Watching Movies

June 26, 1988

"...think I'll skip this movie at the theater and wait for it to come out on tape."  How often I've heard that phrase, and how often I've rudely said "Wait a minute..."

There are many reasons why, given a choice, I'll choose a theater over a tape on my VCR, and foremost among them is the quality of the viewing experience.  Scale is the most obvious of qualities:  when watching entertainment on a screen, bigger is better, and no television set can equal the size or consequent involvement of the movie theater screen.  Hand in the hand with this matter of size is that of proportion:  movies are shot wider than the screen of your television set.

A TV screen has a ratio of width to height of 4 to 3 which, by strange coincidence, happens to be the "Academy" ratio, the ratio of movie projection from before the sound era to the mass distribution of TV sets in 1953.  Having already lost ownership of their theaters to a Supreme Court anti-trust ruling, the movie studios responded to the new threat with the wide screen:  first with the cumbersome three-camera three-projector Cinerama and then with the more practical Cinemascope and its clones.  Movies shot in Cinemascope have a width to height ratio of 7 to 3, and the idea was that the image would extend to our peripheral vision, so the image does not seem cut off on the sides, and that by combining the resulting total visual experience along with stereophonic sound, the theaters of the day could compete effectively with television.

What actually happened was that screens were made shorter to accommodate the new proportions, audiences sat father away so the could see the entire picture without having to twist their necks like tennis fans, and the studios and theaters went into decline anyway.

The result for TV watchers is that most movies made since 1953 do not fit their television screens.

Broadcasters and those who transfer film to tape handle this problem in one of two ways.  The rarer, in the United States, is "letterboxing," putting the entire image on the screen with a black or neutral gray band above and below the image.  Woody Allen's 1979 movie "Manhattan" was transferred to tape this way at Allen's insistence.  The advantage of "letterboxing" is that the entire image is on the screen.  The disadvantage is that the TV screen has to be large or the "letterboxed" picture seems eyestrainingly small.  Also distracting is that the gray bands seem to lighten and darken as the image darkens and lightens.

The other way to "solve" the problem of mismatched proportions is to "scan" each scene, that is transfer only a portion of a scene, left, right, or center, for broadcast or tape in such a way that the TV screen is filled from top to bottom.  For most movies, this works fairly well, considering that as much as half the scene is missing.  Most directors put the bulk of the action in the center of the frame and what is to the sides is, in every sense, peripheral.  But some directors like to use the entire frame, and this is where one can get such weird phenomena as two noses having a dialogue across a wide table, or a character talking to nobody.

Titles at the beginning and end of a film cannot be scanned, so they are squeezed so we will know the full name of the gaffer or best boy, as well as the stars and director.  When action takes place during the title display, things look odd, indeed: limousines are of subaru proportions, and people in fur coats resemble pipe cleaners.

The second visual aspect of theater going versus TV watching is that  of visual quality, especially the qualities of resolutions and shadow detail.  Resolution is simply the fineness of detail one can perceive - do trees have green blobs or leaves, does an actor's hair have merely shape or does it have individual strands.  Film  is so much better in this respect that there is no comparison.

Finally, you may have noticed that night scenes, which can be very effective on the big screen, are confused and unconvincing on television.  This is because in a darkened theater one can easily see the difference between a black background and almost-black objects.  The only way to bring up the "almost-black" or "shadow" detail on a TV is to turn down the black level control, or turn up the brightness control.  The problem is that now the background is gray, and night scenes lose their impact.

And isn't "impact" what movies are all about?  A movie can never achieve the psychological subtlety of a well written novel, not the emotional delights of a stage play, but it can do things other art forms cannot.  A movie can seal one of f from realty and provide an emotional and intellectual reality to take its place.  It can make one laugh, cry, or feel fear only as reality itself can.  But a decent movie requires freedom from the telephone, from chatter, from other visual stimuli that are so distracting around a TV set.

That is why, given a choice, I choose the theater.

Malcolm Rush works in the composing room of the Bennington Banner.

I have to say one of my best memories as a child was being taken to an Alfred Hitchcock triple feature in Adams MA.  Dad wanted us to really enjoy the experience and after all, nothing compares to seeing it at the movies.