Digital restoration and its discontents: the first in a potentially infinite series

So I was looking at Paramount's new disc of John Ford's 1962 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Volume 8 of the company's very welcome Centennial Collection, and enjoying the digital restoration quite a bit. I imagine you won't be surprised to learn that, as an auteurist of a certain stripe and someone with taste, I'm a big fan of the film, embracing both its obvious (to me) glories and endearing (again, to me) flaws. Anyhow, I was reflecting on the way the new digital cleanup of the picture emphasized some of the film's more set-bound aspects, and it occurred to me that a side-by-side comparison of this new disc and the one issued in 2001 might be of interest. I had to shut off the film to do some errands; when I got back, I cued up the 2001 version in my second DVD player, up to the point where I had stopped the new one; the saloon kitchen scene, right after Hallie (Vera Miles) has told Ranse (James Stewart) she can't read, and stormed from the room in humiliation. The below screen cap is from the 2001 version.

Valance, 2001 DVD

Would my confrere, and sometimes opponent in the debate about how a home version of a movie ought to look, Jeffrey Wells, call the above a "grainstorm?" He might, rabbit, he might. There is a darkness to it that some might see as murky. Below is what the new restoration looks like. 

Valance, 2009 digital restoration

It's cleaner, brighter...and sharper? Well, sure, the impression of more detail exists—as in, say, the collar button of the dress Jeannette Nolan's character wears. And you've gotta love the way they cleaned up all the noise buzzing around Stewart's shirt...

Ah, but there's the rub. That wasn't noise. It was film grain, film grain that was poorly transfered to video in the first place. FIlm grain that was trying to resolve a check pattern in Stewart's shirt. A check pattern that is erased in the medium long shot in the screen grab at the top of this post, and miraculously reappears in a medium close-up about a minute later, as below: 

Valance, 2009 digital restoration

"So what's a checked shirt?" some might ask. "Grain IS the picture," preservation expert Robert Harris avers. I have to say—there are certain aspects of the picture on the new Valance that are, as they say, pleasing to the eye. But this kind of wholesale erasure vexes. Below is a grab of the above shot, this time from the "unrestored" 2001 version.

Valance, 2001 DVD

Once aware of this kind of fudging, it's easy to let it take you out of the movie. Depending on who you listen to, either God or the devil is in the details. Actually it's both; God is in the details when they're all visible to be appreciated; the devil is in the details when you're trying to get them down right. So it shall be with digital versions of the classics for some time, I'm afraid.

Comments

[bill]

Based on the screengrabs, I prefer the 2001 release. Stewart looks TOO bright in the first digital example, TOO clean. I'm a dunderhead when it comes to this discussion, but black and white seems to suffer more in these transfers than color films do.

Anyway, "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" is my favorite Ford film. My favorite Wayne film, too. It might have even been my favorite Stewart film, if Hitchcock had never gotten his mitts on him.

[Account Deleted]

I prefer the 2001 version too...and i'm increasingly concerned about this current trend to want everything to look 'perfect'. Perfect, in most of these cases, means bland.

[Steven Santos]

It feels like the 2009 restoration is erasing the texture and shadows from the image. In some ways, it is killing the mood the lighting is setting for this particular scene.

Even odder is that all those images show the lamp which is the light source for the room in the context of the scene. So, you wonder why the light in the 2009 restoration is so much brighter and flatter when they're really wouldn't be much natural light in the room?

[Pete Apruzzese]

Hard to say definitively without seeing them both, but I also prefer the look of the 2001 disc via these screen shots. The 2009 looks like they did digital smoothing then maybe added some edge-enhancement to raise the (perceived) sharpness.

[charles]

I'm trying to remember something from Pauline Kael's negative review of the period: didn't they shoot the film in color and print it in monochrome? Could that affect the grain issue?

[MovieMan0283]

I'll pitch in with the barbarians and vote for '01. That said, I'm not a big fan of this film, despite loving Ford. It seems like the movie that, along with The Birds for Hitchcock, allowed American auteurists to thumb their noses at those who missed the boat...despite the fact that they themselves had just barely missed capitalizing on the directors' best periods (its an interesting irony that auteurism hit its stride in the U.S. just as the Hollywood system American critics were rediscovering collapsed). Its ideas are literary rather than cinematic, as in The Searchers, and the disappointingly studio-bound feel of the movie (something Kael astutely perceived) only emphasizes the somewhat moribund feel of the material.

But what do I know? (Dances off stage with fake grin plastered on face and straw hat in the air while audience pelts tomatoes and boos).

[MovieMan0283]

In case that sentence is confusing, I mean too suggest that The Searchers is "more cinematic" than Liberty Valance, not "as literary." I know, I know, evil words. But I think they're true.

[Marco]

cf. "Citizen Kane", where you can recognize in some digitally "refreshed" DVD versions Joseph Cotten sitting in the projection room after the newsreel screening. (Cotten was used as an extra just to fill the room...)

[JDR]

When Digital Restoration is applied to most of the movies that you see today there is very little if any grain reduction done. The main thing that is fixed is the dirt, example: positive and negative dirt, scratches reel markers and other anomalies that are very disturbing to many viewers. I worked on this both times in 525 and 1080p and when I applied restoration to these there was no grain reduction nor any sort of edge enhancement what so ever, the softness that happened probably occurred when the DVD was made by using too much compression.