyone should make. Watching a movie like "Lawrence of Arabia" or "Spartacus" at home, even in a letterboxed print, can never be more than a memento of seeing it in the theater. And the same is true of more modest-scaled movies like "L'Atalante" or "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg."
I shrink a little when I hear people who can afford to go to the movies say, "I'll wait till it comes out on video." There's also no doubt that the availability of films on video has encouraged a certain laziness. Movies weren't meant to be watched for an hour at a time and finished later. But home technology shouldn't take the rap for bad viewing habits, any more than libraries should take the blame for people who can't force themselves all the way through "Moby-Dick."
For all the benefits of video, there are drawbacks that the form has never overcome. A few years back, when DVDs were coming in, an editor -- overstating the case and dead-on at the same time -- said to me, "I think VHS is going to be remembered as one of the great aesthetic crimes of the century." That may sound simply like the enthusiasm of someone captivated by the new technology. But sometimes, especially in criticism, overstatement is the quickest route to the truth.
Many VHS videos were simply transfers of faded prints that had been gathering dust in studio archives for years. They weren't cut or censored as movies still are on the broadcast networks, which still want to believe that cable is a trend. But aesthetically, they were often just as much a mess. It took years for movies to be released on video in letterboxed format, which meant that the cropped image you saw left out at least a third of what the director had meant to show you, as if you had picked up a book to find a third of the text had been been randomly cut.
For years, Bantam paperback books have carried the disclaimer: "This edition contains the complete text of the original hardcover edition. NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED." That's not only a point of pride, it's a selling point as well. Yet we regularly rent or buy videos whose package says, "This movie has been reformatted to fit your television screen." And the fact is that any widescreen movie made by someone who knows what he or she is doing is nearly impossible to watch that way.
When I tried to teach Brian De Palma's "Dressed to Kill" and "Casualties of War" to a film class a few years back, I found myself having to stop the film at certain points and explain what had just happened. De Palma has consistently used split-screen images, or used the widescreen frame to show us two things happening at once. Watching the cropped and reformatted video of "Dressed to Kill," my students could see Nancy Allen boarding a subway train to escape a killer on the left side of the screen -- but they couldn't see the killer slipping into the same train on the right side. More movies have become available in letterboxed video, but even if we were to reach a point where every movie released on video were in the correct aspect ratio, we would still have to deal with the picture quality of video.
