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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
The advent of movies projected on digital video rather than celluloid raises all sorts of questions about what the quality of the movie image could look like in a few years. I haven't seen any movies projected on digital video so I don't feel qualified to comment on their quality. But at least one director has come out in favor of it. In an interview a few years back, Mike Figgis said that he prefers audiences see his movies on DVD.
He explained that his films "The Loss of Sexual Innocence" and "Miss Julie" each had fewer than 10 prints made. What that means is that by the time those prints reached smaller art houses in the middle of the country, long after the film opened in New York and Los Angeles, audiences were seeing prints that had been projected several hundred times, nicked, scratched and often spliced. Repertory audiences are just as vulnerable to seeing bad images, though for different reasons. Often, the prints of the older films they show have not been restored and have been deteriorating for years in studio vaults.
Unless you're going to see one of the handful of older movies that are rereleased each year in newly restored prints (something that Film Forum in New York has made a specialty), you are likely to see a print in mediocre to atrocious condition. The Criterion DVDs of "The Lady Eve" and "My Man Godfrey" restore those movies to an Art Deco luster that I have never seen in any existing print. The company's DVD of Hitchcock's "The 39 Steps" is even better, cleaning up sound as well as picture, and doing such a great job on the latter that it shows visual details (like a black cat crossing the street at night) that I had never seen, not even in Criterion's laserdisc version.
Before his death, director Roger Vadim got to see Criterion's restoration of his sun-drenched "... And God Created Woman" and said that the film hadn't looked as good since its original release. Universal has released Hitchcock's "The Birds" and "Marnie" (as well as other films by the director) in versions that restore the vibrancy of their original color. The DVD of King Vidor's sumptuous and ludicrous "Duel in the Sun" restores the film to its original roadshow presentation, including the overture.
Unfortunately, not every company has been as scrupulous. As with the initial videos, some companies are merely rushing out existing prints to get movies on the market. The letterboxed print of Godard's "Pierrot le Fou" on the Fox Lorber DVD is the same faded one as on the old Connoisseur video. And while some DVDs offer both widescreen and reformatted (i.e., full-screen) versions of movies, some films are appearing on DVD only in reformatted versions ("Babe," for instance). Still, a substantial number of movies have made it to DVD in remastered versions that surpass what you're likely to see even if you're lucky enough to have access to repertory houses.
So I return to my original question: Does seeing movies as they are meant to be seen mean risking watching a faded and spliced print in order to preserve the "theatrical experience" -- or seeing the film as it was made, with image quality and aspect ratio intact?
I'm not arguing against the theatergoing experience. From the point of view of someone who loves movies and wants to see them in as good shape as possible, I'm simply identifying some of the problems associated with theatergoing. No one who truly loves movies will ever forgo the experience of going out to see them. Sitting enveloped in the dark is too elemental an experience, as is the communal feel of watching movies with an audience, especially comedies or thrillers or horror films. Who wants to laugh or be scared alone?
DVD won't stop people from going to the movies any more than video or cable or TV itself did. The idiot box is always an easy scapegoat, especially for people who don't want to consider the rest of the country beside the big cities. It's nice to pretend that "La Strada" and "Breathless" and "Yojimbo," "The Lady Eve" and "The Band Wagon" and "Rio Bravo" are all coming soon to a theater near us. For most Americans, it simply ain't so. But all those movies and more can be seen in their living rooms, in better condition than they've been seen anywhere for years.
Even that experience -- watching a DVD of a favorite movie at home -- need not be a solitary one. For movie lovers, the new standards set by DVDs aren't just a promise of being able to see the movies we love as they were meant to be seen. It offers the possibility that we'll be able to share the experience with others, many of whom would otherwise never have gotten the chance.
