A DVD PACKAGE OF BRAKHAGE DELIGHT
By Matt Langdon
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But now, thanks to a collaboration between Brakhage, Western Cine labs and the Criterion Collection, a discriminating, concise and, yes, mostly faithful two-DVD set of 26 Brakhage films has been put together for his fans to enjoy.
Criterion technical director Lee Kline says that the transfers were indeed a challenge but that nothing was lost in the process. The films were transferred through a Spirit DataCine telecine machine to uncompressed D5 HD format in 24P (progressive scan) and then downconverted directly to the MPEG NTSC stream from which the DVD was authored. Says David Phillips, who does in-house authoring for Criterion, the most essential procedure, though, was to pay very close attention to detail. "The Sony [Vizaro] encoder," he says, "had a tough time locking into a cadence with the films, so in many cases we had to go in and change the 3:2 pattern encodes manually."
Phillips concedes that if you go through the DVD frame by frame there will be some artifacting but, ironically, it won’t be as visible as with most regular films. That is because most of Brakhage’s films have the same properties as animated films. Phillips explains: "Most of the time, compression artifacts [are noticeable] in areas of flat [static] color. But there is so much visual detail in [Brakhage’s] frames that the inherent compression artifacts aren’t as noticeable." Another reason the DVD picture quality will be enhanced is because most of the Brakhage films Criterion chose were silent, thus allowing for more space on the disk for video encoding.
According to Criterion president Peter Becker, even though they struck new inter-positives and fine grain masters for each of the films, they wanted to keep the films looking like film without "improving" their looks or restoring them. Thus, they intentionally retained the grainy structure of each and every frame. Concludes film critic Fred Camper, who supervised some of the transfers and has written extensively on Brakhage, "People shouldn’t use [the DVDs] as a substitute for seeing the films on film, [but] this could be a good preparation for getting to know some aspects of his work better."
Fred Camper’s Web site, www.fredcamper.com, includes many links to articles about Brakhage. Criterion’s Web Site is www.criterionco.com.
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