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THE THING (1982) in 4k digital and the nature of image quality

Posted by Daniel Metz

Since the beginning of the cinema, whenever we watched movies from the past they have always been in deteriorated forms.

In the earliest days of the medium, nitrate prints of old movies were hauled out of make-shift storage facilities for re-examination. This practice was occasionally done in the silent era, but really picked up in the 1930s. With the creation in the 1930s of the Museum of Modern Art’s film library, the Cinémathèque française and the British Film Institute’s National Film Library, repertory film began to be a real force in cinema exhibition here and abroad.

While these efforts greatly aided the preservation of moving images, it still remained true that these films had deteriorated over time, displaying scratches and the occasional broken/missing frames.

Soon after, MoMA started distributing films in 16mm to cineclubs and schools/universities in the US, and the smaller gauge format took off in many circles. Again, we have image degradation as the 35mm image was shrunk down to a smaller size and then blown up and grainy in projection.

Theatres continued showing classic films, and in the postwar era the practice picked up considerably. Films like Dracula, Gone With the Wind, The Birth of a Nation and others were having rep screenings in art houses and neighborhood theatres in the 1940s and ’50s.

In the 1950s, as television was growing in prominence, old movies began to find a new home on the tube. Films like The Wizard of Oz and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfsplayed on independent stations and the networks, and by the 1960s programs like “NBC Saturday Night at the Movies” were showing both old and semi-recent films on a regular basis; the legendary “late shows,” specializing in B films played late at night, also helped this trend tremendously.

Image quality deteriorated still further, especially in the black and white TV days but even through to higher resolution in the ’70s. The dramatically smaller screen size, the choppy analog broadcast signal, and the conversion of film frames to analog frequencies displayed picture and color problems in addition to scan line/frame rate variances.

Even worse, and I am almost reluctant to discuss this because it sickens me so much, sometimes television broadcasts of films were edited for time and content, removing/censoring controversial scenes and shortening them to neatly fit into programming blocks. They were also intercut with commercials. Furthermore, widescreen movies were often squeezed together or chopped on the sides (and occasionally panned and scanned) to fit into the 4:3 aspect ratios of standard televisions.

In the 1970s and ’80s, new technologies emerged to bring old movies into the home. VHS, Beta, and Laserdisc were among the more popular formats. Obviously, this tech dramatically altered the old movie experience for human beings. Suddenly, we could watch (many) films from our past whenever we wanted, at home, with great ease.

Of course, the price was a reduction of image quality from the 35mm originals. These analog video technologies relied on scan lines to display information, resulting in an unrealistic image reproduction. Video was also (generally) displayed in 29.97 frames per second (25 in many European and Asian countries), a small increase from 35mm’s standard 24 frames. Further, unfortunately, many videos were, like television broadcasts, made in “fullscreen” pan and scan versions, compromising the original aspect ratio.

Another very important thing to note about analog video is the high deterioration rate. As years go by and repeated plays occur, the image continues to get worse, often resulting in very washed up, glitchy images.

These were the basic elements of old movie viewing, and they have continued to improve. Digital technology has provided us with high-definition digital TV, DVDs and Blu-Rays. Digital imagery is generally based on pixels rather than scan lines, and that is a great improvement but continues to not reflect the frame-by-frame look of celluloid. These technologies look better than any TV or video has ever looked, but there still remain some color and image issues, especially related to the compression of video signals.

This little history lesson should hopefully drill down a point which is not made as often as it might be: our experience of watching old movies, “films from the archive,” “classics,” or any other euphemism for those dusty dream reels, is always hindered by time. There is a physical, surface level defection with every movie we watch that is not a new release. This is a reality we live with. This is a reality we are comfortable with.

When we go to Weird Wednesday or Terror Tuesday, we are saying faded, scratched up prints that are often missing reel-end frames. Most of the times, the films are pink with age. We watch these films and our experience of them is affected by their apparent agedness.

We engage with them as artifacts rather than as new-cultural possibilities, and it is the films’ surface-level degradation that clues us into its historicity. Yes, the clothing, language, scenarios and other cultural clues inform us of a film’s archival qualities, but the specificity of these types of signifiers give us a different historical awareness, one more steeped in cultural mores than a broad retrospective perspective.

So, the Alamo Drafthouse has begun a series they are calling “Digital Classics” as part of a gesture by Universal (parent company: GE, who don’t seem to produce any digital projectors or own any companies who do, a very curious fact…) digitizing its collection in the latest state-of-the-art technology. The Drafthouse’s language on this new series:

Seeing how a crystal clear digital cinema image can enhance the modern movie-going experience, we wondered what it could do for revisiting the classics. Well, thanks to our pals at Universal Entertainment, more and more or our favorite Big Screen Classics are being restored and made available to theaters as DCPs – Digital Cinema Packages – providing the best possible image quality at the highest resolution. We’ve seen ‘em all before in 35mm and love every, single frame…but we think our minds are about to be blown.

The Thing, the John Carpenter horror/sci-fi film, was the first entry of this DCP series. Next week we will have Animal House, and the following week, DePalma’s Scarface.

The choice of films is something we may want to discuss at a later date. The options are three of five thus far digitized by Universal; Kubrick’s Spartacus and The Blues Brothers are also available, and a couple of Hitchcock’s films now owned by Universal are to follow (Psycho, The Birds, etc.).

This 4K digital projection is the most advanced digital cinema technology we’ve currently got. The resolution, as the name suggests, is 4096×2160 pixels. Whatever that means, it looks really good. Sitting in the theatre this past Thursday night, the only thing I could think of was how wonderful the film really looked. Here is a film that is twenty-eight years old, yet the crispness of the image, the spotlessness of the surface, is impeccable. It looks as good as a film released today.

And that’s just the thing: this new technology offers us the first opportunity we’ve ever had at watching old movies in a condition that is, for the human eye, indistinguishable from that of a new film. Yes, we see and hear the 1980s signifiers, and we see the filmmaking style that is very much a product of that decade, but for all we know this film could be a historical recreation a la House of the Devil or Hot Tub Time Machine.

What effect is this going to have on our understanding of older cinema? All of my life, and all of your life, we have experienced old movies in the ways I have discussed above – scratched, compressed, squeezed, small, faded, pink and sometimes even with commercials. We’ve now got a way to see the movies as they were “originally intended.” But, is that a good thing?

Is it healthy to see a film that looks brand new when it isn’t? Is this going to contribute to a deterioration of culture through the condensation of history?

I guess I’ll find out when I see Animal House next week.

For a proper review of The Thing, check out Stephen’s post.