Of interest:
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From [log in to unmask] Wed May  7 12:41:36 2003
Subject: DVD films: Everybody Gets a Cut

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/04/magazine/04DVDS.html?ex=1053113335&ei=
1&en=94795b0b509fe084

Everybody Gets a Cut

The New York Times
May 4, 2003
By TERRENCE RAFFERTY

A kiss, all moviegoers know, is just a kiss, and a sigh, by
the same inexorable logic, is just a sigh, but I'm starting
to wonder whether in the age of the DVD a movie -- even one
as indelibly stamped on the collective memory as
''Casablanca'' -- can ever again be just a movie. The DVD's
that have been piling up in the vicinity of my TV seem to
be telling me that a movie is not a movie unless it arrives
swaddled in ''extras'': on-set documentaries, retrospective
interviews with cast and crew, trailers, deleted scenes,
storyboards, even alternate endings. These days, any film
for which a studio's marketing department has sufficiently
high commercial expectations is issued on DVD in a
''special'' or ''limited'' or ''collector's'' edition that
makes an Arden Shakespeare look skimpy by comparison. The
extras on the new double-disc Director's Edition of Brett
Ratner's ''Red Dragon'' include such indispensable material
as hair and wardrobe tests and one of the auteur's N.Y.U.
student films, and take as long to watch as the movie
itself. We all, in our 21st-century paradise of leisure,
have too much time on our hands. But not that much.

Should some scholar of the future be insane enough to take
an interest in ''Red Dragon,'' however, the annotated
variorum edition of this deeply mediocre picture could be
useful. And the as-yet unborn author of ''Unfaithful
Cinema: The Art of Adrian Lyne'' (2040) will need to
consult the Special Collector's Edition DVD of ''Fatal
Attraction,'' which contains the film's original ending as
well as the one moviegoers saw. It also includes the
director's own helplessly revealing comment on the radical
difference between the conclusion he chose and the one he
discarded: ''You can make up your mind which you like
better.''

I've always thought it was the artist's job to make that
sort of decision, but as I watched Lyne smugly leaving it
up to the viewer, I realized with a jolt that I had fallen
behind the times. I still think of a film as a unified,
self-sufficient artifact that, by its nature, is not
interactive in the way that, say, a video game is. To my
old-media mind, the viewer ''interacts'' with a movie just
as he or she interacts with any other work of art -- by
responding to it emotionally, thinking about it, analyzing
it, arguing with it, but not by altering it fundamentally.
When I open my collected Yeats to read ''Among School
Children,'' I don't feel disappointed, or somehow
disempowered, to find its great final line (''How can we
tell the dancer from the dance?'') unchanged, unchanged
utterly, and unencumbered with an ''alternate.'' For all I
know, Yeats might have written ''How can we tell the tailor
from the pants?'' and then thought better of it, but I'm
not sure how having the power to replace the ''dance''
version with the ''pants'' version would enhance my
experience of the poem.

And although ''Among School Children'' is divided into
eight numbered stanzas and therefore provides what DVD's
call ''scene access,'' I tend to read them consecutively,
without skipping, on the theory that the poem's meaning is
wholly dependent on this specific, precise arrangement of
words and images. If you read ''Among School Children'' in
any other way, would it still be ''Among School Children''?
Would it be a poem at all?

The contemporary desire for interactivity in the experience
of art derives, obviously, from the heady sense of control
over information to which we've become accustomed as users
of computers. The problem with applying that model to works
of art is that in order to get anything out of them, you
have to accept that the artist, not you, is in control of
this particular package of ''information.'' And that's the
paradox of movies on DVD: the digital format tries to make
interactive what is certainly the least interactive, most
controlling art form in human history.

When you're sitting in a movie theater, the film is in
absolute, despotic control of your senses. It tells you
where to look and for how long, imposes its own inarguable
and unstoppable rhythm, and your options for interaction
are pretty severely limited. You can wise off quietly to
your companion or loudly at the screen, or, in extremis,
you can walk out, but nothing you can do, short of storming
the projection booth, will affect the movie itself: it
rolls on serenely without you, oblivious as the turning
world.

It's that imperious, take-it-or-leave-it quality that, in
the early days of cinema, aroused the suspicions of
devotees of the traditional arts, who would argue that
watching a film denied the audience some of the freedoms
available to readers -- who could set their own pace rather
than meekly submit to a rhythm imposed on them by the
creator of the work -- and to theatergoers who were at
liberty to look wherever they wanted to at the action on
stage and whose reactions could actually affect the play's
performance. Eventually, we all learned to stop worrying
and love the art form, but the skeptics and reactionaries
had a point: the techniques of film are unusually coercive,
a fact quickly grasped both by the art's early masters,
like D.W. Griffith, Fritz Lang, Sergei Eisenstein and
Alfred Hitchcock, who reveled in their ability to
manipulate the viewer's responses, and by the leaders of
totalitarian states, who recognized cinema's potential as
an instrument of propaganda.

The manipulative power of cinema is neither a good nor a
bad thing; it is what it is, and all movies partake of it
in varying degrees. The films of Jean Renoir, for example,
are markedly freer than those of Hitchcock, but the freedom
they offer is relative; although the long takes, deep focus
and improvisatory acting style of Renoir's ''Rules of the
Game'' (1939) allow the viewer's imagination more room to
roam, the director is nonetheless in complete control of
what we see and what we hear. In fact, just about the only
way a film artist can subvert his or her own authority is
by significantly limiting the use of the medium's
expressive resources, as, for example, Andy Warhol did in
the mid-60's. His eight-hour-long ''Empire'' (1964), a
single shot of the Empire State Building, with no cuts, no
camera movement and no sound, is about as uncoercive as a
film can be. It's the most interactive movie ever made.

All I'm saying, really, is that watching a film is, and
should be, an experience different from that of playing
Myst or placing an order on Amazon. I suspect that many DVD
owners use their players exactly as I do, as a way of
recreating as nearly as possible at home the experience of
seeing a film in a theater. The DVD picture is sharp, the
sound is crisp and the film is almost invariably presented
in its correct aspect ratio -- i.e., letterboxed for movies
made in wide-screen process, as all but a few since the
mid-50's have been. The DVD player is, by common consent,
the best-selling new device in consumer-electronics
history. It's said that the ''market penetration'' of DVD
players (which were introduced in 1997) into American homes
is progressing at a rate twice that of the VCR. And the
unprecedented ''penetration'' of this format cannot be
attributed solely to the Rohypnol of advertising hype; the
DVD is a distinct improvement over the videocassette, and
even over the extinct laserdisc.

But the DVD is a gift horse that demands to be looked
squarely in the mouth, because it has the potential to
change the way we see movies so profoundly that the art
form itself, which I've loved since I was a kid, is bound
to suffer. What does it mean, for example, when a director
recuts or otherwise substantially alters the
theatrical-release version of his or her film for the DVD,
as Peter Jackson did for the four-disc Special Extended
Edition of ''The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the
Ring''? This cut, half an hour longer than the film that
was shown in theaters and that sold millions of copies in
its first two-disc DVD incarnation just four months
earlier, is obviously the definitive version of
''Fellowship'': clearer, fuller, richer emotionally and
kinetically. Better late than never, I guess, but I still
felt a little cheated at having to watch this grand,
epic-scale adventure on the small screen. And don't the
hardy souls who every now and then peel themselves off
their Barcaloungers, trek to the multiplex, stand in line
for $4 sodas and dubious popcorn and then subject
themselves to the indignity of sitting in a room with
hundreds of rank strangers -- don't they deserve the best
version of the movie? At least when Steven Spielberg
re-edited and digitally rejiggered his ''E.T.: the
Extraterrestrial,'' he had the decency to give it a brief
stopover in movie theaters on the way to its final
destination as a multidisc Limited Collector's Edition DVD.

It's thoughtful of Spielberg, too, to include in the DVD
package, alongside the spiffy new ''E.T.,'' a disc
containing the original 1982 theatrical version of that
justly beloved movie, which is not only the sole extra
worth watching in the whole overstuffed grab bag of goodies
-- what viewers, I wonder, are thrilled to discover therein
a two-hour film of John Williams conducting the score at
the Shrine Auditorium? -- but is also a stern warning to
filmmakers who might be tempted to tinker with their past
work: in almost every respect the old version is better.
Although the two brief scenes Spielberg has restored to the
picture are nice, you wouldn't miss them if they weren't
there (as the filmmaker evidently didn't when he left them
on the cutting-room floor two decades ago), and the digital
removal of the guns carried by the government agents in the
original's climactic chase just seems silly.

What's most damaging to ''E.T.'' is the way Spielberg has
tampered with the movements and facial expressions of the
eponymous alien itself. A team of computer wizards has
labored mightily to make E.T. cuter -- an undertaking that,
as even those of us who admire the picture would have to
agree, has a distinct coals-to-Newcastle quality.

I'm sure most filmmakers occasionally look at their past
movies and wish they'd done one thing or another
differently, but before the rise of the DVD, they rarely
received much encouragement (i.e., financing) to roll up
their sleeves, get under the hood and fine-tune or soup up
their vintage machines. That state of affairs changed when
the consumer-electronics industry discovered, to its
delight, that many members of its affluent and highly
penetrable market could be induced to buy the same
entertainment product, with variations, over and over
again. (One day you wake up to find you have 17 ways of
listening to Elvis's ''Heartbreak Hotel.'') For movie
lovers, a new DVD Director's Cut of ''The Fellowship of the
Ring'' or ''E.T.'' or ''Apocalypse Now'' or even ''X-Men''
can be a powerful incentive to reach for the wallet yet one
more time.

The restoration of older films that were mutilated before
their theatrical release or that have suffered from
disfiguring wear and tear is, of course, welcome. There's
every reason to shell out for the DVD's of David Lean's
''Lawrence of Arabia,'' Hitchcock's ''Vertigo'' and ''Rear
Window,'' with their images and sounds, which had faded
badly over the years, now buffed by crack restorers, and
Orson Welles's baroque 1958 noir ''Touch of Evil,'' which
replaces the distributor's release cut with a version that
conforms more closely to the director's own extensive notes
on the editing of the film. (Like the new ''E.T,'' all
those restorations played briefly in theaters.) In each of
those cases, the DVD allows us to see the film as its maker
wanted it to be seen.

But most of the current mania for revision appears to be
driven by motives other than a burning desire for aesthetic
justice. It's not that I don't believe Steven Spielberg
when he says that his ''perfectionist'' impulses were what
spurred him to rework ''E.T.''; it's that I don't believe
that without the financial incentive of DVD sales he would
have given in to those impulses -- or, perhaps, felt them
at all. Although the film's 20th anniversary, last year,
supplied a pretext for revision, nothing in the finished
new version argues very strongly for its necessity. God
knows, there are DVD packages far crasser than the Limited
Collector's ''E.T.'' (For an especially pungent recent
example, see ''X-Men 1.5.'') I'm picking on Spielberg here
because he's a great filmmaker and a man who loves and
respects the history of his art; if even he can be seduced
into tampering with his own work, then the innocent-looking
little DVD is rolling us down a very steep slope indeed.

Revisiting past work is almost never a good idea for an
artist. Every work of art is the product of a specific time
and a specific place and, in the case of movies, a specific
moment in the development of film technology. Sure, any
movie made before the digital revolution could be
''improved'' technically, but the fact is that the choices
the director made within the technical constraints of the
time are the movie. It wasn't so long ago, maybe 15 years,
that filmmakers took up arms against Ted Turner and his
efforts to ''modernize'' old black-and-white films by
computer-coloring them. Colorization was an easy target,
both because the process was surpassingly ugly and because
it was inflicted on films without the consent of their
makers. But would the principle have been any different if
the colorization technology had been better, or if the
directors had somehow been persuaded to perform the evil
act themselves, on their own movies, of their own apparent
free will? If Georges Melies, the wizardly animator of
silent cinema, were alive today, would he boot up his
computer and take another crack at ''A Trip to the Moon''?
Would we think more highly of him if he did?

That's kind of where we are with DVD's today. We're all
well past the point of being shocked at the compromises
people make in the name of commerce, but I still wonder why
filmmakers have been so meekly compliant with the
encroaching revisionism and interactivity of the digital
format. For many, I suppose, it's simply a matter of taking
the bad with the good. The huge upside of the DVD, for
filmmakers, is that it makes their work widely available,
in a form that more or less accurately reflects their
intentions: they long ago learned to live with the reality
that ultimately more people would see their films on a
small screen than on a large one -- the directors of
Spielberg's generation themselves received a fair amount of
their movie education from television -- and at least on
DVD the movies aren't interrupted by commercials or
squashed into a ''full-frame'' presentation. So the
filmmakers tell themselves, I guess, that the more
insidious features of the format don't really matter: that
the making-of documentaries don't make them sound like
hucksters and blowhards; that the deleted scenes and
alternate endings don't subtly impinge on the formal unity
of the work; that all the revisions and digital tweaks they
agree to don't undermine the historical integrity of the
picture; that voice-over commentaries don't drown the movie
in a torrent of useless information; that scene access
doesn't encourage viewers to rearrange the film to their
own specifications; that the user-friendly conventions of
the format will not steadily erode the relationship between
movies and their audience.

The men and women who make films need to put up more
resistance to the rising tide of interactivity, because,
''Casablanca'' notwithstanding, there's no guarantee that
the fundamental things will continue to apply as time goes
by. The more ''interactive'' we allow our experience of art
-- any art -- to become, the less likely it is that future
generations will appreciate the necessity of art at all.
Interactivity is an illusion of control; but understanding
a work of art requires a suspension of that illusion, a
provisional surrender to someone else's vision. To put it
as simply as possible: If you have to be in total control
of every experience, art is not for you. Life probably
isn't, either. Hey, where's the alternate ending?

There's not much point speculating on what the ending will
be for the strange process of DVD-izing cinema. Many
suspect that the DVD is already the tail wagging the weary
old dog of the movies. Will the interactive disc ultimately
become the primary medium, with film itself reduced to the
secondary status of raw material for ''sampling''? Maybe;
maybe not. The development of digital technology, along
with the vagaries of the marketplace, will determine the
outcome, and neither of those factors is easily
predictable. What's safe to say, I think, is that the DVD
-- at least in its current, extras-choked incarnation --
represents a kind of self-deconstruction of the art of
film, and that the DVD-created audience, now empowered to
take apart and put together these visual artifacts
according to the whim of the individual user, will not feel
the awe I felt in a movie theater when I was young, gazing
up at the big screen as if it were a window on another,
better world.

I no longer look at movies with quite that wide-eyed
innocence, of course, but it's always there somewhere in
the background: an expectation of transport, as stubborn as
a lapsed Catholic's wary hope of grace. Perhaps the DVD
generation, not raised in that moviegoer's faith, will
manage to generate some kind of art from the ability to
shuffle bits and pieces of information randomly -- the
aleatory delirium of the digital. It just won't be the art
of D.W. Griffith, Jean Renoir, Francois Truffaut, Sam
Peckinpah, Andrei Tarkovsky and Roman Polanski.


Feeling slightly melancholy, I call up David Lynch, who is
not only a director whose works -- ''Blue Velvet,''
''Mulholland Drive'' -- demand a pretty high level of
surrender on the part of the viewer, but also one who has
in recent years refused to allow voice-over commentary or
scene access on the DVD's of his movies. ''The film is the
thing,'' he tells me. ''For me, the world you go into in a
film is so delicate -- it can be broken so easily. It's so
tender. And it's essential to hold that world together, to
keep it safe.'' He says he thinks ''it's crazy to go in and
fiddle with the film,'' considers voice-overs ''theater of
the absurd'' and is concerned that too many DVD extras can
''demystify'' a film. ''Do not demystify,'' he declares,
with ardor. ''When you know too much, you can never see the
film the same way again. It's ruined for you for good. All
the magic leaks out, and it's putrefied.''

He's not opposed to DVD per se. Lynch just finished
supervising the DVD of his first feature, ''Eraserhead''
(1976), which, while eschewing the usual commentary and
chapter stops, will contain a few extras (the nature of
which he declines to reveal). We spend a few minutes
discussing one of his favorite DVD's, the Criterion
Collection's ''Complete Monterey Pop,'' and agree that D.A.
Pennebaker's groundbreaking concert film is the sort of
movie the format serves well; even the scene access is, in
this case, mighty useful. But Lynch says that filmmakers
need to be very careful about the way they present their
delicate, tender creations on DVD. ''Don't do anything to
hurt the film, and then you're rockin.' ''

I hang up, leaving David Lynch to rock on, and find that
I'm feeling more hopeful that the relationship between
movies and their audience will survive the current
onslaught of interactivity -- that this need not be the
beginning of the end of a beautiful friendship. So I dig
out the no-frills DVD of ''Mulholland Drive,'' slide it
into its little tray and pick up the remote. And I tell the
machine to play it.

Terrence Rafferty is critic at large for GQ magazine.