There is a chain of “off price” apparel stores named Syms that has a connection of cinematic importance. No, this is not a less than subtle plug for promoting a well-dressed crowd at the local cineplex. If ticket prices keep rising a night at the movies could become an event as special as a night at the opera, which by itself might naturally draw a swankier crowd. So where’s the link? Syms does sponsor cinema programming on PBS stations, but more apt is their company motto, “an educated consumer is our best customer”. If this catchy phrase were not copyrighted it would make the perfect call to arms for the movie industry’s education and enhancement of the average viewer’s movie watching experience.

I’m not referring to an understanding of camera movement or the intricacies of lighting, editing, set design, costume or sound. An appreciation of film noir, cinema vérité, the French New Wave and the master films of Hitchcok are likewise not part of this discussion. The deeper understanding in any art form leads to a greater appreciation and enjoyment of the medium. I refer to something more elemental, the basic experience under which we view films. As our viewing habits continue to change, moving further away from the shared experience of viewing film with an audience, to the delivery of DVDs or Blue Ray discs to our mailboxes or downloading files from online; as the screens on which we view films shrink to a size not much larger than the single frame that the original film was photographed on; none of these technical advances, (if you’re inclined to consider them such) has in any way educated the average consumer to some very basics of cinema appreciation.

Recently I was reminded of this fact when I rented a DVD from my local video rental. A well-tuned movie theater is still my preferred viewing experience for a film, but I do occasionally succumb to laziness or simply the desire to catch up with a film missed in its theatrical run. Such was the case this evening. My wife and I settled in front of the television. We don’t own a flat screen, plasma or Dolby surround home system, just a fairly large, stereo television. We turned off the lights and attempted to make the experience as all engrossing as possible.

The film was a taut crime drama. At about half an hour in things started to unravel, not in the story’s narrative, but in the DVD player’s reading of the disk. It froze, broke into pixels, wouldn’t progress forward and then replayed sections. I washed the disk and tried again to no avail. Undaunted and determined to see the mystery solved, I jumped on my bike and after a mad dash returned from the rental house with another copy. I scanned ahead to where we left off and again settled in. Within minutes I was again fighting with technology, changing the DVD player for the computer, washing and finally once again biking to the store. By this point my determination was verging on obsession. The third copy played relatively problem free. That’s not the end of this story but the beginning and where the educated consumer enters. Although the DVD played, it proved to be an infuriating experience for another reason.

In the theater the original projection of this film was in a rectangular size that, without some manipulation, does not naturally fit the shape of a standard television screen. The rectangular size of the film image presentation is referred to as its aspect ratio. This ratio describes the relationship of the width to height of the image on the screen. While all of the various aspect ratios for presentation are longer in width than in height, so as to comfortably approximate human vision, there is no standard format that films are designed, photographed and projected in. Presently the most common theatrical presentation is a ratio of 1.85:1. Wide screen formats had been experimented with as early as 1927, but the most commonly accepted format ratio of 1.33:1 had been set by Thomas Edison and his assistant in the development of the film medium William K. L. Dickson, in the late 1800’s. This remained the standard projection format until the mid 1950’s. Before the advent of wide flat screen televisions, this slightly squarer 1.33:1 format, was the perfect ratio for the television format where it is commonly referred to as 4:3.  It was the competition from television that moved Hollywood into wide screen formats that might range anywhere from 1.85:1 to 2.39:1. It was the retrofitting of this wide screen format into the near square box of my television that was the source of my discontent.

There are a number of ways that DVD formats fit this rectangular peg into a square hole. How it was accomplished in the first two disks from my rental house was through the use of “letter boxing”.  In this technique the width of the film’s original projection size is fit to the width of the television screen. Because the projection height will now be less than the height of the television, this blank space is equally filled top and bottom by black bands. The resulting shape of the film image on the television screen resembles that of a letterbox set in a black frame. In this way the integrity of the filmmaker’s original vision remains intact for your pleasure. If you have ever had a two-sided DVD where a different format is presented on either side, as indicated by “widescreen” or “full screen” printed circling the hole in the center, this would be the “widescreen” side. The “full screen” presentation, while it may seem to suggest that you will see everything, actually refers to the fact the film’s image, no matter what the original aspect ratio was, will fill your television screen on all sides.

A number of different techniques are used to accomplish this depending on the film’s original aspect ratio. If the film’s original format was 1.85:1, the least of the widescreen formats, the film may simply be expanded so that the height of the film image fits the height of you television. Since the width of the film image will now be wider than that of your television a vertical strip from the left and right of the original film image will be cropped off. You will no longer be able to fully experience the time and thought given by the cinematographer to the framing of the shots, the director’s blocking of the actors or the editor’s editorial decisions. You may in fact completely miss information that may have been framed close to the edge of the screen and is now arbitrarily eliminated.

An equally egregious technique is used on films with a wider format. To use the aforementioned technique on an aspect ratio greater than 1.85:1 would lose too much information from the sides of the screen. It is not uncommon in widescreen to frame actors to one side looking across the expanse of the frame addressing an off-screen actor. This may be followed by a shot of the other actor, framed on the opposite side of the frame responding. If the sides of the frame were to be eliminated it would cut the actors out of the frame and the viewer would be watching a film of empty rooms filled by omniscient voices.

The technique used to solve this problem is called “pan and scan”. This is a selective horizontal reframing of every shot of the film. Taking the above example, the first shot would be reframed starting screen right to fully include the actor and eliminate the remainder of screen space. The same would be done with the second shot reframing for the left side of the screen thereby recreating the original intent within an altered frame. What is so bad about this, you ask? What if this scene is not composed of single shots of the actors, but one widescreen shot where the actors face each other from opposite sides of the screen. How do you reframe without losing one of your actors. In the pan and scan technique they will create an artificial camera panning movement. A pan occurs when the camera, from a fixed position, pivots horizontally. So this widescreen shot with no movement in it, may now turn into a shot with movement, panning from one speaking actor to the other. Another method is to create edits where none previously existed. In this same instance the first actor may be framed while speaking, and then creating an artificial cut, the framing will jump across the screen and reframe for the other actor.

How unethical is this? Think of it this way; you buy a Van Gogh oil painting that measures one foot high by two and a third feet wide, and you have the most perfect frame for it. The only problem is the frame measures one foot high by one and a third feet long. Not a problem. Get out the scissors. Poor Vincent. As if he didn’t already have enough reason for grief. And who does the reframing, panning and cutting? Not the director, not the cinematographer, not the editor, but someone unconnected to the film and its creative originators whose only job it is to plot this out on films.

No one with any empathy for the creative spirit and integrity of this art would endorse, even passively, any form of reformatting of the original vision. Become an educated consumer. When the beginning of your DVD warns: “ this film has been reformatted from its original size to fit your television,” reject it. One last warning, you are not automatically safe in a theater. Films can, through the sloppy careless practices of theater projectionists, be projected in the incorrect aspect ratio. Your only protection is to be sensitive to the framing, question, be educated and demand respect for the medium.

Next time I’ll address sound, the other half of your film experience, and how to educate yourself against its rampant abuse at theaters.