What with all the online controversy about the new Blu Ray disc of Franklin J. Schaffner’s Patton, I was finally motivated to check out the thing myself the other night. Got up to the intermission point, almost. It was, to my eye, pretty much the scrubbed-clean digital nightmare described by film restoration maven Robert A. Harris in his 6/23/08 column over at The Digital Bits; seriously, anyone who believes that this thing faithfully reproduces the clarity and detail of a 70MM film image needs quite a bit more than an eye test.
But hey, that’s just my opinion, right? I would like to state, however, an absolute fact, which is that at one point in the film the image nauseated me. Literally. As in, gave me an experience of I dunno what—vertigo, perhaps—that made me feel sick to my stomach.
The shot is in the scene between Patton’s slapping of a shell-shocked soldier and his beating British General Montgomery to Messina. It’s a brief rendezvous between Patton (George C. Scott) and Omar Bradley (Karl Malden). The opening shot of the scene follows Patton’s jeep as it goes up an incline, turns left, climbs another incline and then makes a right into a plaza. The camera appears to be on a crane following. The shot goes from 1:27:57 to 1:28:21. Here’s a section from it:
Now at this point in the shot the camera is still moving to the right, following the jeep (which here has just straightened out) along. But the camera and the jeep are not moving at the same speed. And to make it worse, in this high-definition digital video rendering, the white buildings behind the plaza seemed to be moving as well—also at a different speed than the camera and the jeep. I’ve looked at the shot several times and the effect on me is always the same—a moment of dizzyness followed by queasiness.
I know why this is happening—the picture has been translated into data, and lost its solidity. But if anyone reading has a more detailed technical explanation, please chime in in the comments. In the meantime, I wonder if Fox would consider putting a “May Induce Nausea” warning sticker on the disc, the way Ken Jacobs and theater producers have to put up warnings about the use of strobing effects…
Ah, the dark side of hi-def. I find stories like this really interesting, because more is not always better.
What is this ‘more’ you refer to?
I think you thoroughly misunderstood the thrust of Glenn’s post, Liz: this is not about “more,” this is about “less”–about the format not being used to its potential, dumbed-down for gamers and home-theatre-in-a-box types. I would recommend reading the link provided, even if Robert Harris writes in an annoying Haiku-style (or at least has been edited to read that way).
Not to try to speak for Liz, but the claims made by the High-Definition format give rise to some semantic confusion. Blu-Ray does promise “more,” and in the “Patton” case it certainly does deliver “more”—in terms of brightness, color, and a particular brand of vividness. It delivers that “more” however, by SUBTRACTING the film grain—and the important picture detail actually contained in that grain. All this is indeed conveyed in Harris’ piece.
Hey, this is all pretty abstract without knowing who’s been giving the positive reviews and without visual evidence (at least I can’t tell from your frame, Glenn).
1. Does anyone have some links (or hints) as to who these “eye candy folks” (as RAH refers to them) are?
2. Are there any screen captures that can show this? Not to impugn RAH, the man is clearly a restoration ace, but his article is pretty cryptic (I assume not to offend unnamed powers-that-be in the studios), and, you know, I’d like to see for myself what the image looks like.
3. Wait–I just checked at DVDBeaver (http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film2/DVDReviews37/patton_blu-ray.htm), and Leonard Norwitz (at least it wasn’t Gary) rates it highly!?! Does this mean I can no longer trust the Beav? Say it ain’t so!
No, obviously the frame’s not gonna tell you anything—it’s the motion within the shot that created the effect I describe. I was hoping someone else who’d seen the Blu-Ray would chime in; hopefully that’ll happen.
I don’t know if it’s a matter of trust, but from what I can tell Norwitz seems a lot more partial to very showy Blu-Rays than Gary does. That dreaded subjectivity again.
Here’s another very positive review of the disc:
http://bluray.highdefdigest.com/1341/patton.html
It can’t be emphasized too much that a lot of this depends on the monitor one watches the disc on. As RAH points out in his piece, watching the Blu-Ray disc on two different monitors felt like watching two different discs. The phenomenon I describe in my post, from a viewing on a 50-inch plasma, might not have occured while viewing a 40-inch or smaller screen.
O brave new world, that has such issues in it!
I think Liz’s comment is a semantic puzzlebox, but “touché” anyway. HiDef talk sure does make me cranky, I think because it’s like GROUNDHOG DAY for someone who was an early adopter of LaserDisc, DVD, and now Blu-ray.
Apropos John’s comment, I notice one prominent next-gen review website that praised the PATTON transfer up down and sideways went offline roughly around the time Harris posted his article. Surely a coincidence, but notable just the same. I myself irresponsibly endorsed it in an unrelated review having only sampled the opening speech; it really is a weirdass transfer, but 65mm is still innately crisper and less grainy than 35mm, and I don’t think the difference if/when Fox gets around to remastering it is going to be night and day.
In my defense, I was tired.
Glenn basically nailed what I was trying to say. I guess there’s no single quality of hi-def that can be properly described as “more,” but metaphorically the saying still works. Blu-Ray expects us to believe that it is better simply because it’s cleaner and crisper, but this is not always true, particularly with older films. I’ve heard Dawn of the Dead looks terrible.
Bill, I agree that this is about the format being used badly, but I think your use of the phrase “semantic puzzlebox” is, in itself, a semantic puzzlebox. Whoa. Dude.
Anyway, I didn’t mean to spur so much discussion of the meaning of my silly little comment. Carry on.