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SCS Statement on Creative Rights

1988; University of Texas Press; Volume: 27; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/1225022

1527-2087

John Belton,

Cinema and Media Studies

The Directors Guild of America, the American Society of Cinematographers, and the American Film Institute have, during the past year, voiced their opposition to the colorization of black and white films for release on television. Representatives of the DGA and other members of the film industry have, more recently, testified on this issue before your Subcommittee on Technology and the Law. The Society for Cinema Studies praises this stand taken by members of the film industry. As film and television scholars and educators, we are equally concerned with the problems colorization poses to the artistic integrity of our film heritage and would like to join our professional colleagues in the stance they have taken against this practice. However, we feel that there are a number of other issues of equal importance that need to be addressed, and we fear that focus upon the colorization issue alone may inadvertently obscure these other issues. Concern for the individual practice of colorization leads quite logically, we believe, to a concern for the creative rights of filmmakers in a much broader range of areas. For example, although we abhor colorization, we feel that the practice of pan-and-scan or scanning, whereby CinemaScope and widescreen films are reprocessed to accommodate the video format, poses as serious a threat to the integrity of film. Pan-and-scan involves the loss of 50 percent of the original 'Scope image in its transfer to the conventional TV format. Essentially, the right and left sides of the original 7:3 'Scope image are cropped so as to fit the 4:3 aspect ratio of the television screen. Panning-and-scanning not only results in the cropping of the original, but in its attempt to follow widescreen action, it also often introduces arbitrary panning movements that were not in the original, or it edits breaks within sequences that were originally continuous. As far as television viewers are concerned, colorized films are not as significant a violation of artistic integrity as panned-and-scanned films. Added color can easily be removed with a twist of the color-control dial on television sets equipped with that feature. But panning-and-scanning crops the sides of the original image; part of the film is arbitarily eliminated, and no amount of ingenious playing with the controls can ever restore it.