Through the Letterbox
In this era of IMAX, Dolby Surround sound number whatever, CGI and pyrotechnics, an old black and white film from the 1930’s or 40’s doesn’t do much to capture attention. But one can appreciate the slower pace, the crafting of the dialogue, as well as the use of shadow. Back in the day, when you didn’t have special effects, that is what you relied on, and I appreciate the artistry of it.
As you can imagine, I am often tuned to the Turner Classic Movies channel, or TCM. Because it is commercial free, they fill the gaps between movies with interviews, classic short films, and some original content.
Every now and then, though, you see something that gets you thinking about today. It’s not always a clear lesson, but something puts your mind to a useful analogy for our times.
On occasion, TCM has aired what can only be described as a ‘short documentary’ on ‘Letterboxing.’ As a classic film buff, I found it interesting. As a political person, I found it strangely revelatory.
‘Letterboxing’ is a term that refers to the shape of the viewing screen. As with its namesake, the shape is more rectangular. Often, when you see a film broadcast in letterbox, or from a Blu-ray disc, there is black space at the top and bottom of the screen.
Many of the films presented in letterbox format are ones where the imagery is on a more expansive scale – think the classic chariot scene in Ben-Hur with Charlton Heston, or David Lean’s ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. In these films, the use of background is just as important as the action between the main actors. To appreciate the context of what you see between the protagonists, you need to also have an appreciation of their situation. The chariot scene in the former needs a large coliseum, replete with crowds, pageantry and grandeur. To understand the overwhelming nature of the desert in the latter film, you need to see just how small the people are against it.
In other words, context is everything.
Just as Hollywood was beginning to develop Cinemascope and Vistavision and all sorts of larger scale cinematography, television was also coming into its own. Studios saw the opportunity to have their films broadcast for the home audience, which was good for both the studios and the networks. There was, however, a catch.
Televisions of the 1950’s and 1960’s had square screens and not the greatest quality resolution. Taking a film like ‘The Ten Commandments’ and putting it on a black and white analog television whose screen was barely larger than a laptop computer was not an easy process. It was fitting a rectangular peg into a square hole, and it would not work without some adaptation.
The workaround was something called ‘pan and scan’. While the layperson might not have known what that was, it was the reason why some television broadcasts and VHS tapes used to carry the disclaimer at the beginning that what you were about to see was ‘formatted to fit your screen.’
‘Formatting’ is a rather innocuous term for what was really a major reworking of a film. You would look at the film in its unadulterated state, isolate a square of the image that, in the opinion of the editor, captured the essence of the action, ignore the rest and magnify the part you intended to keep.
The documentary demonstrates the phenomenon well. With graphics, they play scenes from Ben-Hur, Lawrence of Arabia, Gigi, and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. You see both the pan and scan version, which is silhouetted in a square, as well as the rest of the scene that would not be used. After seeing what is done, it is hard to disagree with director Martin Scorsese when he argues that ‘pan and scan’ is nothing less than ‘re-directing the film’.
Other directors in the short, such as Michael Mann and Sydney Pollack, explain that each scene is a composition, with every person and thing on camera meant to convey the story. Change the view, and you change the narrative. By way of illustration, an image of Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper’ is shown subject to ‘pan and scan’, where the square contains Jesus and no more than two disciples to either side of him.
‘Pan and scan’ is the perfect analogy for much of what people like to call “fake news.” Stories go through several filters from the time they happen to the time you see them – what the reporter notices and records, what they write as a draft, and what the editor allows. Each of these actors are, technically, redirecting the event. In fairness, this is not always conscious. The people who bring us accounts of the who, what, why, when and where are just that – people. Even the most perceptive human alive does not have a perfect ability to recount the richness
This has always been the problem with the allegation of “fakeness,” because often it is the altering of perspective and not the facts. A car looks different from the side than the front, but we can hardly say that they are two completely different objects because of it.
Look up the word ‘fake’ in the Oxford Dictionary, you get the adjective variant of the word meaning ‘Not genuine; imitation or counterfeit’. The logic follows that the term ‘fake news’ would infer ‘news’ that is just that – not genuine, imitation or counterfeit.
That ‘fake news’ exists is a hard point to dispute. If an accident is reported to have happened on the corner of Main and Central at 1 am on a Saturday, and it simply did not occur at that time and location, it is an easy call. But what if it did happen, and it’s just a dispute over whether the accident was “major” or simply a “minor fender bender?”
Constructing a full fiction can easily be considered ‘fake news’ or ‘alternative facts’, but if you ‘pan and scan’ the who, what, when, where and why, is it still technically ‘fake’?
My point is that this issue has always been with us. We just seem to notice it more.
Unfortunately, it is also unavoidable.
When the responsibility of conveying events to the broader public, and committing them as a matter of record, is left to a handful of individuals, and those recollections are subject to the editorial policies of an even smaller group, you will always incur the danger of getting a story that takes a particular point of view or perspective. It cannot be helped.
When you read or see a recount of an event, you are reading or watching what the communicator has deemed important. The camera points in one specific direction for an extended period of time to the exclusion of other concurrent events, or the article contains two paragraphs about a single aspect of the story, and gives one sentence to another.
Truth be told, there have always been aspects of reportage that have been dubious on veracity. Crack open a history book, or do a little investigation, and you will find that newspapers has often taken a slant. In the early days of the American republic, rival publications skewered John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in equally lurid measure, much based on rumour and supposition. In the lead up to Canadian confederation, George Brown – the chief political rival of Sir John A. Macdonald – also helmed the Toronto Globe, with its editorial policy reflecting his philosophical bent.
Closer to our time, one could consider the rather pro-active editorial policy of William Randolph Hearst which, some suggest, drove public sentiment during the Spanish-American War, thereby creating a legend around the exploits of future President Theodore Roosevelt and his ‘Rough Riders.’ In Britain, one can also look at the policy of discretion employed by press barons during the 1930’s as it related to the coverage of King Edward and Wallis Simpson.
Today in Canada, various large newspapers – the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, and the Postmedia chain of papers – are routinely accused of favouring one side over another. One paper declares the glass to be half full, while the other decries that it is half empty, and yet another questions why we are using a glass to begin with?
Think about yourself, and how you interpret events in your personal life – at home, at school, or at work. How do you recount the who, what, when, where and why? Would someone else with first-hand knowledge tell it exactly the same way?
There are those who blame social media for the rise of ‘fake news.’ They are correct, but not in the way they think. We are exposed to more – more content and from more sources. Each one of those sources is, like a movie production, with individual editors controlling the camera angle from their specific piece of equipment, and the consumer seeing the unedited raw footage – the “dailies” – from all angles.
We used to be the passive movie goer, sitting in a darkened theatre and swallowing handfuls of popcorn. Now, we are both the film editor and director in one. The onus is on us to decide what makes the release and what ends up on the cutting room floor – and like those who used to curate our information, we are no less biased in our perspective.
So what is to be done?
Sadly, nothing – for the alternatives are to either have the responsibility of curating your own diet of information or to go back to having someone else do it for you - which means rationing what you see and hear.
In the end, though, the answer may just lie in the two things we are all born with – innate curiosity, and a desire to know the truth. How we use it can be trained and honed, but it’s a gift every one of us has. We just need to use it a little more often than we used to.
So if our lives are like a movie on a wide screen in IMAX, we may just have to watch it more than once to appreciate the full story.