Page 153 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

1 | The DVD: Home V ew ng of Mov es Comes of Age

brazil
One of the most interesting DVD releases is the Criterion (the most respected of the DVD
manufacturers) version of Terry Gilliam’s 1985 film Brazil. The multi-DVD set includes two
complete versions of Brazil. One of these is a “director’s cut” with an optional commentary
by Terry Gilliam. It is the film as Gilliam wanted it to be. It was prepared with care for the
DVD with all of the care and devotion that has become the hallmark of Criterion. The other
is a pan-and-scan version of the movie, the version first shown on television and including a
“love conquers all” ending that Gilliam did not create (it was done by the studio without his
permission). Significantly, Gilliam does not provide commentary for this version.
The significance of having both versions in one set is that one is able to see quite clearly
the difference between pan-and-scan and the film in its original aspect ratio. This, perhaps
even more than the butchering of the film by the studio, is what makes this set interesting
to the film buff and historian. However, the ability to compare a director’s version of a movie
with what the studio wanted is also a boon to the viewer.
Included in the set are documentaries on the making of the movie and even a sequence
of storyboards used in the making.

the ill-fated Betamax. The introduction of home taping systems scared the film
studios. They believed that amateur home recordings would eat away at their
profits. It took them some years to realize that the VHS was a boon to them, not
something that would starve them. Rental of videotapes had become big busi-
ness by the end of the 1970s. Soon after that, sales of prerecorded movies on vid-
eotape began to take off as people began to understand and demand the higher
quality of professionally dubbed tapes as compared with home recordings.
Even on prerecorded tapes, however, the quality of videotape was never very
high. There was at least one alternative that did gain a little momentum, the la-
serdisc, but it was unwieldy (as large as a long-playing record) and, like the Sony
tapes, could not hold an entire movie. Even so, a number of films were trans-
ferred to laserdisc in the 1980s and early 1990s, bought mainly by serious film
fans who objected to the alterations of films made for presentation on videotape.
The warning inserted on the screen before the start of most videotapes, “This
film has been modified from its original version. It has been formatted to fit
your screen,” began to irritate more and more viewers. By the 1990s, the demand
for films presented in their original and with even higher quality had grown suf-
ficiently so that manufacturers finally started to seriously develop alternatives to
the videotape.

aDvanTagEs oF ThE DvD
At the time that television was introduced, it used an aspect ratio of 1.33:1,
just slightly narrower than the movies of the era. Partly in response to television
(wanting a more dynamic look that could not be reproduced on television) and
partly because new technologies allowed it, movies soon moved to what would