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To dvd or not to dvd?

Movies go digital, it's a fact. From Bergman to Kurosawa, from Antonioni to Fassbinder, whole oeuvres are opened up to us on dvd. We no longer have to wait for a retrospective in a filmtheatre, we can watch Yojimbo and Katzelmacher in our homes, in front of our dvd sets, treated to perfect images and perfect sound. Lots of movies from all over the world that were not or that were very hard to see before, are suddenly available on dvd. Critics take it serious. Next to their movie columns they have their dvd columns. Not only in specialised magazines, but also in daily newspapers. But what if Samuel Fuller's 35mm masterpiece The Big Red One comes to us in a digitally blurred version, as Chicago critic Gabe Klinger argues. Should we be happy seeing Singin' in the Rain in a brand new digital version which, when projected in a movie theatre, has plastic colors and no depth at all? And what if Simon Field, former director of the International Film Festival Rotterdam, is just dreaming, when saying that the old filmtheatre in Tsai Ming-liangs Goodbye, Dragon Inn will be replaced by a new one which is technically more up to date, and that people will always be wanting to come together to see a film in a public space, whether there's a strip of light or not. Is Tsai Ming-liang just nostalgic? Are we?   Belinda van de Graaf

The Big Red One, Sam Fuller's epic about his World War II combat experience, was severely cut by its original distributors back in 1980. Film critic Richard Schickel has assembled a new version that's 50 minutes longer and considerably richer. At the occasion of a screening In Chicago, Gabe Klinger writes about his impression of the new version.

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