"Nunsense," or, "In the pink," or "Getting to be a habit with me," or, OK I'll stop...

So. I was get­ting ready to retire the oth­er night, as I’ve got­ten to be a bit of an early-to-bed-and-early-to-rise type of late, and I thought before that I’d check out the com­ments threads over at the olé blog and see if any­thing new had come under the transom, and I find that on the thread for “Digital Archery” there’s a ques­tion from esteemed laser disc and DVD assessor Doug Pratt, and the ques­tion is, “What did you think of the pink out­lines around the white nun­’s habits in Black Narcissus?” And my first reac­tion is a more, erm, Christian vari­ant of “Oy gevalt.” My second reac­tion is “Is that a trick ques­tion?” And if not, well, what am I sup­posed to think of the pink out­lines? I’m guess­ing that I’m not sup­posed to approve of them. Well, I’m not going to start invest­ig­at­ing the issue right now. It’ll wait until tomorrow. 

And the next morn­ing I got up and decided, first off, to stop being so para­noid. For heav­en’s sake. And I got out the standard-definition DVD of the new Criterion edi­tion of Black Narcissus and threw it on the com­puter. And it did not take me long to find the pink out­line of which Mr. Pratt speaks. 

Now under­stand, that when Pratt or oth­er mavens dis­cuss things such as pink out­lines, they don’t neces­sar­ily mean things that look like force fields that attach them­selves to mov­ing objects and so on. No, such observ­ers are detail men. So below, a screen cap­ture in which the dis­cussed pink out­line is at its most evident.

For those of you who might be ask­ing “what pink out­line?” see the cropped detail­ing at left. That pink out­line. And now that we’ve estab­lished what the pink out­line is, we have to ask, well, just what is it? Usually, shim­mer­ing halo effects around out­lined fig­ures in DVD images are accoun­ted for by over­use or mis­use of DNR, for Digital Noise Reduction, the tech­no­logy that’s used to “clean up” per­ceived film grain, cut down on actu­al video noise, which is some­thing else entirely, and increase sharp­ness. Much has been writ­ten about how over-cleaning film grain actu­ally reduces detail, and how you end up with a false sharp­ness, a big bright shiny DVD or Blu-ray image that has less pic­ture inform­a­tion than what these ostens­ibly increased-definition formats are hyping. 

Those who fol­low the formats also know that Criterion is hardly a com­pany known for slath­er­ing a lot of DNR on its releases, and that it has a “let grain be” policy that’s earned the ire of…oh, hell, I’m not even gonna go there. The main point is that, first off, the anom­aly is not likely to be the res­ult of DNR because pre­ced­ent strongly sug­gests that would­n’t be the case, but more import­antly, because the anom­aly does­n’t look like a DNR arti­fact. The pink outlining—which, I should point out here, is not a con­stant prob­lem, as the screen cap some grafs below demonstrates—is more sol­id, more con­stant than a DNR halo would be; it does­n’t have that mad­den­ing shim­mery quality. 

My sus­pi­cion was that the anom­aly was a sort of hol­d­over from the Technicolor pro­cess itself, but I could not put my fin­ger on it. So I thought to con­sult my rebbe on such mat­ters, Robert A. Harris, the film pre­ser­va­tion and res­tor­a­tion expert, maes­tro in both the­ory and prac­tice. I recall being in the Manhattan theat­er back in the day, at an event at which the cine­ma­to­graph­er Jack Cardiff spoke, and Harris ask­ing if the lav­ender tint that suf­fused the print that Criterion had used for its laser disc of Black Narcissus was sup­posed to be there, and Cardiff say­ing no, it most cer­tainly was­n’t. It seemed to me at that moment new ground was broken in terms of the director-or-cinematographer-approved home incarn­a­tion of a film, a wel­come devel­op­ment even if it did open a whole new can of worms (see Vittorio Storaro and aspect ratios). I know his­tor­ic­ally I’m prob­ably off on that. But I insist that the moment got the ball rolling that led to the largely excel­lent ver­sion of Black Narcissus we have today. 

I e‑mailed Mr. Harris and asked what he made of the pink thing. And his answer made me say, “Of course.” Here is some of what he wrote to me: “First, Black Narcissus, as opposed to The Red Shoes, was com­pos­ited ana­logue; pre­sum­ably going from the ori­gin­al negs to an interpositive…Keep in mind that three-strip Technicolor was not three fully ‘direct-to-emulsion’ dif­fer­ing expos­ures, but rather two, with the third expos­ure, what’s called the cyan record (which con­trols red), being exposed through the base of anoth­er record—and ALWAYS SLIGHTLY OUT OF FOCUS!” (Going into even more detail about pro­cesses, he points out, “the bi-pack pair were emul­sion to emul­sion, with the image first expos­ing the yel­low record, and then the cyan, with cyan—always—in slightly soft focus.This would nev­er have been noticed via dye trans­fer print­ing, and espe­cially with the optics in use at the time.”)

This is why his obser­va­tion that Black Narcissus was com­pos­ited ana­logue is so cru­cial to the ques­tion. Because while digit­al tech­no­logy can be a very hurt­ful thing when used incor­rectly, it can also be an incred­ibly valu­able tool to make vari­ous fixes. Harris notes: “If one is com­pos­it­ing the records digit­ally, the cyan (red inform­a­tion) can be slightly sharpened, re-sized, etc., toward a bet­ter fit.What we’re see­ing [with the pink out­lines around the habits] may be either that cyan record prob­lem, or just as pos­sible, optic­al aber­ra­tions with­in either the cam­era prism sys­tem, or the tak­ing optics them­selves.” Thus, Harris con­cludes, the new Narcissus could have done with some digit­al tweak­ing, as was used by Warner in its recent res­tor­a­tion of Gone With The Wind. “Or,” Harris adds, “more to the case, the new Robert Gitt/UCLA/MPI res­tor­a­tion of The Red Shoes,” the basis of the new Criterion stand­ard def and Blu-ray editions.

Is my enjoy­ment of the new Black Narcissus spoiled by these fruits from the tree of know­ledge? I can­’t say it is. What is enhanced, rather, is my appre­ci­ation of there almost always being room for improve­ment in these matters.