ON DVD AND BLU-RAY

During the two-year break of this diary I have seen more films than ever. Besides covering Cinema Orion, commercial premieres and various film festivals I started to take dvd seriously. In 2006 I checked some 500 dvd's, typically during long Saturday evenings, screening some two dvd's per week at the correct speed and the rest with fast-forward, paying attention to the extras. Recently I have been convinced that BluRay and HD-DVD are the perfect home-viewing formats and the first home video formats that I might consider collecting. I have no vhs or dvd collection, as I don't trust in their durability. The recent years have been those of full maturity of the dvd phenomenon with excellent transfers and editions. Comparing three different transfers of popular dvd titles the most recent ones are always evidently superior.
Yet the cinema experience is not threatened, it's something else to see a movie in the cinema. My favourite example is the Titanic: in the cinema, we are in the big ship, bigger than us; at home, at the remote control, we sink the little ship, smaller than us. In the cinema, there is a sense of space, of atmosphere, a sense of air. I was surprised recently to see some excellent chamber pieces by Joseph L. Mankiewicz (The Ghost and Mrs. Muir and A Letter to Three Wives) in the cinema for the first time. I had seen them previously on video / tv only, and now they were different and much more intensive because of the sense of atmosphere on the big screen. There are also fine nuances that may get lost if the film is not seen on screen. And in many best films, the nuances are the point.
Unfortunately the visual standards of new cinema films are at their lowest ever because of the current practices for digital intermediates. There is a huge loss of information in current digitization. A digital image may look sharp, but it usually eliminates most of the detail that borders on the invisible. If one looks at a perfect 70mm print for instance, no single frame might be as ultra-sharp as a digital image, but instead there is a much stronger and fuller sense of life and atmosphere: air, breath, heat, dust, smoke, fog, small particles that may blur the contours. Real life is not ultra sharp and completely defined. The strength of the photochemical image is something bigger than sharpness: it can give a sensual feeling of life and infinity.