DCP vs. Film

A couple of years ago, Film Forum played a digital restoration of The Bridge on the River Kwai, which I eagerly attended. Visually, it was a disappointment. The film didn't look terrible, mind you, but it definitely had that stretched-out-Blu-Ray quality. In my mind's eye, I recall seeing actual pixels on the screen. (These digital restorations are usually listed with the initials "DCP." Bridge was a "4K," though I'm not sure the difference between the two or how they're related, and I am too lazy at the moment to research it. I would like to think it doesn't matter to my overall point, but I am certainly wrong.)

After that, I resolved to avoid DCP/4K/digital restoration screenings. (Modern films I'm okay with. I think they're largely shot in digital and/or set up to not look like dreck when projected digitally. At least, I assume so.) It's been hard to do. Film Forum frequently touts a restored film, I begin to make plans to see it, and then my eye catches the letters "DCP," and I immediately change my mind. Citizen Kane and Lawrence of Arabia are two of the most recent restorations I was extremely tempted by, DCP or no. "Surely seeing it on the big screen, even if the quality isn't equal to film, is still worth it?" I ask myself. Logically, that sounds right. Emotionally, it doesn't. Especially with New York City prices, the limited amount of time I have for film/television viewing in general, and the generous amount of pop culture that still awaits me.

As time went by, of course, I began to second guess myself. Film Forum is one of the top theaters in the city, and therefore the nation. They wouldn't project crap, would they? What about The Red Shoes? That looked gorgeous there, didn't it? It was probably a DCP/4K projection too, although I wasn't smart enough to check at the time. Soon enough, the Museum of the Moving Image, which is conveniently located in my own neighborhood, began screening DCPs as well. Their venue and methodology is the best of the best, and if they were throwing their bona fides behind the technology, well then, it must be on the up and up, mustn't it?

This was on my mind when I woke up Saturday morning and checked Twitter. (Yes, I'm that kind of person.) The Museum tweeted about a 2:00 pm DCP screening of Ashes and Diamonds, one of those classic, universally acclaimed films I've never seen. Better yet, film critic David Thomson would be there to talk about the film and his new book and whatever else he had to plug. Having nothing better to immediately do, I resolved to attend the show and settle my opinion once and for all about DCP.

And so I did. And you know what? I would still prefer to avoid it.

Admittedly, the DCP wasn't all terrible. For most of the running time, my technologically stupid eyes couldn't tell the difference between it and real film. And certain shots and images were clear and stunning, no doubt about it. DCP has a lot to recommend for it, and if the choice is between seeing a film on the big screen in DCP or seeing it on the small in Blu-Ray, I'd go for the former (if life were to ever provide such a clear cut decision).

But then there were the times when the projector had no idea what the hell it was trying to display. I first noticed it with the tank treads. Ashes and Diamonds takes place at the end of WWII, and many shots have Soviet tanks moving by in the background. The treads of these tanks were always an unnatural digital blur. "Well, okay, but that's a small thing," says my mind. "If that's the worst of it, then you've been overreacting." It wasn't. There is a scene in the film where two characters are talking in bed. It's shot largely in close-up, in low level lighting. For the entire scene, the actors' faces were a too-smooth digital haze, as if they were the victims of a poor PhotoShop job. It was appalling. Outside of that, I would notice a softness of the entire image every so often, as if parts of it were out of focus. It was subtle, though, and I couldn't be sure if it was an actual defect, or just me being overly paranoid.

After Ashes and Diamonds, the Museum screened Yotsuya Kaidan, directed by Kenji Misumi. This one was a 35mm print, so I stuck around to watch it (one of the great things about the Museum is that you only pay one ticket fee, so if you see the early show, you can watch the rest for no extra charge). The quality wasn't appreciably better than the best the DCP had to offer - not to my untrained eyes, at least - but there were also no obvious lapses into digital crap, either.

Still, the screening gave me a thrill, an excitement, that the DCP hadn't provided. That was because the 35mm print was old. There were scratches and flaws and the soundtrack frequently popped and crackled. Having grown up before the proliferation of digital technology, these were things I was familiar with, and should have also considered lapses. And yet it's so infrequent that I see a genuine film print, and an old one at that, that the defects here felt like a treat. They signified an authenticity, a gritty reality that DCP screenings lack. It felt, somehow, new and alive, rather than old and decaying. Perhaps it was nostalgia, but I realized then that I would gladly pay a surcharge to see a film shot on film projected on film, rather than a digitized version with the latest whistles and bells.

"Time rushes by, love rushes by, life rushes by, but the Red Shoes go on."

I spent last Sunday afternoon embedded in the warm cocoon of Film Forum. Before showing the restored print of Powell and Pressburger's The Red Shoes, they played previews of current and upcoming films, one of which was a the 40th anniversary re-release of Five Easy Pieces. It wasn't quite a natural fit. I wondered what the little girls in front of me thought about Jack Nicholson calling another man a "cracker asshole." Personally, I loved it - "cracker asshole" is one of those curse word combinations that has a natural poetic rhythm and rolls right off the tongue.

At the end of the trailer, there was a blurb accredited to Richard Schickel: "If you see nothing else this year, you must see this film." That shocked me, frankly, because I wouldn't even call it the best of the pre-Chinatown Jack Nicholsons. I would give that honor to The Last Detail. Ask yourself which one you prefer: the ennui-ridden, grown up Holden Caulfield-type, or the lifelong Navy man who enthusiastically demonstrates "yodeling in the canyon"? I know which one I'd rather have escort me to jail. After I got all worked up over the tendency for film critics to overpraise - after "brilliant" is reduced to having the same power as "mediocre," they will have to resort to "It will give you mind boners!" - I realized that the blurb was probably taken from Schickel's original 1970 review. After some research, I saw that it was, and in that year, it was praise more than merited - although looking back, let us not forget to also praise Patton, or God forbid, Kelly's Heroes.

So my longtime nemesis, Research, shot down my point and my planned way of opening with what I originally wanted to say about The Red Shoes: that though I am not given to hyperbole, the first word that comes to my mind to describe the new print is "miraculous." Released in 1948, The Red Shoes is a Technicolor wonder about a ballerina and composer who fall in love while creating a new ballet. The director is displeased and attempts to keep them apart. A simple enough story, told gorgeously and with great dancing. I imagine it looks as good as, if not better than, it did back then, and I encourage everyone to go and see it right now. I SAID NOW!

Like most external forms of stimuli, it got me a-thinkin': Did I enjoy it more because I saw it on the big screen? The obvious answer is yes, films just capture your attention better when you see them where they're meant to be seen. But I'd like to go beyond that knee jerk response and examine the issue a bit more, or maybe just waste your time. Why not? You're probably procrastinating anyway.

There are certain movies that I'll watch at home on DVD or off TCM, typically older ones, and though I will intellectually recognize why they are acclaimed, and will enjoy them on a certain level, I still have to struggle to avoid nodding off, usually around the middle section. Recently, films of this nature include Breathless (most Godard, actually), Woman in the Dunes, Au Hasard Balthazar, El Topo, and Gate of Hell. I'll be sitting there thinking "That's a nice shot" or "Oh, cool character moment," and then I will blink and feel like I've been asleep for hours, even though it was a snooze lasting a split second. I slap myself, adjust my position, sit awkwardly, rewind a bit, check the clock, and try to focus. This occurs several times. Toward the end I will break through and rally and, sometimes, make an emotional connection with what's happening onscreen. When the movie is over, I worry that our wacky modern life is killing my attention span, although to tell the truth, I've been pulling this sort of thing since college. I end up telling myself that I will enjoy it more whenever I watch it a second time and will be able to appreciate it beyond the turns of the plot. This conveniently ignores the reality of my likely not watching them a second time, at least not anytime soon, what with the massive backlog of movies I have yet to catch up on, plus all the movies I know I love waiting for me to view them again and again and again.

Again, on a certain level I enjoy these movies, and yet they don't manage to engage me enough to keep me awake the whole way through. When pondering why this happens, I come up with theories about my personal preferences that fall to pieces when examined. For example, I'll think, "Gee, maybe I'm just a story person; if I'm not caught up in a interesting plot, I drift away." But this doesn't explain my love of Amarcord, Fellini's slice of life movie that examines an Italian town over the course of a year in the 1930s. Or other character/life-focused films like My Neighbor Totoro, Taxi Driver, American Splendor, The Kid Stays in the Picture, or the Grand Daddy of them all, Citizen Kane. So then I think, "Well, maybe I'm a character person, then." This leaves out films I love with admittedly one-dimensional or stock characters I might hate in other contexts, works like Once Upon a Time in the West, Dead Alive, Hard Boiled, The General, and City Lights (really, most action flicks and comedies).

What does this have to do with The Red Shoes? I began to ponder whether it would have been one of the films I nodded off during had I watched it at home, or whether the secret ingredient to being thoroughly drawn into these films is the theater-going experience, the chance to be able to focus exclusively on the movie without outside distractions like mewling cats, honking horns, and groaning neighbors. (This is not taking into consideration the distractions of your fellow audience members, of course, but at Film Forum they were generally a quiet, well-behaved lot; there was nary a glowing cell phone screen during it or The White Ribbon, which I saw after.) BUT, once again, there have been plenty of films I was completely enthralled by while watching for the first time in the safety of my apartment: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Matter of Life and Death (which has possibly the greatest opening sequence ever), The Burmese Harp, and Children of Paradise. (Although, to be even more elemental about it, Moira Shearer had amazing gams I would have enjoyed equally on the big screen and small.)

My current theory is "Gee, maybe I need to be emotionally invested somehow." But what is that "somehow"? Most of the time we think of it as, again, liking or identifying with the characters. But I think it goes deeper than that. Great filmmaking, or, perhaps more accurately, filmmaking that speaks to us on a personal level, can move us emotionally. Even filmmakers who are normally thought of as cold and austere toward their characters, like Kubrick, the Coen Brothers, and Haneke, can get me wrapped up in their worlds and viewpoints through their sheer artistry and move me, story and characters be damned. At the same time, someone thought of as a warmer, more spiritual filmmaker, like Bresson, can leave me feeling nothing. I can clinically say "I understand why people love it," but I can't quite feel that way myself.

Ultimately, I suppose it comes down to something as simple as this: Some people dig some things, some people dig others; such is the way of art. And yet we allow this to mire us in redundant, meaningless arguments. Look at the way Richard Schickel (speak of the devil) recently bashed Robert Altman's work in an essay that basically boiled down to "I don't like the way he did things." The current fad of ripping into Scorsese contains a lot of that, as does this piece by Jeffrey Wells (which the Self-Styled Siren kicks in the nuts). While simultaneously pondering at this and digging into the reasons for our reactions, we need to respect, or at least understand, why certain people like things we can't get behind. We don't have to abandon criticism, or never tear apart something we hate or find offensive, but we have to have reasons that go beyond "Fuck long shots, that shit is wack." We have to be able to build up our own houses without tearing down those of our neighbors.

I suppose that doesn't start flame wars and get page views, though. Hell, I should join the game to get more peepers. How's this for a start?: Andrei Tarkovsky was a navel-gazing ass face who could turn a five minute blowjob from Marilyn Monroe into an agonizingly boring three hour experience full of mind numbing tripe. What do you have to say about that, Solaris lovers?