I posted the following message on cropping of films in April:
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. Like it says on the Film Four website:
"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."
Film 4 replied:
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
My wife then had a baby and the thread is now archived. But I do wish to respond on both counts:
O Lucky Man is full screen. I've seen it as such at the NFT, and I own the Warner Home Video copy. I've compared the two, and the top and bottom have been removed on the Film 4 version.
Casanova I saw at the NFT during the Fellini season last year. Again, the film was 4:3/fullscreen, not widescreen. If you look at the version Film 4 showed, it's obvious in many scenes that bits are missing from the top and bottom, leaving some pretty awful composition.
I compared Film Four's 1.85 transfer of CASANOVA with Fox's old UK video, which was full-screen. The Film Four print reveals a great deal of additional image at the left and right, and doesn't lose anything at the top and/or bottom, which suggests that this film was shot hard matte 1.85.
On the other hand, the only reason I'm sitting at my computer at the moment is that I started watching THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE on Film Four, but gave up when I found that the 2.35 image had been cropped to 1.85!
I'm glad I wasn't the only one annoyed at Bird being cropped to 1.85:1, particularly since it was being shown in Italian - I've got the first R1 DVD release from VCI, and I think it only has an English soundtrack. Also, the murder with the pants being torn off has a few shots inserted in the wrong order.
Isn't this due out again soon on R2? I seem to recall the BBFC recently reclassifying it as a 15, but there's no sign of a release date on Play or Amazon.
I believe the VCI version was corrected in later pressings, is this still the best version available Brad?
Later pressings of the VCI disc were indeed corrected.
There is a UK DVD of BIRD, but it's heavily cut, and I believe panned-and-scanned. Apparently, the BBFC announced that they would have been happy to pass an uncut version of the film, but this cut version is the one that was submitted to them.
Needless to say, the Film Four transfer was also cut.
Thanks Brad. Quite timely, too, since I have just heard that Blue Underground in the US are to release a special edition of BIRD including seemingly never-before-seen violent footage. Should be interesting...!
Poor show FilmFour for airing this in a cut, cropped version - couldn't be that hard to obtain a better print could it??
