The digitizer, much like the cataloguer, is in a
position of underappreciated authority. A common, mistaken assumption about
their profession is that what they do is a simple cut-and-paste job for
whichever work needs to change from its original form into the more accessible
digits and pixels. In carrying out their profession, they must be precise –
making decisions which will accurately reflect whichever artefact they are
working on. Their power comes from the understanding that any mistake they
make, no matter how insignificant it may seem, becomes fact, distorting, as
Sperberg-McQueen would call it, the
theory of the artefact which the professionals are trying
to represent.
I
had convinced myself of that notion from the materials and theories I had
encountered as a student of Library and Information Science, but the thought
first began to germinate when I encountered the Senegalese film, Mandabi, as
an undergraduate film student. I watched the film in class as a required
screening, but what made this screening unique was the format in which we, as a
class, watched it.
To
date, Mandabi is the only film I have
had to watch for a class which was projected on chemical film. Every other film
which was screened for a class was done with a DVD or a Blu-Ray. And while I
thought that it was certainly interesting to watch a film which was on – well –
film, I didn’t think that there was anything unique or special about the
quality of the picture. Nothing about this particular format made it the
picture or sound quality noticeably better or authentic like I had heard from
countless purists.
But
the day after, when we would re-watch segments of the film and discuss it, a
few things became very clear to me. For obvious practical reasons, the clips of
the film which we watched again for the purpose of discussion were ripped from
the DVD. The first thing that I noticed was different when experiencing the
film this time was one which should’ve been obvious before, that the experience
of consuming the film through a chemical print was far less interactive than
with a DVD. It’s very difficult to pause, rewind, or fast-forward a reel
without doing considerable damage to the print. The only way to watch the film
would be from beginning to end without pause for whichever reason external to
the film.
The
second thing which became obvious was the quality of the image, itself. Like my
many peers who were purists for chemical film, I saw how much more compressed
the image was when compared to what I had watched yesterday. Many details which
I simply observed the day before had now become an obviously pixelated
representation, simply a different version of the work which came from what the
digitizer believed would best represent the film in digital form.
The
digitizer(s) of films need to be keenly aware of the consequences of the
decisions they make when trying to adequately represent the artefact precisely
because of the way film, and other traditional media, are increasingly being
consumed digitally. The director, Ousemene Sembene, created the film for an
audience to be experienced on film. He did not, at the time, anticipate the way
in which modern, digital devices would dramatically affect the way in which his
work.
Rightly or wrongly,
many people choose to watch films, read books, and listen to music this way
over their original format. Even I didn’t notice the difference until I had the
two different versions which I could immediately compare with each other. It’s
possible that, as Walter Benjamin argues, we
lose the aura of the original artefact every time we experience a mechanical
reproduction and not the original piece itself, but even the chemical film
print which I saw was a copy of the original print. Any aura would have been
from the form of the object and, while I noticed many disheartening differences
from the digital copy of a copy, I don’t doubt that my experience of the film
wouldn’t be terribly different had I watched it digitally
instead of chemical film.
Still, I earned an
appreciation for the work carried out by those who digitize and markup “classic”
works for a living. They need to recognize the best way to represent the work
in digital form in order to ensure that the experience can be continued,
despite the idiosyncrasies of future projection methods.
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