The mother of all aspect ratio throwdowns, starring Jean-Pierre Léaud and Chantal Goya

No Comments

• Oliver_C says:

  July 18, 2012 at 9:54 am

  One aspect-ratio issue which did both­er me was Werner Herzog, in ‘Grizzly Man’, crop­ping Timothy Treadwell’s ori­gin­al 4:3 video foot­age for widescreen instead of simply pil­lar­box­ing it.

• Petey says:

  July 18, 2012 at 10:49 am

  Thank you for that, Glenn.
  Not just utterly apro­pos to the moment, but also a scene that made me EXCEEDINGLY giddy when I first saw it in a dark cinema.
  (Has any­one ever noticed that Godard had a damn good run in the ’60’s? Sometimes I think the sug­ar cube in the cof­fee in 2 ou 3 choses is the single greatest sequence in the his­tory of cinema. He’s like the fuck­ing Beatles.)

• Petey says:

  July 18, 2012 at 11:13 am

  “One aspect-ratio issue which did both­er me was Werner Herzog, in ‘Grizzly Man’, crop­ping Timothy Treadwell’s ori­gin­al 4:3 video foot­age for widescreen instead of simply pil­lar­box­ing it.”
  Disagree.
  Using inter­mit­tent pil­lar­box­ing can have down­sides by tak­ing you out of the cinema exper­i­ence. There are times when you need it, espe­cially if you’re show­ing some­thing really meant to sig­ni­fy old TV broad­casts or old home movies, of course.
  But I would have made the same decision that Herzog did. The immer­sion is a big­ger factor than dis­rupt­ing the integ­rity of the doc­u­ment­ary video.

• Richard says:

  July 18, 2012 at 11:22 am

  One of David Bordwell’s best posts con­cerns aspect ratio in Late Godard:
  http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2007/12/14/godard-comes-in-many-shapes-and-sizes/
  The gist is that the movies come from the lab marked 1.66 or 1.85. But they simply look much bet­ter at 1.37 or even 1.33. So James Quandt wrote Godard, who con­firmed 1.66. (Compare Polanski on Rosemary’s Baby). Then, how­ever, Godard turned around and did a piece for Cahiers basic­ally say­ing that to pro­ject Notre Musique at 1.66 or 1.85 would be the mor­al equi­val­ent of bomb­ing Sarajevo.
  What are you gonna do? The dir­ect­or’s word isn’t final. Neither is it unim­port­ant. Deep in the heart of Wells’ obnox­iously phrased post was the germ of an idea: that Rosemary’s Baby looks good, to him, at some­thing oth­er than 1.85. That could have been the start of an inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion. Wells made that impossible, alas.
  Anyway, the Bordwell post is really good.

• Oliver_C says:

  July 18, 2012 at 11:58 am

  Entirely IMHO Petey, but per­son­ally I like the way (for example) ‘F for Fake’ mixes unashamedly grainy 16mm with Welles’ crystal-clear talking-head shots. Or in ‘Winnebago Man’, cut­ting from 1980s, nth-generation VHS foot­age of Jack Rebney to his present-day self, older but no mel­low­er, filmed in HD. (Can’t recall if the young­er Rebney appeared pil­lar­boxed, though; will rewatch.)
  When a doc­u­ment­ary addresses dif­fer­ent lay­ers and levels of present­a­tion and rep­res­ent­a­tion, I find it them­at­ic­ally appro­pri­ate and cine­mat­ic­ally reward­ing to mani­fest, indeed emphas­ize, those dif­fer­ences visually.

• christian says:

  July 18, 2012 at 12:36 pm

  Jeff Wells is the Tea Party of film blog­gers now.

• Josh Z says:

  July 18, 2012 at 2:39 pm

  IIRC, Godard also changed his mind on Alphaville. The Criterion Laserdisc is let­ter­boxed to ~1.66:1, but the later Criterion DVD is 4:3 per Godard’s insistence.

• John M says:

  July 18, 2012 at 3:08 pm

  “Has any­one ever noticed that Godard had a damn good run in the ’60’s?”
  A few people have.

• David Ehrenstein says:

  July 18, 2012 at 5:37 pm

  He’s STILL the champ!
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkAfrKFt6nI&feature=player_embedded

• David Ehrenstein says:

  July 19, 2012 at 1:29 pm

  “A col­league has made me aware of the dis­cus­sion under way here, and while it amuses me bey­ond meas­ure, I feel under the oblig­a­tion to schol­ars and in defence of my mag­ni­fi­cent friends at Criterion to set the mat­ters aright. “Rosemary’s Baby” is being released by Criterion in 1.85:1 because that is the aspect ratio I dir­ec­ted the film to have, because that is the aspect ratio that I prefer, and because that is the aspect ratio I insisted upon. While there was pro­tec­tion in the film­ing for the pos­sib­il­ity of inad­vert­ent pro­jec­tion at 1.66:1, it was nev­er my inten­tion to allow such pro­jec­tion if I could main­tain con­trol of the cir­cum­stance of pro­jec­tion. This film is and will always be prop­erly framed at 1.85:1. And Mr. Wells, while I admire your sense of right­eous fury, let me say to you that I know a little bit about fas­cism, and dis­agree­ing with you is not the hall­mark. However, your response to dis­agree­ment looks famil­i­ar. Polanski”
  Slow cur­tain. The end.

• JF says:

  July 20, 2012 at 12:17 am

  The last time I saw M‑F I found myself think­ing primar­ily about how dif­fer­ent it is visu­ally from the ones that sur­round it. Without the com­ic book styl­iz­a­tion of his work with Coutard, a kin­et­ic ten­sion devel­ops between the nat­ur­al­ism of the images and the Godardian hijinks. It’s like watch­ing Godard infilt­rate a Truffaut movie.
  The gender polit­ics give me a mild head­ache, though. The prot­ag­on­ist does devel­op a degree of self-awareness about the way he deals with the women in the movie but I’m not sure that com­pletely mit­ig­ates the fact that they’re all more or less depic­ted as vap­id slaves to con­sumer culture.

• Petey says:

  July 23, 2012 at 10:53 am

  “He’s STILL the champ!”
  Meh. He’s still a con­tender, and I still hap­pily trek to his new movies, but I think the last time he was the champ was Soigné ta droite.
  (Polanski is so impress­ive to me because he’s actu­ally improved as he’s reached an advanced age, which def­in­itely is not the norm with directors.)