THE DEVIL IS IN BLU-RAY'S DETAIL
Shane Danielsen: Blu-ray may give us unimaginable levels of sharpness in picture quality, but movies
can suffer from too much information – like a magician who reveals his tricks
Right now, in my apartment, there are just over 900 DVDs, arranged alphabetically by title on a tall row
of shelves in my living room. Not one of them is Blu-ray, nor are they likely to be. Blu-ray was a
necessary commercial development for a sell-through DVD market that was starting to plateau; it
arrived, like the Millennium Falcon, in the proverbial nick of time. Yes, it cost more – demanding that the
passionate cinephile shell out to upgrade his or her collection – but it also offered more: hitherto
unimaginable levels of visual and audio excellence. I don't doubt that the format, with its superior
resolution (1080p to 480p), its higher compression rates, looks better than conventional DVD
technology: sharper, cleaner, more richly detailed. This might, however, be the problem. Last week, on
the blog of the US critic Jeffrey Wells, he wrote about a British Blu-ray release of Hitchcock's Psycho so
uncannily crisp and clear that, in a close-up of the actor Robert Balsam, you can see smears of theatrical
makeup on his face – a detail never evident in the theatrical print, and a discovery that inspires boyish
excitement in the usually curmudgeonly Wells. ("I love being able to see stuff that you weren't intended
to see, but which Blu-ray has now revealed," he burbles happily.) I take quite the opposite view. I've
never been one for knowing how the magician does the trick; I just want to be wowed. And movies, a
sustained feat of legerdemain, can actually suffer from an excess of clarity. Recently, the Blu-ray edition
of Paramount's 1953 War of the Worlds has given fans much anguish, with the wires holding up the
Martian spaceships now clearly visible in almost every shot. Moments like these – when the mask slips,
and the gears and pulleys that drive the illusion are revealed – serve to take us out of the film and into
the realm of technical assessment, reminding us that it's mere play-acting. They're the enemy of
storytelling. I remember being in the Virgin Megastore in Times Square back in 2008, and pausing to
look at a screen showing Coppola's The Godfather, which had been released on Blu-ray a fortnight
earlier. It was the trattoria sequence, when Michael kills McCluskey and Sollozzo, and it looked great . . .
in fact, it looked TOO great. The colours were rich and burnished (that background red, in particular),
the shadows were deep – yet at the same time, there was a precision to the images, a sort of hyperreal
clarity, that didn't jibe with my memory of having watched the film, either in the cinema or at home. It
seemed weirdly artificial, somehow, and watching it, I felt that I could almost see the grain of the film
stock, the flicker and shudder of individual frames, such was the degree of visual information on offer. I
felt, suddenly, like Ray Milland's character in The Man With the X-Ray Eyes. This could, I realised, drive
me mad, if I let it. One of the Virgin staff noticed my scrutiny, and sidled up to me. "What you think?" he
asked, his voice neutral. As I voiced my qualms, he stared at me with a patient, pitying expression. I
expected the usual salesman's pitch – ah, but sir, this is state-of-the-art, this is essential for any serious
film-lover – so the next thing out of his mouth surprised me: "I agree with you," he said quietly. "Shit
don't look real no more." He pointed to the screen. "Look at that." He indicated Pacino, now making his
getaway from Louis's restaurant. "My boy looks like he's drawn by Pixar." He snorted. "I ain't buying
one." The Virgin Megastore is gone now – perhaps all the salespeople were equally candid about their
wares. But the guy was right. Shit don't look real. Contrary to what you might believe, I do care a great
deal about picture quality. So much so, in fact, that I watch movies on the same large Bang & Olufsen
television I've had since 2002. It's an elegant piece of furniture, but more importantly, it's an oldfashioned, cathode-ray tube set, a technology upon which, to my mind, we have yet to improve. (I
especially loathe LCD and LED televisions, both of which not only exhibit pixel-lag on fast-moving
images, but make anything older than 1990 look like it was shot on VHS.) Thanks to the surpassing
excellence of digital technology, we're now seeing the flaws of the past, every stray hair and blemish,
every guide-wire and carelessly painted backdrop, with near-hallucinatory clarity – and as a result, the
movies are losing a little of their ability to enchant. As a friend of mine, a cameraman, noted, there's a
real problem when you're experiencing a visual image in a format superior to anything their makers
could have anticipated when they shot it – not least, for the tough aesthetic (and even ethical) choices
they now inspire. In a recent Blu-ray restoration of The Wizard of Oz the technicians took care to
digitally erase the wires holding up the Cowardly Lion's tail, so that the War of the Worlds problem
would not be repeated. But weren't we then seeing a digitally altered, retrospectively "improved"
version of the original movie? What's the difference, in basic terms, between this and George Lucas's
much-maligned "fix-ups" to the original Star Wars trilogy? It all represents, for purists and fans alike,
something of a slippery slope. Blu-ray, like any other digital technology, has the effect of privileging
recent work, conceived with it in mind: Wall-E looks stunning on a Blu-ray disc, almost miraculous; The
Rocky Horror Picture Show does not. It looks cheap and shoddy. One of my favourite ever films, a
touchstone in my life, is Godard's Masculin Féminin, shot by Willy Kurant in a grainy, rather flattened
B&W. It's rough, unpolished – a dispatch from the frontlines of pre-1968 Paris, as was its maker's
intention. Just how much "better" do I need it to be?