The "Statement on the Use of Video in the Classroom" published in Cinema Journal (Vol.30, n° 4, 1991) and reprinted in the past issue of this Bulletin has raised a lively debate among American scholars, involving some relevant issues of archival policy such as the relationship between film archives and film teaching. We reproduce here the "Dialogue" Section from Vol.31, n°4 of Cinema Journal, 1992 Board of the University of Illinois.

Reply to "Statement on the Use of Video in the Classroom"

The "Statement to Administrators" in Cinema Journal 30, n° 4, calls for support from administrators for the use of film in the classroom. No one can object to this call; we all need to show films, but the reasoning, particularly the comparison with alternative media, seems somewhat faulty. The Statement seems to be flying in the face of both economic reality and pedagogic priorities.

Few, if any, institutions are prepared to provide rental budgets commensurate to the need. Not only are budgets of $1200 to $2500 per course unrealistic for many of us, they do indeed fly in the face of the "common sense" reality that administrators (some of whom are members of the Society for Cinema Studies [SCS]) perceive. One part of that reality is that a set of video holdings serves the needs of the general student body, and faculty, better than film holdings due to their ease of access. Spending money for film purchase or rental seems an extravagance if it is for a group of faculty who cannot also make use of alternatives. Video, much more than film, makes using a number of clips, or rearranging a sequence of shots or scenes from a single film, almost painless. Tremendous pedagogic breakthroughs are possible with video (and laser discs) that remain extremely difficult, if not impossible with film. These advantages are not lost on administrators any more than on most film professors. Why would SCS eschew them?

The ideal policy would be to rent or purchase material in the format in which it was made. For many of the feature films that SCS members show, this would be 35mm. In most cases a 16mm print, even if pristine (rarely the case), is a degraded copy; suffering from the same truncation of image, and perhaps sound, as the lowly videotape. (A nostalgic wish to show "the original" is itself extremely hard to defend when we are always dealing with copies and often with differing versions of films, each of which can make important claims on our attention.) Using flat 16mm prints of Blade Runner or Thelma and Louise makes the case quite clearly: secondary characters and dramatic effects that depend on the original aspect ratio (such as the wide arc of police cars that pursue Thelma and Louise across the desert, or the male body builder glimpsed at the margin of the frame at one of the gas stations) are simply lost. Using scope prints may still not reproduce the original ratio exactly and may still result in degraded sound. Many university classrooms are not equipped to mask a scope image properly, and very few can reproduce high-quality sound from any format.

Arguments about film versus videotape longevity are misleading. The Report uses archival figures. Most users are not concerned with archival preservation but with instructional use. I have yet to see a heavily used 16mm print that holds up well after ten years. I have seen many 16mm prints, either bought or rented, that are of grossly inferior quality from the outset. Videotapes may not last any longer than ten years either with heavy use, but at least they only cost a fraction of the price. We will never win the argument on the basis of cost effectiveness or scan lines alone. At my institution, and many others, I suspect, films are only allowed to be screened twice for any given course to minimize wear and tear. This itself can be a serious handicap. Selecting a complex string of clips from 16mm prints is a practical impossibility in many cases.

We are also at a point where some works are easier to obtain on video than on film. California Newsreel, for example, rents a set of recent African films, but only on video. No one carries them in 16mm, and most were originally shot in 35mm. Sixteen-millimeter distributors constantly change their holdings and have increasing difficulty keeping marginal titles in their inventory. Budget is part of it, but part of it is also very clearly the choice of instructors to rent or purchase several videotapes for the cost of a single 16mm rental. (Would that SCS could help 16mm and video distributors lower their costs; this could be as significant a step as anything we can do with our own administrators. When an independent feature film like Surname Viet Given Name Nam costs $450 to buy in half-inch video, the cost exceeds that of some 16mm prints.)

In fact, SCS might want to pronounce videotape copies of films the godsend they are while still arguing that film rental and purchase is a discipline-specific need regardless of the cost differential. This need must be supported if film study and production are to be taught as distinct disciplines. Except for initial screenings, especially in large lecture halls, though, videotape is currently the medium of choice, certainly for close analysis, assembling clips, and repeated screenings. A university library might want to buy 16mm prints of titles that are rented routinely, and administrators might strive to provide budgets adequate for film rental (and for increasingly expensive video rental of independent, experimental, and documentary work not available in film), but it would be quite foolish not to insist on also securing videotape copies of film titles used in classes and to make most acquisitions in nonfilm formats.

Already, though, videotapes are losing ground as the primary alternative to film. Laser videodiscs are vastly superior in sound and image quality. Once appropriate projectors and monitors are available, their quality can often match and sometimes exceed 16mm prints. Like videotape, laser discs can be obtained in letterbox formats that replicate the original 35mm format, and the sound quality is exceptionally high (not to mention the flexibility of being able to add a new commentary or analysis on the second sound track). Why use a muddy print of a classic title when an exceptionally clear laser disc version is readily available? Why rent poor-quality 16mm prints at all?

When 35mm prints are generally out of the question due to storage difficulty, screening difficulty, individual study access difficulty, and cost; when 16mm prints only present reduced versions of the same problems; when videocassettes are at least vastly more economic and infinitely easier to use; and when laser discs are already equal or superior in quality to most 16mm prints actually in circulation and offer an entirely new range of options for analysis through their digitally based image storage, it seems a little anachronistic to issue a call for the support of film use as though our future depended on it. Laser discs bypass this entire debate, shifting it to a new plane. (High-definition TV, CD-ROM, and hypermedia are the cutting edge of the next level of debate.) SCS can quite rightly support the preservation of films by the world's archives and call for a maximum access to copies of these preserved titles. It can hope film distributors will survive and be able to offer titles at reasonable rates. It can urge administrators to recognize the special need film instructors have to show work in its original format, or in the closest approximation to it available, whatever format that may be, and to help cover the cost of doing so. But the future of 16mm film acquisition, and rental, seems inevitably limited and eventually doomed. And an equally pressing issue - the impact of the Copyright Remedy Clarification Act of 1990, which has many university libraries running scared lest they be subjected to lawsuits for possessing or allowing students to view illegal (unlicensed) copies of films or tapes - also calls for our collective attention.

Bill Nichols
University of California, Santa Cruz

John Belton replies:

Our original statement encouraged the use of film-on-film (rather than film-on-video) as the primary medium of classroom presentation of original motion picture films; it did not, as Nichols seems to imply, discourage the use of film-on-video as a secondary mode of presentation. Videotapes and laser discs can be quite successful pedagogic tools. It is only when educators are forced to choose between film-on-film and film-on-video that problems arise. Quite often that choice is uninformed; the first two-thirds of our statement (to which Nichols does not refer) details several of the differences between film and video and is designed to inform educators so that they can more readily make that choice; the statement to administrators is designed to suggest ways in which those of us who choose to use film-on-film can make a pedagogical case for it.

What is the "economic reality" in whose face our statement flies? Nichols, as a former department chair, must certainly be aware that the "economic realities" of university budgets are neither hard nor fast, but always subject to negotiation and political pressure. To accept a nonexistent or inadequate rental budget as an economic reality is to deny that economic reality can be changed. If your university has allocated $10,000 to 15,000 to install a video projection system in a screening room, but refuses to provide a rental budget because it has funds for "capital improvement" but not for operating expenses, is that an economic reality or a state of affairs that needs to be, at least, discussed if not renegotiated? The fact that this state-of-the-art video projection system is incapable of producing an image equivalent to Super-8 (not to mention 16mm) film should be a factor in this discussion. Nichols suggests that video projection technology will eventually improve; we sincerely hope that it does, but why should we accept a downgrade in the quality of classroom presentation? (By the way, Nichols suggests that video can produce sound superior to that provided by 16mm prints. Perhaps it can for home viewers, who have hooked their video players up to their stereo systems, but how can video projection result in improved sound in the classroom? The sound system that it relies on is the same as that available for 16mm projection, relying upon the same amplifiers, wiring system, and speakers.)

The economics of the situation are, moreover, not quite as clear-cut as Nichols has suggested. If, indeed, it is more economical these days to rent or buy videotapes/discs than movies and to install video projection systems, the costs involved with video are not fixed, one-time costs. Not only is the longevity of the life of video uncertain, but the fields of video technology is rapidly developing and changing. In terms of longevity, 16mm prints, if handled properly by projectionists, can retain their pristine quality for twenty or thirty years or more; they will not decompose if exposed to random magnetic fields, "print through" onto adjoining layers on the spool, or flake off their base, as in the case of videotape. As for video technology, the playback and projection systems that we install today will be obsolete tomorrow. Just over the past twenty years video standards have changed from two- and one-inch tape to three-quarter and half-inch tape (not to mention disc). Within a few years, an improved, High-Definition Television system will be in place, a system that will require a complete overhaul of existing playback and projection technology. But even here there is uncertainty; the international engineering community has been unable to agree upon a standard for High-Definition Television (though in the United States, this standard seems to have been fixed at the low end of quality [1100 scan lines] in an attempt to insure compatibility with existing broadcast standards). If, as Nichols argues, the quality of video projection will improve, the cost of keeping up with these improvements poses long-term economic problems to the short-term economic solutions that they offer. Most of us have witnessed a similar (albeit perhaps more accelerated) technological revolution in the field of personal computers, which obsolesce within five or six years of purchase. Thirty-five-millimeter film, on the other hand, has endured as a standard for over one hundred years; 16mm film has been standard for almost seventy years. You can run a 16mm print on any 16mm projector in the world; the same cannot be said for a "standard" videotape disc.

Nichols argues that most 16mm prints are "degraded" copies of the 35mm original, "suffering from the same truncation of image, and perhaps sound, as the lowly videotape" and maintains that our insistence that 35mm or 16mm prints be used for primary classroom screenings is a "nostalgic wish to show 'the original'". Granted that the quality of individual materials may vary from title to title and that 16mm does not possess the same quality in terms of image and sound as does 35mm, Nichols' equation of 16mm to video in terms of quality has no basis in comparative statistical data. Video is not equivalent to 16mm film (as the first two-thirds of our statement attempted to make clear). Of course, if Nichols rents a flat, 16mm print of Blade Runner and Thelma and Louise the images will be truncated by 50 percent. The Task Force on Film Integrity has made a special effort to call this problem to the attention of the members of SCS through our film availability bulletins that indicate whether 'Scope versions of 'Scope films are available in 'Scope. Unfortunately, Swank does not distribute anamorphic 16mm prints of either of these films. Anamorphic prints would provide more than 90 percent of the original 35mm image (the tops and bottoms of the 35mm image are slightly cropped in 16mm 'Scope prints). Such prints would provide, in most cases, more image than do letterboxed versions of wide-screen films on video (which routinely crop 2.35:1 images to 2.2 or 2:1). If 16mm is "degrades" in terms of 35mm, then video represents a further stage of degradation beyond that. In the age of Walter Benjamin (before video), there was no such thing as an "original" in terms of motion pictures. The mechanical reproduction of motion picture resulted in a plurality of originals. Video, however, has transformed Benjamin's argument, generating a new mode of existence for the work. The video version has emerged as a copy that refers back to what has subsequently become an "original" (that is, 35mm or 16mm) version of the film. The more distinct the copy is from the original, the more aura there is to be attached to that original. Considering the apparent rarity with which film is seen on film in the classroom, film has clearly regained the aura of the traditional artwork. With video, it is now possible, for the first time in the history of the cinema, for us to talk about "the original film".

We do not wish to discourage members of SCS from using videotape and video disc as supplementary materials in the classroom, but we do wish to encourage the issue of film-on-film as a primary presentation of works made on film. Our failure to use film in the classroom only compounds the problems associated with its (lack of) availability. It is perhaps too late to reverse the chain of events that has led to the disappearance of 16mm as a viable nontheatrical format, but it is not too late to educate one another and our students about what it is that we/they are seeing on screens in the classroom. Perhaps film archives will eventually be the only places where we can see films-on-film in the future. Perhaps we are being "anachronistic" or out of touch with (economic or pedagogic) reality when we point out the (economic and pedagogic) problems involved with the substitution of film-on-video for film-on-film. But it is far worse to ignore the material alteration of our object of study - the cinema - when it is presented on video and to pretend that it doesn't matter. The very least we can do is to point out how film-on-video differs from film-on-film and to protest the insensitivity of our administrators (and colleagues) who refuse to see any difference whatsoever between the two.

John Belton
Rutgers University
Society for Cinema Studies Task Force on Film Integrity

The "Statement on the Use of Video in the Classroom" appearing in Cinema Journal 30, n° 4, shows a justifiable concern for offering film students an experience of the filmic "text" that comes as close as possible to what the artists who created that text intended. The authors of "Statement" focus entirely on the use of video copies of films to be taught versus 16mm prints, which, whether rented, leased, or purchased, had formed the backbone of film studies courses for many years. But within that focus, the authors choose to ignore many of the shortcomings of the medium they extol while also ignoring - or showing a disturbing ignorance of - the distinct advantages of releases that are now appearing on video, particularly in the laser disc format. I would like to address some of the issues raised in "Statement", not so much in the spirit of argument but in the same spirit in which I presume "Statement" was written, namely a concern for giving the students as accurate a representation of the filmic text as possible.

The Condition of the 16mm Print

Ideally, teachers of film studies courses would show their students pristine, uncut, 35mm prints, in the correct aspect ratio (not always all that easy to determine), of the filmic "texts" for a course, just as teachers of art and art-history courses would ideally have the original Van Gogh, Renoir, or Picasso on hand to give their students an accurate impression of the colors, size, and textures of and on a given canvas. As "Statement" implies on page 4, albeit indirectly and very briefly, the sharpness, colors, and resolution, not to mention the sound, of the best 16mm print projected through the best equipment do not come close to duplicating those same elements on a 35mm print. No university I know of has the means or material to offer more than an occasional class - and even that is extremely rare - using 35mm prints. I have a strong memory of feeling surprisingly unmoved following the screening, for a class early in my teaching career, of a decent 16mm print of Bresson's Four Nights of a Dreamer from New Yorker Films, while a 35mm screening I had attended a year or so before had left me quite enthusiastic over both the movie as a whole and over the subtlety of much of its evening and nighttime cinematography. At its very best, the 16mm print represents, vis-à-vis thirty-five, the same type of compromise deplored by the authors of "Statement" in discussing video vis-à-vis sixteen. Unfortunately, the phrase "at its very best" can rarely be applied to the 16mm prints available to educators, even those prints from the long-past heyday of the 16mm business. That industry simply never showed enough of a profit to allow it to continually strike new prints of even the most popular titles, even presuming access to flaw-free negatives, also rarely the case. Thus, throughout my career as a film teacher, I have had to deal, almost every time I have shown a 16mm print, with every imaginable obstacle that could be imposed between the viewer and a reasonable experience of the original artistic text: scratches, missing footage, that celebrated Eastman-color fade-to-magenta, abysmal sound from optical tracks squeezed into much too small a space, and various and sundry other horrors. Further, the existence of a given title on 16mm has never guaranteed the integrity of that title. While a fair number of movies on 16mm have been offered either in anamorphic transfers (need I mention here the problems of 16mm anamorphism?) or masked to accomodate wide-screen aspect ratios, just as many have been available only in "flat" prints. To my knowledge, for instance, neither Hitchcock's North by Northwest nor John Ford's The Searchers, two of the most frequently taught movies, has ever been available in 16mm in its "preferred" Vista Vision aspect ratio of 1.85:1. (NO1) Both must be watched only in the "flat" (1.375:1, not 1.33:1, according to Stuart) aspect ratio. Problems also exist as to the actual state of the filmic text, and I will deal with these in the ensuing section.

The Condition and States of the Video Text

Although nobody will deny the numerous crimes committed by fly-by-night video companies purveying public-domain titles copied from inferior (often 16mm) prints, most films on video automatically enjoy a distinct advantage over the 16mm print: they are transferred from a virgin, 35mm print and preserved in a medium that begins to deteriorate either not at all (laser discs, save the problem of "laser rot", which has now apparently been solved) or only slightly after hundreds of playings (tape), although student aides will always find a way to muck up any existing soft- or hardware. Further, the most conscientious companies spend considerable time on getting black blacks, white whites, and all the grays in between for black and white films and, for color, obtaining balances, saturations, etc., that work the best for the video medium. Students at NYU, used to a beaten-up 16mm print of Ivan the Terrible, gasped at the beauty of the print when I showed an excerpt in Beta from the Corinth Films video release of that film. Needless to say, the colors on the best video copy of a film will never truly duplicate the richness and limpidity of those found on a well preserved, 35mm print. On the other hand, the color quality of good video copies generally represents an improvement over what one finds on most 16mm prints - not that the 16mm quality couldn't be better, but because of the condition of most prints one can access. During the Fall 1991 semester, I chose to show Antonioni's Blowup off of my Criterion Collection laser disc, which uses the mildly wide-screen aspect ratio of that film and which offers something much closer to an experience of the director's all-important color scheme than the flat print, with its drab colors, owned by Queens College. My principal regret was the difficulty in seeing Vanessa Redgrave's subtle reappearance outside the nightclub toward the end. While you're at it, compare the Technicolor restorations on laser disc of the Curtiz/Keighley Adventures of Robin Hood or Fleming's Wizard of Oz (both available from the Criterion Collection) to anything you'll ever see in 16mm.

In their discussion of the aspect-ratio problem, the authors of "Statement" are either not aware of or chose to ignore the fact that, mostly on laser disc, there has been an enormous surge of films that have been "letterboxed" to either duplicate or approximate their original aspect ratio. This applies not only to new releases, many of which are issued in pan/scan versions on tape but letterboxed on laser disc, but to older films as well. Indeed, one of my current anguishes as a collector has come from finding myself impelled to replace films, from Forbidden Planet to The Hunger, that I had on pan/scan laser discs and that have been reissued in wide-screen versions (on the Criterion Collection and MGM/UA respectively). So aspect-ratio literate has the laser disc crowd become that the distributors of David Lynch's Wild at Heart withdrew, because of consumer and critical outrage, their pan/scan laser disc almost immediately and replaced it with a letterboxed version. For a course I am doing on the western this coming semester, I am debating as to whether to show my class Queens College's flat print of The Searchers, which also, around a half-hour into the story, has its color balance shift toward yellow for the remainder of the movie, or Warner Home Video's stunning, Technicolor restoration on laser disc, which uses the VistaVision aspect ratio (I will probably run the laser disc on a big-screen, nonprojection TV while simultaneously showing the 16mm print). For A Fistful of Dollars, I will definitely screen the letterboxed laser disc, since that quintessential "spaghetti western" cannot be obtained in an anamorphic print on 16mm. Further, for foreign films, video versions often take advantage of the space left by letterboxing to put the subtitles offscreen, leaving an entirely uncontaminated image. Such was the case for the version of Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad shown on Bravo, and such is the case for the Criterion Collection's laser disc of Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player, offered in its rarely seen "Dyaliscope" version and subtitles beneath the screen, which allows among other things the restoration of the French subtitles used by Truffaut during Bobby Lapointe's drolly misogynistic song. The laser disc viewer of Shoot the Piano Player can also listen to the English-dubbed version of the film on an alternate audio channel should he/she so choose. Interestingly, one area that does need improvement, an area not touched on by the authors of "Statement", is the masking in video even of films in the 1.33:1 (silent) and 1.375:1 (early sound era) aspect ratios, since both the broadcast and the software video industries do not scan the entire filmic image, for fear of leaving those dreaded aperture-plate edges on the screen, while TV monitors cut into that already incomplete image by overscanning.(NO2)

I would also like to comment on an area totally ignored by the authors of the "Statement", namely sound, which has acquired considerable importance as a part of the overall filmic text in more recent films and which represents perhaps the most primitive element of 16mm transfers, both for the reasons mentioned above and because of the generally dismal hardware through which sound is communicated. Laser discs, when played through even a modest stereo system, offer a clarity of that format's images. The sonic (including music) profile of such recent films as Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Dick Tracy (both on Touchstone Home Video) represents, for better or for worse, a major element of those films' artistic structure; only laser disc come close to duplicating that profile as experienced theatrically. I might also evoke the most recent avatar of Fantasia, which not only restores Leopold Stokowski's interpretations of the music (idiotically replaced by a newly recorded, digital music track for Fantasia's last avatar) but also the whimsical, nonmimetic directionality invented by Disney's sound people, who at points just let the music rush back and forth between both sides of the theater. This neglected aspect of the creativity behind Fantasia, all but impossible to duplicate in 16mm, has been preserved on the VHS-stereo and laser disc versions of Fantasia on Walt Disney Home Video.

Conclusion

There is no question that I will continue to attend as often as I can theatrical showings of both new and old movies. There is no question that I will continue to screen 16mm prints for my students, not so much because of the quality of the image and sound but because of the psychology involved in watching a huge image in a darkened theater or auditorium. But there is also no question that the advent of video has brought about a profound change in my career both as a teacher and as a scholar of cinema. This is not the place to go into the ways in which video has allowed the easy success, the repeated screenings, the frame-by-frame viewings, always problematic for 16mm even presuming availability of a print or of funds to pay for a theoretically one-screening-only rental, essential for non-hit-or-miss books, articles, lectures, and, yes, student papers. Nor is this the place to wax rhapsodic over how films have become available, for courses and research, that remained totally unattainable before the video revolution. Thanks to video, I can now teach any or all of the films of Alain Robbe-Grillet, not one of which is currently rentable in this country on 16mm or even available here on commercial video. But I am sure that the authors of "Statement" would not dispute these points. The fact remains that, even when all pixels are counted and all scan lines accounted for, the video versions of many films remain visually, both in image quality and in aspect ratio, sonically superior to equivalents that can actually be rented, leased, or purchased on 16mm, as opposed to the ideal product suggested by the authors of "Statement". What video cannot yet provide, but may be able to provide with the advent of H.D.T.V., is the theatrical "experience", since the maximum screen size for preserving the visual qualities one finds in the laser disc format in particular is around thirty-five inches. Projection television - rear or front - has a long way to go and generally remains unacceptable for me.

But let's face it: the video revolution has already encouraged, by making financially feasible, restorations and recoveries that the 35mm industry rarely cared about and that were generally but a distant dream for 16mm. Now that prints of films such as Becky Sharp, Once Upon a Time in the West, and Spartacus, with their glorious, reclaimed colors (and footage, for Spartacus), can have life after their occasional film festival and/or big-city screenings, more and more undertakings of this sort will be done. Even arch villain Ted "I don't tell you what color to paint your house, so don't tell me not to color my films" Turner is also the hero behind many of the glories appearing under the MGM/UA aegis. Few if any of these color-restored, retrieved-footage, proper (or nearly proper)-aspect-ratioed movies will make it to 16mm, no matter how many financially harried administrators are urged to up rental budgets (a major problem well before video came along). The 16mm industry will continue to rent, lease, and sell fewer and fewer titles in worse and worse condition until finally it goes the way of the dinosaur. That, of course, is a shame, since, as "Statement" implies, 16mm, particularly had the technology continued to improve, could and should have been the ideal compromise medium for film study. But that is no longer in the cards. Indeed, I will encourage Queens College's Film Library to buy up 16mm prints as they become available as long as they are of reasonable quality (we had to send back one or two used prints purchased from a major distributor because of their poor color and/or condition). Because, as they say, once they're gone, they're gone. But I will also encourage the purchase of high-quality monitors and more laser disc hard- and software in order to be able to fully take advantage of visual, audio, and textual splendors I never dared dream of only a short time ago. I will wait with bated breath for H.D.T.V. And I will continue to encourage, through letters and phone calls of support and complaint, the video industry to persevere in the positive directions it has already begun to establish.

Royal S. Brown
Queens College, New York

1. For what appears to be the ultimate statement on the various aspect ratios, see the letter to the editor from UCLA's Steve Stuart in the Perfect Vision 3, n°11 (Fall 1991): 21-23.
2. For an excellent discussion of this and other aspect-ratio problems, see Anton Wilson, "Movies on TV: What You Lose: Film vs. Television Aspect Ratio", American Cinematographer 61, n°11 (November 1908): 1098, 1162.

A Reply to Royal Brown

I want to thank Royal Brown for his comments. The condition of existing 16mm prints available for classroom rental continues to be a concern to all of us who teach film. Many prints could be better than they are; Vista Vision 16mm prints of The Searchers and North by Northwest could be struck, as they were in the case of Universal's 16mm rerelease of The Man Who Knew Too Much and Vertigo. Unfortunately, there seems to be a greater market for films in their proper aspect ratio among high-end videophiles than there has been in the academic community. For decades, the rental of panned and scanned 16mm prints (to college film societies and to educators) has surpassed that of 16mm anamorphic versions. Today, when 16mm color negatives can cost as much as $10,000 to produce, distributors can only afford to strike one negative; since the "flat" version has historically generated more rental income than the "scope" version, it tends to be the only one that gets made (as seems to be the case with the prints of Thelma and Louise mentioned by Nichols and as is the case with Paramount's Star Trek films).

Thirty-five-millimeter prints remain superior to 16mm prints. Though it is unreasonable to expect educators to rely primarily upon 35mm films for classroom use, it is not unusual to find those who do. UCLA runs many of its courses using 35mm prints from its archive. Until coming to Rutgers (where, alas, there is no 35mm projection equipment [yet]), I have always used 35mm materials in my classes - not only in "professional" film graduate programs such as those at Columbia and NYU, but even in undergraduate courses at Brooklyn College (in the state-of-the-art Whitman Auditorium). Colleagues at Michigan, USC, MIT, Iowa, Santa Barbara, Chicago's School of the Art Institute, and, more recently, Madison, use 35mm for regular or occasional screenings. But 35mm is not the question. Video is.

Though certain video formats, such as laser disc, may provide better sound than do many 16mm prints, their ability to render colors remains, as our statement points out, problematic. Though laser discs do provide letterboxed editions, readers of The Perfect Vision (like Professor Brown) know full well that the extreme edges of these widescreen versions are regularly cropped from 2.76:1, 2.55:1, 2.35:1, and 2.21:1 down to 2.2:1 and 2:1. It is possible that laser discs might provide high-quality versions of original motion picture films on a small screen (35-26 inch) monitor, suitable for viewing by three or four students. Our statement, however, addressed the larger issue of classroom screenings, which tend to be facilitated by means of video projection, which continues to be drastically inferior to even 16mm (dare I say Super-8) projection. If students only see films on TV monitors, then classroom screenings might just as well be replaced by at-home or library viewings. Professor Brown is right; we did choose to ignore many of the advantages of laser, such as sound, aspect ratio, print completeness, subtitling, and other features. But this sin of omission was committed in the knowledge that all of laser's advantages are lost when, in trying to compete with 16mm, it is projected in the classroom. Laser may have given us better TV, but (so far) it has not given us better cinema.

John Belton

"Lorsqu'on admet que l'utilisation de copies de 35mm est hors de question en raison des difficultés de stockage, de projection, d'accès physique et de coûts; que le support en 16mm n'est qu'une variante à peine réduite des mêmes problèmes; que les vidéo cassettes sont considérablement plus économiques et infiniment plus faciles à manier (de même que les disques laser); que les disques laser sont désormais égaux ou supérieurs en qualité à la plupart des copies 16mm en circulation et qu'ils offrent une nouvelle gamme de possibilités pour l'analyse grâce à la digitalisation de la conservation de l'image, il semble quelque peu anachronique de faire appel à l'utilisation du support film comme si notre avenir en dépendait. Le disque laser rend caduque tout le débat.
La télévision de haute définition (HDTV), le CD-ROM et les "hypermédia" placent le centre du débat à un niveau supérieur. La "Society for Cinema Studies" (SCS) peut légitimement soutenir les archives du monde entier dans leur effort de préservation des films et lancer un appel en faveur d'un accès accru aux copies d'oeuvres ainsi conservées (...). Mais l'avenir de l'acquisition et mise à disposition de copies 16 mm me semble inévitablement compromis (...). Au demeurant, mes collègues et moi-même, continuerons à louer des copies 16 mm, même si je préfère montrer "Citizen Kane" ou "The Graduate" sur disque laser, et les acheter lorsque des considération d'ordre financier me l'imposeront".

Réponse d'un puriste

Rien ne saurait remplacer la projection d'un film sur support film, dans une salle obscure. Voilà la conviction première qui sous-tend l'article-réponse, véhément et circonstancié de John Belton de la Rutgers University adressé aux défenseurs de la vidéo.
Belton, membre de la "force d'intervention pour l'intégrité du cinéma" associée à la SCS s'inquiète de l'insensibilité grandissante parmi les administrateurs et enseignants des écoles à l'égard de la différence qui existe, indiscutablement, entre les "films-sur-film" et les "films-sur-vidéo".

L'éloge de la vidéo

Après une analyse des inconvénients de l'utilisation du support film 16 mm pour l'enseignement et l'étude du cinéma, découlant surtout du mauvais état des copies et des difficultés de restitution des formats originaux de l'image, et suite à une appréciation très positive des possibilités offertes par la vidéo - surtout le laser disc - dans les domaines du son et de la couleur, Royal S. Brown, du Queens College à New York, conclut: "Il n'y a pas de doute que je continuerai d'assister à des séances de cinéma de films anciens et récents. Je continuerai aussi de montrer des films 16 mm à mes étudiants, non pas à cause de la qualité de l'image mais en raison de la psychologie du spectacle liée au visionnement d'une grande image dans un cinéma ou une salle obscure. Mais il y a aussi le fait que l'arrivée de la vidéo a opéré un changement profond dans ma carrière de professeur et de chercheur de cinéma.
Ce que la vidéo ne peut pas encore offrir - mais le pourra peut-être avec l'HDTV - c'est l'expérience du spectacle... Mais, avouons-le, la vidéo-révolution a rendu possible des restaurations et sauvetage dont l'industrie du 35 mm ne se serait jamais souciée et qui n'auraient été qu'une utopie pour le 16 mm (...) "En effet, j'encouragerai la cinémathèque du Queens College à acheter des copies 16 mm aussi longtemps que celles-ci seront d'une qualité acceptable (...). Mais j'encouragerai également l'achat de moniteurs de qualité et des disques laser dans le but de profiter pleinement des splendeurs visuelles, sonores et textuelles dont je n'aurais même pas osé rêver il n'y a pas si longtemps. J'attendrai en retenant mon souffle l'HDTV et je continuerai d'encourager l'industrie de la vidéo, par des appels de soutien et de protestation, à persévérer dans la bonne direction qu'elle a déjà empruntée".

John Belton répond à Royal Brown

John Belton convient avec Royal Brown que l'état des copies 16 mm joue un rôle important pour le choix du support à des fins pédagogiques. (Le bienheureux aurait d'ailleurs toujours eu la possibilité de montrer des films 35 mm à ses étudiants) .La question, cependant, ne concerne pas le 35 mm mais bien la comparaison du 16 mm avec la vidéo: même si certains formats vidéo - comme le disque laser - pourraient fournir un meilleur son que la plupart des copies 16 mm, la restitution de la couleur reste, à son point de vue, problématique.
Belton va plus loin: "Il est possible que les disques laser permettent le visonnement de haute qualité de films sur un petit écran (35-26 pouces) par des groupes de trois ou quatre étudiants. La possibilité de visionnement sur vidéo grand écran en classe reste, à mon avis, d'une qualité inférieure à celui d'un film en 16 mm et même en Super-8 (...). Le laser a peut-être donné une meilleure télévision mais il ne nous a pas donné - jusqu'à présent - un meilleur cinéma".