pan and scan disgrace
Man, I had forgotten how much I despise pan-and-scan videos.
Starman, the science-fiction film directed by John Carpenter and starring Jeff Bridges and Karen Allen, arrived on my doorstep at the end of last week, courtesy of Netflix (to my surprise, too, which I suppose is part of the fun of setting up a queue and then forgetting about it).
Equally surprising was the realization that, unlike what is stated at the Netflix site, the disc I received had no widescreen version of the film, enhanced for 16×9 displays; in fact, it had no widescreen version at all.
Instead, I was forced to endure watching a film that had been shot in anamorphic Panavision crammed into a nearly square box, which said box is occasionally and quite abritrarily slid from side to side within the original film’s 2.35:1 format.
Now, a letterboxed movie which is not anamorphic widescreen is bad enough. But a pan-and-scan “full frame” edition? Almost unendurable. I’d managed to steer clear of full frame DVDs pretty much entirely over the last few years, but one finally managed to rear up and take me by surprise. It would have to take me by surprise — I certainly wouldn’t rent a pan-and-scan movie intentionally.
What’s worse is that this Sony release is copyrighted 2005 on the disc, the same disc which says absolutely nothing about “full frame” anywhere upon its printed surface. And the menu — I saw better menus in the very first crop of Warners DVDs way back in 1997. I think it must be the worst DVD menu I have ever beheld. Bad enough in 1997; intolerable in 2005.
The worst insult a “full frame” movie can offer is actually not that it’s chopped off about half the picture. No. What makes it so horrific is the pan-and-scan feature. Because when the picture effectively trucks left or right, there is this horrendous smearing effect on the screen that completely and unceremoniously drops you out of the cinematic cocoon in which the movie has wrapped you. It’s like a wake-up call to remind you that the director and DP of the movie are no longer in control, and some technician with dodgy equipment will now be re-shooting the movie in a very small box with a bad dolly track.
And yet some studios still release DVDs in both widescreen and full frame versions (the Star Wars Trilogy comes to mind). The idea of actually consciously choosing to spend money to get a full frame edition seems to me equivalent to buying the airline edit of a movie because you prefer it to the original theatrical edition. It’s simply a decision for mad people who ought to be shipped off to Manhattan with the mutants and not get rescued by Snake Plissken.
To return to Starman, every time I began to sink into the movie and forget that half of it had been sheared off, along would come a pan-and-scan move, and pop, suspension of disbelief bursts. The truck move, complete with smearing of the picture, is so obvious and heavy-handed, it’s impossible not to be ripped from the narrative, because it’s so bloody incongruous. Pan-and-scan moves look absolutely nothing like a film move, they don’t look like a camera on a dolly, and the unpleasant sensation of scrolling along a two-dimensional plane (in other words, the movie screen itself), is so disorienting that it makes me sick. If a real camera really filming a scene were to make a truck to the left or right, on real dolly tracks, the perspective would shift as the camera moved. As viewers, we expect this shift in perspective for the movement to feel naturally a part of three-dimensional space. A Pan-and-Scan truck does not shift perspective, because the actual shot in the movie itself is usually not moving. Instead, the equipment trucks across the two-dimensional plane of the flat movie projector screen, while the perspective in the shot remains the same. That’s disorienting enough, but when you add this grotesque smearing effect to the affair, it just totally throws it beyond endurance for me.
I suppose I’ve been somewhat spoiled by having this great 16X9 HDTV set, and having so many anamorphic widescreen movies which fill my widescreen set and offer films in the aspect ratio intended by the filmmakers. It may seem like griping over something fairly trivial to some, but to me, especially after avoiding Pan-and-Scan videos for so long, it’s shocking to realize how poorly-treated filmmakers’ work has traditionally been, just because a few people are too stupid to understand what those damned black bars at the top and bottom of the screen are supposed to be.
Selfish I may be, but I hope to God I don’t have to endure another Pan-and-Scan full frame DVD any time in the near future. I swear, the experience may kill me.
Now if I can just find an edition of Starman out there with a widescreen transfer so that I can actually give the movie the attention it deserves.
Tags: DVD, widescreen, Starman.