How times change. As recently as six years ago, I used to think it was cool for movies to be on video in grainy, shitty, beat-up condition. It added to the "ambiance" of the film, particularly if it was something many of us considered to be a grungy underground movie. Who cared if Eraserhead or Night of the Living Dead was swimming in grain with deep scratches or missing frames? That's the way they ought to look, right?
While I still periodically pop in washed out videotapes of movies that are all chopped to hell and riddled with defects, a big shift came when dvd finally took off. Movies were getting remastered, and maybe you still say "why", as I do every now and then (Faces of Death, anyone?). On the other hand, I suddenly had access to films the way they were shot. While the grimy, "hidden" quality was gone, it became clear the films were just as good (and often better) when you could actually make out what was going on.
Night of the Living Dead and Eraserhead were prime examples; each film was a revelation of details heretofore obscured by persistent print damage. The stark photography of Romero's first "zombie" film accentuated the bleak finale. Watching the film in a clean print made me aware that there was no other way Night of the Living Dead could end. There was no hope, and Romero's documentary-like coverage inside and outside the house watched passively as the world went to hell.
Sometimes I wish I could have seen Eraserhead with an audience during the heyday of its "midnight movie" run. That film is a trip even with a small group of people, and I can only imagine what being in a hazy, pot smoke filled auditorium surrounded by a midnight crowd forced to deal with David Lynch's debut projected against the screen. Lynch, perhaps sensing that this could never be, worked dilligently to clean Eraserhead up frame by frame for four years and remixed the audio for home speaker systems. The result is probably different from Eraserhead as it appeared in theatres, but I'll be damned if I've put my grainy as hell UK bootleg back in the dvd player since.
Why I find this Eraserhead (re-named Eraserhead 2000 on the dvd cover) so amazing is that every detail emerges, often confounding the nightmarish quality of the film. It would be a safe assumption that if you could see more of the picture, much of the mystery would go away, but Lynch is fastidious in cramming tiny details into his films, ones that when visible are frequently as confounding. I've watched this new, cleaner version of Eraserhead more times than the beat up dvd and vhs bootlegs I've had, basking in the details and trying to work out the visual non sequiturs. It may be a revisionist version of the film, but it turns out that Eraserhead can handle the polish.
There are a number of other films I've come to appreciate from cleaned up images: Apocalypse Now's dense opening unveiled a whole new layer when I saw a widescreen remaster (Martin Sheen's Willard was a bail bondsman before Vietnam. Who better to send after Kurtz?) and Taxi Driver continues to surprise me when properly framed. I've caught things in films I never noticed, reveling in their "beaten up" status for too long.
All things considered, I still have a soft spot for the trod upon dvd picture. To be perfectly honest with you, I can't imagine Chopping Mall would look better with a widescreen remaster. Right now the disc is a straight-up port of a Vestron Cassette Tape, right down to the logo after the credits. It looks okay, but frequently leans dark and is clearly panned-and-scanned. Would I trade it for a minty fresh remaster? It's hard to say. Chopping Mall is such an obviously cheap movie that I have to wonder just how much of an improvement is possible.
The Driller Killer is widescreen, claims to be "remastered from 16mm negative" and still looks like shit. It's way to dark in most scenes to even figure out what's happening, and the sound mix buries dialogue so far down that at times I couldn't tell you what anyone's saying. A comparably cheap film, Maniac Cop, looks much better than the old "full frame" dvd I rented from Netflix. I can finally make out kills in the night scenes. I'll take the remastered Metropolis and Nosferatu over any third rate public domain cheapie any day. The remastered Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer improves on its vhs antecedents, so these things are a toss up.
I guess in the end it comes down to the movie. Does every film bear a top-to-bottom scrubbing? I honestly don't know. Clearly there are good arguments for why one should; when done correctly, the difference can be eye opening. On the other hand, I do suppose that some films continue to have "cult" followings because of their dingy, time-worn picture and muddy soundtrack. Even as home video moves in the "high definition" direction, this question is going to persist, because you can face (at times) a startlingly good shift in picture quality. Evil Dead 2, for example, looks pretty good for such a low budget film on Blu Ray, even if the string holding objects is now readily visible.
I suppose if the movie is good enough, it can transcend even the worst transfer.
Thoughts?
1 comment:
Where the limitations of the technology -- or the content matter itself -- will reveal some sort of cinematic-technical trespass, remastering may not be the best course of action. I am speaking here pretty much completely about Criterion's Brakhage anthology and La Jetee. In the former, cleaning the "dirt" off the transfers of his films that are not painted-on or taped-on leader film seems to have destroyed some of the dream-like, nebulous qualities of the films. Window Water Baby Moving and the Pittsburgh Trilogy, conceptually, are about imperfection, about the subtleties that subconsciously and consciously pervade the viewer's experience of the films regarding the essence of humanness and the faults of the human body, human institutions, and human interaction. The removal of dirt and grime and flaws from, especially, The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes completely changed my experience of Brakhage's frank framing of death. In the original print, there was a mediator: the illusion of reality. These were images of death, not death itself. These were images of deceased humans, not deceased humans. The psychological distance allowed me, during the original experience, to focus on broader-scale notions life and imperfection of the human form and life in general: the least effective machine breaks down and is easily rendered useless. Once I saw the "cleaned-up" version (granted, there wasn't much that could be done, but the resampling and digitizing clarified and crystallized every frame), the reception was damn near opposite. I began to fixate on the details, to concentrate less on the broader Gestallt of the film but on small, finnicky things -- like framing, lighting, texture. I forgot that it was an experimental film, and at some point the gravity of the images became such that, through the clarity, I thought I was indeed staring at death -- not its representation. Which, of course, may have been what Brakhage wanted.
With La Jetee, the problem is similar. The Cult of Deleuze like to use this film as a standard-bearer for non-linearity in temporal experience, and the usage of Chris Marker's stills -- as literal snapshots in time -- gets belied as well as bolstered when the grain and texture is smoothed over, when small creases or tears of the photographs being filmed are seen in much more revelatory lights, when -- as opposed to hearing a print that is technologically dirty and hissy -- I am able to start understanding the various whispers in French and can decipher that a lot of being said is nonsense, which destroys the time-traveler, non-linear-time narrative Marker creates in this small, standstill, microcosm of collected eons. The notion of the film as a collection of instants in time beyond the life of the protagonist becomes less and more pronounced.
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