A filmmaker’s frame is one of the most important tools in their arsenal. Why mess with it?

There are many ways in which films can be messed with during the journey from the editing bay to the small screen. Watching a film like Die Hard on TV in the 1990′s was a very different experience from watching it today for instance. Now I don’t refer to the size of TV sets with smaller CRT units being the norm back in the day, nor the relative lack of home cinema equipment available to the average consumer in the days of VHS. What I’m talking about is how the actual film was often changed. One of the most famous examples of this is the “melon-farmer” approach, replacing strong language with alternative words, often dubbed over by people faking the original actor’s voice, so that the film can be shown at an earlier time (or maybe not) and generally will lead to less complaints regarding the transmission of the film. While purists complained about this, most audiences didn’t and indeed today even the most fanatical film fans can look back on that age and wonder at just how quaint it was (although this does happen today on the odd occasion).

One thing that the majority didn’t even notice though was the process of “panning & scanning”, wherein a film’s frame is tampered with to fit it inside the strict confines of the standard size of TV which until the early 2000′s was around 4×3. Virtually every film sold on VHS and shown on TV will have been messed with somehow. This became a real bone of contention for many filmmakers, perhaps most famously Woody Allen who had it written into his contract that one of his many masterpieces Manhattan could only ever be sold in the scope aspect ratio in which it was conceived. While Original Aspect Ratio (OAR) versions of films were available on VHS, they were much harder to get hold of and often more expensive. Things started to change however, with the advent of DVD which enabled either the studio to include both P&S and OAR versions of films in the same package, or with the increasing use of domestic widescreen TV’s, finally start switching people over to OAR as the default way of watching a film. There was much resistance to this at first, I remember working in a Safeway supermarket at 17 years old and having to explain the difference between different versions of Harry Potter and trying to convince people who bought the Widescreen version that it really was the best way to go. Most of the time though the “why are there massive black bars on the TV” argument won out, a checkout assistant can only go so far…

You don’t have to just take my word for it to see how this can mess with a film though. Nope, now you can just go on Netflix! The UK service which launched a few weeks back has already become a bit of an essential staple in my filmwatching but there’s a huge problem. Go check out Donnie Brasco, go on do it now. The start of the film sees the opening credits with all the faces of the main players being shown and the credits coming up in a lovely “scope” frame, so far so good. But then the film moves from “Directed by Mike Newell” to me exclaiming “what the fuck is this?” very quickly as the image is cropped to make what is known as a “flat” image (around 1.85:1 or so) so that if you’re watching on a normal TV, the whole frame is being used with no black bars on the top or the bottom. Some of you may say, “Great, I don’t really want those black bars anyway when I’ve already got a widescreen TV”. To you people I say Let Uncle Loring tell you why you’re wrong.

The choice of a flat or scope frame is never exactly an arbitrary decision. Yes, it could be argued that using a scope frame makes a film, no matter how low-budget, feel inherently more cinematic, but for any filmmaker worth their salt, they and their cinematographer will consider what frame to use in conjunction with what kind of film they are shooting and what they want to show us. While John Carpenter is famous for insisting on only using scope ever in his theatrically released films, something which due to the added equipment costs increased the budget of Halloween significantly back in the 1970′s, but not all directors adhere to this template. Steven Spielberg has used a mix of formats all throughout his career, and not just in the way that could be expected. Aspect ratios are chosen for specific purposes, to enable a presentation which the filmmakers want us to see a film portrayed, is this not just a tad important?

Now, back to Donnie Brasco. Once you know the film is supposed to be presented in scope, it will never stop bugging you. Many scenes are played out between Pacino and Depp, often in cars and everything looks… well, cramped. Instead of looking like a camera’s been placed on the bonnet and we’ve got a lovely wide frame showing the space between them in the car, they instead look like they are being filmed in a rather too intimate way which I just know Mike Newell did not intend. There are many scenes which play out feeling too tight, like the attention is being paid a little too much to certain things which aren’t intended. It just feels wrong.

Moving away from this specific example, as well as just general cropping and zooming which this process will have to do, there are examples of artificial movement taking place within a shot. In Fox’s excellent 2-disc DVD of Die Hard released years back, there is a feature where director John McTiernan takes you through a sequence both in the proper scope ratio and then what happens to it while being “formatted for TV” as they used to say. In this, if characters are at two edges of the frame, an artificial cut to another character or pan across the room will be inserted to make the visuals and the audio make some sort of sense together. Sometimes even this isn’t even done though, look at any old VHS copy of Dario Argento’s Deep Red and the full frame version will see a conversation between two men seemingly all coming from a water fountain in Rome, the two actors at the edge of the scope frame with the fountain in the shot in the original composition and as no one bothered to alter it, a scene plays out for minutes where without context you’d have no idea what was happening.

All of this may seem like it’s picky, pedantic and just plain nerdy but if you are going to make the effort of sitting down and concentrating on a film for a couple of hours at a time, don’t you want to know that the version you’re seeing is the one the filmmaking team behind the effort actually wanted you to see? It’s an insult to the technicians who crafted and released the thing you’re watching if it’s not treated correctly and frankly, it isn’t good enough.

My worry is that this does seem to be getting worse, and hence why I am writing this now. Netflix over the last few weeks has annoyed me with this, and while I don’t blame them entirely, they deal with what they are given by the people providing the material, it’s interesting to note that I can’t remember having this kind of issue with something coming from the Lovefilm Player, or at least the “major” releases that particular Player provides.

However this also seems to be creeping into TV again. While some channels still don’t treat films correctly, the ITV ones are still notorious for never showing films in scope, FilmFour, one of the UK’s leading film speciality channels if not THE leading, also has apparently started slipping. I remember when you used to have to pay for FilmFour but back in those days they had some rather more adventurous programming than now, foreign films were usually always subtitled, there were no ad breaks during films and they were one of the first mainstream providers of OAR content. The direct thing which made me write this article however was a tweet from the Cinematographer behind, funnily enough a FilmFour co-financed film Kill List, Laurie Rose, who pointed out that a showing of The Piano a couple of days ago was being presented in the wrong aspect ratio. And during the channel’s self-named “Great Directors” season no less. Again, they deal with what they are given , and indeed this could be a one-off, but this example and what Netflix UK has started showing is a concern to me.

Netflix is pretty much inherently designed for film fans. People who want to discover new films or see old favourites in the way that is intended. Say what you want about the death of physical media but 99 times out of 100, the film on the Blu-Ray or DVD will be the one the director wants shown, in both content and presentation. We need to fight for this to stay that way when it comes to new media, and tried and tested TV channels too. Colourisation, re-dubbed dialogue and TV edits used to be the bane of the film fan’s life. For this fan, I’ve got a re-emerging bane and that is the incorrect presentation of a film’s frame on screen.

Geeky, yes. Pedantic? Some may see so. Absolutely bloody essential? Fuck yes.