Blu-Ray Cinephilia

Movies and books are my sole clustering vices as a collector (whiskey, thankfully, does not take up that much room, nor linger for long). At the same time, though, Blu-Ray is another reminder of how difficult it is to “own” a film—the perfect sound, the perfect image, the “total” cinematic version of a film, feels increasingly out-of-reach with each new platform that proclaims the highest clarity and resolution yet (“owning” a film’s ideas and themes, meanwhile, is another equally problematic matter). Indeed, one problem which haunts cinephilia today is the potentially self-destructive obsession with personal ownership, the idea that films belong to, or exist to serve, an individual.

There is no question that the advent of Blu-Ray and high-definition home theatres has changed what it means to be a cinephile. If we take cinephilia to be, to have always been, a certain kind of technophilia—a love of the medium’s technical potential, which is inseparable from its artistic identity—then it’s hard not to appreciate the stunning clarity of image which these two innovations provide to the attentive cinephile. It is not “film,” of course, but it is what film was trying to be.

Even on my modest 37’’ inch widescreen at home, details emerge that I’d never seen in movies before. Theatrical images, even 70mm or IMAX footage, may have the greatest potential for clarity to the viewer, but that sharpness always seems lost in the old (generally mechanical) projection, even or possibly especially on the biggest possible screens. Honestly, watching a movie on Blu-Ray, or even just a high-definition “live” broadcast of a movie on television, at home is generally-speaking a more satisfying image of clarity than the pictures I catch at the local multiplex, whose blurriness is counterbalanced only by its considerable size, the nostalgic ritual of old-fashioned theatre-going, and the ephemeral community that is a large movie audience.

Since I began watching movies on Blu-Ray last summer, my sense of cinematic perception has unquestionably been altered. For the first time, I see the blurry corners, edges and lines around objects and people in regular DVD movies presented on a BR player, its imperfectly reproduced image now maxed out; I can see the faint spots of compression in HD television shows and movies on a regular television, its visual potential unfulfilled; theatrical presentations, which of course I would never for the world give up, nonetheless contain a certain fuzzy layer of smudge that frustrates my eyes.

Of course, this is all relative in the larger histories of film and home viewing technologies. I can remember having some of the same reactions to watching VHS in the late 1990s after a few months of compulsive DVD consumption. And perhaps in another decade, I will feel the same way about Blu-Ray. Yet I have also felt at times that certain films, on the new format, have come as close to ideal as they may achieve—that moment when the imperfections of the captured image, which stayed hidden on VHS, television and DVD for so long, have now become as glaring and as haunting as the perfections.

Such high-definition cinephilia is perhaps the closest we’ve come to a virtual approximation of Christian Keathley’s crucial theory for the cinephile: panoramic perception, “the cinephile's defining mode of vision.” The eye wanders, glancing across the HD widescreen image, taking in all the small details of the frame suddenly drawn into being by the power of high definition digital imagery. This new technology intensifies the cinephile’s “fetishizing of fragments of a film, either individual shots or marginal (often unintentional) details in the image, especially those that appear only for a moment.”

Blu-Ray embraces the whole frame, and may even, one can hope, usher in a new era of Bazinian patience after decades of an obsession with various forms of montage—to once again let reality come back to the camera. I am not criticizing montage, but Blu-Ray reminds us what potentially the wide, wandering frame can still show us.