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Originally Posted by KubrickFan
Actually, the producers wouldn't let him shoot it anamorphically, so according to your terms, he now has a right to change it. In fact, there are probably many things he couldn't do, due to budget issues or whatever. Not every movie (I think the majority) comes out the way the director exactly wants it to be, let alone satisfy everyone who sees it. You don't like grain, that's a preference nobody can do anything about. That doesn't mean they should remove it when it's thicker than tolerable for you.
Also, claiming what a director might have wanted is useless, since both Wilder and Welles have been long dead. So, isn't it better to leave the film as it is, then?
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The thing is, for the grain-purists, either it's a mucky-muck grain experience, grain the size of crushed gravel, and glory-be-to-God for that raw, Iraqi-sandstorm effect...or it's the arid, video-game hell of the
Patton Blu-Ray. No in-between -- it's "give me librium, or give me meth." There
is an in-between, and it can look beautiful. It can look sublime.
If Lowry Digital's John Lowry had been allowed to allowed to moderately de-granulate
The Third Man, it would have made for a very significant difference. But no...the grain-purists are like mad, inbred, brown-robed monks living in a secluded abbey in the French mountains. Purity! Purity above all!
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Originally Posted by Chaka
I understand your point but there will always be a debate about is it art or just entertainment. Where do you draw the line? Should you preserve and clean or digitally alter what is left because the director didn't originally want grain. Should we add color to B&W films because it is obvious that the directors saw things in color? Should Lucas keep altering and adding to his trilogy because its a constant work in progress?
The HD revolution has made certain movies and shows look amazing where its so much better than what we were used to its damn right distracting at first glance. With this comes expectations that everything can look that good which I think is very misleading to some.
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You bring up some good points, although in the case of film grain, I think there probably exists a reasonable compromise-zone between how a film was originally exhibited, versus what their directors likely would've
wanted their movies to look like, if they'd had high-grade film stock, etc., available to them at the time.
This issue has only come to the fore with Blu-Ray technology, because now you can visually see the grain much more clearly. I popped in an eight-year-old
Dr. Strangelove DVD the other day, and was shocked at how much grainier it looks on my 52-inch Sony plasma, than on my four-year-old, 36" Sony analog flatscreen.
High-def, in short, is exposing the granular reality of how these films look more than ever before. In the exact same way that the most recent digital mastering of George Pal's
War of the Worlds ('53) exposed the wires holding up the Martian spaceships, for example. Only an oddball like DVD Talk's Glenn Erickson would say that seeing the wires is an okay thing. ("There was no CG wire removal in 1953," Erickson wrote in '05, "and it would be detrimental revisionism to change the picture now, [so just] learn to live with it.")
The wires obviously weren't
intended to ever be seen, and the obvious remedy is to go into the current transfer and digitally remove them -- simple. (And perhaps retain the original, unaltered version for the purists out there.) That's all I'm talking about, in general. Remove the stuff from older films that distracts the viewer from the dream-state that movies are supposed to lull you into. Because grain is the worst waker-upper of all.