Got my special rinky-dink top of the line Ming the Merciless unleaded supercharged buy one get one free can’t believe it’s not yoghurt DVD editions of ‘Touch of Evil’ and ‘Vertigo’, two of my favourite films - heck, they’re probably two of the favourite films of everyone who has seen them - this week. They remain under wraps til later in the week when I will have time to see them, but their presence in my living room raises a question: there’s a bit of controversy out there about these discs - specifically the restoration done on ‘Vertigo’, and the aspect ratio of ‘Touch of Evil’. In short, ‘Vertigo’ might be a bit redder in places than it should be, and ‘Touch of Evil’, while it was projected in a regular widescreen version, was shot in the ratio we know and loathe from old TVs - you know, square and all that. The DVD apparently shows the film in this widescreen version, which lops a bit off the top and bottom. Having said that, anyone who saw the film when it was first released saw that version too, and Orson Welles does not appear to have expressed a preference; it can probably be assumed that he filmed it in the knowledge that it would end up looking like this.
So my question is this - how important is it to The Listener to have DVDs that look exactly the way a film historian thinks they should? Aren’t we just happy enough to have a clean print that resurrects the amazing pieces of cinema we may once only have seen on late night television, in dusty prints, with the hell pan-and-scanned out of them?
PS: I’m aware of the argument that art should be seen in its ‘pure’ form, which is fair enough; although taking that to its logical extreme would leave us only being satisfied in Egypt rather than the Pyramids exhibition at the British Museum; my point is more that I’m not sure I’m that worried about perfect presentation when the films are perfect to start with (or special features on DVDs, for that matter).
