This is by Glenn Erickson from the website DVD Savant:
Hello! Well, Savant has run into something worth complaining about! I
DVR'd MGMHD's Hi-Def cablecast of Michael Powell's The Red Shoes a
couple of days ago and discovered something very disturbing. Ever
since about 1970 or so I've been a regular whiner about the practice
of Pan-Scanning widescreen movies for flat televisions, pointing out
ruined compositions, squeezed title sequences and the famous shots
where we see people's noses on each side of the frame while the Pan
Scan stays firmly planted on a table lamp at screen center. The
ability to see movies in their real aspect ratios is what pulled me
into the expensive hobby of laserdisc collecting; as I'm sure I've
said too many times, I bought a 16:9 television in 1995, two years
before enhanced DVDs came around, for the express purpose of cropping
full-frame transfers of movies that were supposed to be matted for
widescreen. Now, in 2009, widescreen TVs are finally the norm and the
transition is complete.
Except with what I saw with the 1948 The Red Shoes, a flat 4x3 1:37
aspect ratio feature film. MGMHD was showing it Tilt-Scanned to 1:78.
Somebody decided that Powell's classic looked nice at the wider ratio,
you know, to fill widescreen TV screens. MGM pillar-boxed The
Quatermass Xperiment full-frame, when it should be at least as wide as
1:66, and now they've taken it upon themselves to chop up a widely
acknowledged classic. The Red Shoes is a ballet movie, and the first
thing that happens in many shots is that feet cross the line out of
the bottom of the frame. Masking off feet in a dance movie is a
serious problem, to say the least. When Powell and cameraman Jack
Cardiff get fancy with mattes, double exposures and strange angles,
the Tilt-Scanning makes it difficult to locate our intended focus.
This movie has just had a major restoration / repremiere, and doesnot
need to be "reformatted" to fit our TV screens".
So for heaven's sake, someone sic Martin Scorsese, Thelma Schoonmaker
and the disc producers at Criterion on these people ... let's not let
Tilt-Scanning get a foothold on HD video!
Kirby McDaniel
www.movieart.net
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