Film 4 - Could you please stop cropping 4:3 movies to make them widescreen e.g. recent showings of "O! Lucky Man" and "Fellini's Casanova". I want to see the film as it was intended: that's one of the reasons I pay the subscription.
"FilmFour aims to screen films so that they look like they do in the cinema, as intended by the filmmakers. As we know, that means that some films will look like wide letterboxes with black bands above and below. Sometimes the picture will be very wide (2.55 times wider than high), or at other times, almost square (1.37 times wider than high). Of course, sometimes we fail to find the perfect copy because not all films have been properly transferred. Most often though, we succeed, and the whole picture is there, edge to edge, as the director intended."
Thanks sgb65 for your attention to this. As far as we know, O Lucky Man was shot at 1.66:1, and we showed it very near to that at 16x9; Casanova would have been seen at around 1.75:1 in Europe and 1.85:1 in the US. Again, we showed it as near to that as possible at 16x9. If you have any information to the contrary we would love to hear about it. IMDB is silent on this matter, by the way
This begs the question, doesn't it? If "O Lucky Man" was shot in a ratio of 1.66:1 (the standard European ratio at the time), then why was it not shown in that ratio instead of "near to that"? I know there are some grey areas here (American prints of British films etc) but you should really try and show everything in the correct projection ratio.
