When You’re at the Movies, Does Size Really Matter?

In the opening scene of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” James Stewart leaps a rooftop, slips and grabs hold of a gutter, hanging on for his dear life. The camera focuses on his face, horrified as he slowly gazes down at the alley 12 stories below.

It’s a timeless scene in the minds of movie buffs, but one almost completely lost when film professor Gene Stavis watches it on video.

Gone is the illusion of depth that makes for a sweeping backdrop of the San Francisco skyline. Twinkling lights and rooftop neon signs merely blend together when transferred to the pixels of a TV screen. On a 13-inch monitor, Hitchcock’s reverse zoom, meant to convey Stewart’s terror as he glances at the ground below, looks like MTV-inspired camera work.

“To me, it just doesn’t work,” says Stavis, a professor of film at the School of Visual Arts in New York. “In a theater, the image is more powerful, bigger than you are. There’s something incalculable about it.”

Mike Frank, an associate professor of film at Bentley College in Waltham, Mass., couldn’t care less--even if the image is fuzzy, taped on extended play and taken from broadcast TV.

“There are clear failings in video, no one is denying that,” Frank says. “But as far as I can tell, what matters to most people can be gotten from a reasonable video copy.”

Stavis, Frank and other film teachers shared their clashing views recently in an Internet discussion group that raised questions about how much their students were learning in the VHS age. But it is a topic that could just as well apply to most American movie fans, especially those who are aficionados of the classics. Most viewing these days is through videos or cable channels such as AMC and TNT. Undoubtedly the viewing experience is different than seeing the films projected on a theater screen; the question is: Does it matter?

There’s no argument that the picture is framed differently and that the sound quality usually isn’t as good on TV. Where the debate gets testy is over less obvious matters--the light emission, the kinesthetic impression, the communal experience. A fundamental question is raised: Can a film be fully understood when viewed on the small screen? Some purists think not, and that the future of cinematic auteurs is suffering as a result.

“If you look at the films today, you see what happens,” Stavis says. “They are unsubtle. We don’t get much nuance today--the lighting, the sound, the set decoration. The majority of films these days are cartoons.”

As the discussion wound down, it was clear that no one had given an inch.

“This kind of either/or is kind of a fruitless argument,” says Jerry Eisenberg, executive director for electronic media programs at USC. “It’s sort of like, ‘Do you like Macintosh or IBM PC?’ There’s no right answer.”

That’s what he thinks.

As Stavis wrote at one point: “Is a Xerox of an Ansel Adams photograph the same as seeing a beautiful print of the original? In reproducing works of art, we strive for the closest approximation of the original experience. Video is handy, yes, but is that any reason to denigrate a far better representation, which is film?”

Frank responded: “It is obviously easier, less annoying, more pleasant, to read a poem that is printed clearly on clean paper, than it is to read the very same poem handwritten over the print on an old sheet of newspaper . . . but isn’t the poem exactly the same in both cases? Does the text itself change when the medium of delivery changes? On the face of it, it would seem not.”

The film vs. video back-and-forth got its start when Frank sent a message on the Film and TV Studies Discussion List expressing his satisfaction with video after years of frustration trying to round up 16mm film prints.

“I could probably work it out to rent [celluloid prints] occasionally, with great difficulty and great expense,” Frank said later in an interview. “But I have given up. It was just a pain in the ass.”

Instead, Frank relies on video copies he started taping off TV eight years ago--in the extended play format, to save money. Otherwise, the choice was that his students wouldn’t see any movies at all. His conclusion: The TV presentation doesn’t make much of a difference.

“It seems to me that most people who care about the movies these days have questions that don’t require film--the ideological issues, the psychological issues, the structure,” Frank said. “Most of these things are available from video.”

His example is Hitchcock’s 1926 silent movie “The Lodger,” which opens with a woman’s face screaming at the camera, followed by a close-up of a neon sign. Together, the two images convey a mysterious message that lingers throughout the rest of the movie.

“Certain kinds of information do get lost when you convert a film to video, but the question is, ‘Is that information germane to the movie?’ ” Frank said.

Not to 86-year-old director Edward Dmytryk (“Murder, My Sweet,” “Mirage”), who has always taught USC classes using video, including many of his own films. Many times, he prefers the TV medium, given that he can stop the tape and point out technical details.

“Some people like to make esoteric points about it, but for a practical director like me, it doesn’t make a difference,” he says. “Look at ‘Casablanca.’ It looks just as good on tape as it does on screen. And thank God for video. Most of my pictures are on video, even the old, old ones, and they didn’t wear out.”

He points to Roberto Rossellini’s 1945 “Rome, Open City,” an Italian classic made with such a low grade of film stock that some scenes are scratchy or foggy.

“It’s still a great classic,” he says. “No one looks at the quality of the film, but what it has to say. . . . The fact is, you can have the greatest motion picture screening room, but it’s not going to make a good filmmaker.”

But Meryem Ersoz of the University of Oregon would argue that even the message of a film is lost on the small screen, especially with Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane,” regarded by many as the greatest movie ever made.

“Video could not reproduce the meaning of the film,” Ersoz wrote on the Internet. “. . . In practice, the meaning-making function of Welles’ deep focus, his use of vast spaces, his shots of Kane from low angles--all of these things were evacuated of their significance in the video transfer.”

Celluloid purists also say video defenders take too narrow an attitude when they define film as a “text.” As Stavis wrote: “If all one is concerned about is the ‘text,’ then a videotape is perfectly sufficient. But don’t pretend that you are studying ‘cinema.’ ”

Using the School of Visual Arts’ library, Stavis has been able to screen movies in a theater, on a big screen, the way many audiences saw them in their first runs decades ago.

Among them is “It’s a Wonderful Life.” In a theater, with the sound of “Auld Lang Syne” blaring and the picture larger-than-life, the emotional impact is much greater, he says. “It’s a Wonderful Life” comes off as stylized, almost corny on TV, he says. “It’s easy to make fun of it.”

“Invariably, students come to me and say, ‘I saw that movie 20 times on TV, and I have never really noticed it before,’ ” he says. “Unlike video, the movies are not condensed [on the big screen], the images are more powerful than you are. All you can do is walk out.”

Yet even new technology, such as elaborate home theater systems, where screens rival some multiplex theaters, doesn’t replicate the “humbling, exciting, even erotic experience” of watching a movie in the company of strangers, popcorn chomping and all, Stavis and others argue.

“I always feel there isn’t enough air in the room to breathe easy when watching laser projection, no matter how special the . . . transfer on the laser disc may be,” wrote Susan Denker of Tufts University/Museum School in Boston.

All of this, however, is pretty much an academic argument, brought down to reality by the fact that film schools, not to mention regular folks, rarely have the resources to show their favorites on the big screen.

“This is a no-brainer,” concludes Robert Rosen, chairman of UCLA’s Department of Television and Film and director of the Film and Television Archive. “There’s no question that there is nothing better than seeing film on the big screen, larger than life, the way it is meant to be experienced. But if you take the position of ‘Show it on film or show nothing at all,’ I’m afraid ‘nothing’ will win out.”