Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by Bruce from DC (i) on April 30, 2001 at 11:46:51

In Reply to: You had me up until The Maltese Falcon bit. posted by john dem on April 30, 2001 at 01:53:47:

Umm, well, I guess you and I are looking at different things. To be honest, I'm not much of a connoiseur of B&W image quality in movies; although as a still photographer for 35 years, I much prefer to work in B&W. Certainly, I agree with you that film will render a much better gray scale than a transfer to video. It's just that I never paid much attention to that.

The reason I selected "Falcon" as an example, is that the movie has an intimate, close -- almost claustrophobic -- quality. A reduction in screen and image size does not violence to that, IMHO. By contrast, any number of B&W westerns, for example, would suffer from image size reduction. Part of the motif that needs to be allowed to work is the "big sky" feeling. You need a big picture to convey that.

Much more recently, I saw "Crouching Tiger" in the theater and was completely entranced. I'm pretty sure it would suffer when it's reduced to video-sized screen.