What is the best way to watch your favourite movie? As technology has progressed, the options have only grown more numerous. Having to go to a cinema used to be synonymous with seeing a film, before home television began its gradual but unyielding incursion into viewing habits. For readers alive for the same timespan as me, the progression from videotape via various discs to streaming has transformed film viewing in your lifetime.
To the list of available viewing mediums we can add one you may not have heard of: the “35mm scan”, a digital file you download from an anonymous link that isn’t any official home release of the film. Instead, an enterprising fan has gotten ahold of a set of reels from when the film was shown in pre-digital cinemas. Armed with these, they have secured the use of a professional scanner used to digitize film, and have made their own version for home viewing. These scans are highly prized for their scarcity and their perceived proximity to seeing the film in the cinema.
I will tell you up front: whenever I hear about one of these scans I bristle. The world of colour science, the nitty-gritty detail in how an image goes from being staged in front of a camera to being displayed on a screen, is a complicated and subtle one. Seeing a scan advertised on twitter via a slapped-together comparison of different frames in from different releases showing different colour tones as if it proves something sticks in the craw. Making a home release of a movie is always a process of compromise; the dialogue around 35mm scans erases this complexity.
When people talk about having seen a film they do it just like that: have you seen the film? A single, unitary experience. But this cannot possibly be the case. Every viewing of a film is unique across a breadth of categories. Did you see it in 3D? In IMAX? On Bluray? On 4K Bluray? On streaming? Cropped to 16:9? The director’s cut? Which director’s cut? In HDR? In the daytime? In HDR in the daytime? And so on. An alien observing from orbit might conclude that no two viewings of a film are comparable, that every one is utterly unique. In practice people actually don’t really think about this, or if they do they decide for themselves whether or not their viewing of the film was sufficient. People may choose to supplement a film they saw on DVD with a trip to the cinema if it comes back around. People may consider that if they watched the airplane edit of a given film, they still need to see the real thing. Conversely, people may seek a censored cut out as a particular experience — ‘stranger in the alps’ and such.
In the rough hierarchy of preferable viewing scenarios, cinemas and distributors have gotten wise to a few successful approaches. It’s not uncommon for a big action film to receive an ‘IMAX cut’, with some scenes shot for the full frame IMAX format — and when the time comes, with some scenes available to be shown pillarboxed at home. Of course there are 3D presentations also, and adventurous directors have pursued high frame rate showings. But the real prestige is being shown on film, real physical film. Tarantino ran a roadshow of viewings of ‘Hateful Eight’ in the 70mm format. Arthouse cinemas and megaplexes alike boast of special 35mm showings.
Why is real film so revered? Is it entirely down due to the mystical draw of film grain, the organic distribution of structure in the chemicals that resolve into an image? By the time film stopped being the major format of distribution though, film stock was capable of having very little natural grain. And conversely, digital grain has been largely indistinguishable from the real thing for many years — some directors going so far as to have blank film processed and scanned so that a unique grain can be applied to a digital negative. One of the ironies of film production is that grain, which is so prized by the end consumer as a mark of quality, must be removed for the visual effects process to function. Individual elements cannot appear to have more or less grain, so for visual effects shots it all gets removed at the start of the process and replaced again at the end.
I saw Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in 35mm on release, at an excellent cinema. It’s a great film, but I can’t say that the chemical medium enhanced the viewing at all. Simulated grain has long being indistinguishable from the real thing. Frankly, seeing any film in a proper cinema will elevate it — the controlled environment, the dark room, the commitment to not being able to pause the damn thing and compulsively scroll on your phone for a while.
I suspect though that at the root of the question is the authenticity fetish: the analog film experience, joining the vinyl record and the manual gearbox car, is simply more “real”, more tactile, desirable for what it represents rather than any particular positive aspect of the experience it provides. Which isn’t to say that these things don’t have tangible appeals of their own — just that the cosmic first mover is the nostalgic impulse. As the slogan goes, 35mm film is ‘The Real Thing.’
The dark cousin of the real film screening, the home viewing equivalent, is the phenomenon of the ‘35mm scan’. The news often flies round Twitter: some brave soul has unspooled a prized 35mm print of some classic movie and scanned it in, delivering a true unmediated experience of the film in question for the first time outside of a cinema and at home. Unmediated by what? Well, by the process of home release which — it is implied — goes beyond merely presenting a movie and into tampering with it, presumably with sinister intent. The print, by virtue of having laid untouched since the movie was released in cinemas, represents another level of purity of artistic endeavour — the original, before any revisions could be made.
The phantom at the feast here is George Lucas, pioneer both of digital filmmaking and of tampering with films post-release. The phenomenon of the 35mm scan is presaged by the phenomenon of the ‘despecialised cut’, a decades-long effort by fans of Star Wars to wind back the clock on Lucas’s special editions and produce the authentic original Star Wars as seen in cinemas in 1977. Many expected the purchase of Star Wars by Disney to result in a release of these stolen treasures, but none has appeared — perhaps lending credence to the theory that the production of the special editions involved dismantling and repurposing all the remaining viable film elements of the original cuts. ‘Despecialised cuts’ proliferate, despite the stated goal being to return to the original truth of Star Wars. Fans cannot agree, it turns out, on exactly which elements of the special editions are authentic and inauthentic. Everyone can get mad at the cartoon dinosaur, but perhaps they don’t think the lightsabers should be white, or that matte lines on model X-wings deserve to be squirreled away. Despite years of effort, the single truth of Star Wars continues to elude capture.
There are different versions because there are different screens. Any TV whether in the past or today is fundamentally different to a cinema screen. Back in the day this was so straightforward and obvious that no-one questioned it: Your crummy CRT TV could barely display a TV channel correctly (especially if you were North American, suffering under the yoke of the NTSC colour system), let alone compete with the screen at the cinema. Before we even get to the quality of the image, for much of the history of the television the screen was a different shape. This makes a good analogy: much as pan-and-scan cut the physical size of the frame to fit the restrictions of TV, a similar job needs to be done to fit the superior contrast and colour of a 35mm image to what is possible on, and what would look good on, an average TV.
The trouble is that while this need to reformat is now much less obvious — our TVs are bigger, brighter, more colourful than ever — it hasn’t gone away. Cinemas are (mostly) still projected using xenon bulbs, which give a quality of light totally unlike any display technology you’re likely to interact with. Cinema projectors can reliably reproduce colour in excess of the majority of home screens. One of the reasons that 35mm film continued as long as it did as the format of choice for directors was that it is capable of capturing dynamic range — contrast — well in excess of what the average video camera can capture, or TV screen can display. Every film pushed to home video or TV broadcast is reformatted to mitigate these differences. As screen technology advances, the change becomes more subtle but no less essential.
Once you’ve accepted that every version for home viewing is an adaptation, a deviation away from the cinema experience — and that itself depending on the calibration and capability of the projector used — you start to understand what’s so pernicious about the phenomenon of the “35mm scan”. Because the implicit claim is that by going straight to the film print as a source of truth you’re avoiding all this inconsistency — but in fact you’re simply entrusting it to the hands of a well-meaning amateur. Someone still needs to handle how the dynamic range of film is mapped to the more limited range of video. It’s just either going to be the call of whoever prepares the scan, or worse still: the default settings of the scanning software.
It’s a whirling vortex of uncertainty — to achieve the goal of adapting an accurate presentation of a specific 35mm print of a film for home video, you’re forced first to assume the accuracy of your scanner, then of the colour science of the scanning software, then of whatever tools you use to package the scan into a video. This is before you’ve considered whether there are any colour casts or degradation on the print itself that would need to be compensated for — if you had a reference to compare them with. With all that done, you can’t say anything certain about how the print looked when originally shown in a cinema other than that it was definitely illuminated with a bulb with a totally different tone to your screen.
And of course, if you’re in the business of thinking that home releases are being chronically mis-coloured, you’re probably bringing your own biases to the table. The scanning software has tempting sliders for contrast and sliders for saturation and all sorts of other options. Let’s all hope your display is well-calibrated when you nudge the white balance a little warmer — after all, isn’t that how it was in the cinema? Most often when one of these scans turns up the argument from first principles is moot: the author has clearly jumped right in and tried to grade the film to their memory and preferences rather than the boring old scientific process that might not end up looking very good anyway.
Well, why shouldn’t people make their own grades? It is after all a creative process, and there’s no more reason to believe that art cannot come from this process than there is to believe art can’t come from a re-cut or mash-up. I certainly think people should be able to do their own grades. What I can’t concede is locating in these efforts any authenticity, this fiction of a ‘perfect’ rendition of the film that is being denied to us by greedy corporations or fickle creatives. The truth is back where we started, with our alien observer: there is no perfect rendition, in fact there are no common renditions whatsoever. Every time a film is played is unique. The place, the time, the heat, the humidity, the age of your eyes. Much remains the same; more changes. A 35mm scan is no more able to take you back than a grotty old VHS.
I think for lots of people the appeal of these scans is surely that of the cult: the insider knowledge, the initiation. Sure, you know The Matrix. But do you really know it? My carefully cultivated Plex library can show it to you in original cool blues instead of corporate-approved green. Original grades, open mattes, extended TV cuts: there’s something a bit “rare Pokémon cards” about it all.
Directors are not immune to correcting against the vision in their memory either: later home releases have often “fixed” perceived issues with earlier ones, if not while introducing new ones. James Cameron is infamous for ramping up the digital noise reduction on his new releases to the point of parody. And of course George Lucas was making even special-er editions of Star Wars right up until he signed on the dotted line with Disney.
It all speaks to the malleability of the experience, to the unique force of watching a movie over and again, discovering new things to love and new things to hate. Just don’t tell me that this one has the colours right.
If you enjoyed this essay-length whinge, please watch my video essay The Fanatic, available now with a short companion essay kindly published by Blood Knife. If you’re after more text, please follow me here on Medium or subscribe to my Letterboxd reviews. I also post regularly on Bluesky.
