El título del hilo hace referencia a la frase final que me gustó mucho.
Me parece que esta muy bueno el artículo. Creo que algo se ha hablado sobre esto en algún lado por acá, pero no pude encontrar el foro, no obstante este artículo tiene más puntas.The Incredible Shrinking Movies
Video iPods pose a threat to the filmgoing experience -- but they also offer an opportunity
October 29, 2005; Page P4
Norma Desmond didn't know the half of it. When she made her celebrated remark in "Sunset Boulevard" about the pictures having gotten small, it was barely imaginable that they would shrink beyond the size of a TV screen to that of a computer display, or now, if the downloaders and file-sharers have their way, to the peek-a-boo dimensions of the video iPod. (A few days after that new model hit the stores, I overheard a twenty-something in a restaurant telling his girlfriend that someone would soon find a way to play feature films as well as music videos and TV shows on the nifty little gizmos. I'll bet he's right, if a way hasn't been found already.) Our relationship with movies is changing swiftly, but what does the seemingly inexorable move to smaller screens imply for a medium that used to come in one size only: extra large?
It implies losses, to be sure, especially the loss of social contact. Rather than files to be shared -- a prospect more chilling to the movie industry than any Halloween horror ever put on film -- the movies have been, until recently, emotional adventures to be shared in the mysterious, immersive darkness of a vast chamber. We knew that the images came out of a projector, but they inhabited the screen as if by magic, shimmering in their hyperreality. Still, there will always be movies -- at least one hopes so -- that demand a giant field to play on. No home entertainment center can do full justice to the visual grandeur of "Lawrence of Arabia," "2001: A Space Odyssey," "The Godfather," "Star Wars," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" or "The Conformist," the last of which, dismayingly, isn't even available on a decent DVD.
In the same way, of course, conventional multiplexes can't match the majesty of IMAX theaters, where the screens are so big that our sense of a proscenium disappears, making us both spectators and giddy participants. Yet an immersive experience doesn't depend on screen size alone. Other elements in the mix include audio quality coupled with stereo presence (thus the success of the iPod and the Walkman before it), the purity of the image (soon to make a dramatic leap with the advent of high-definition DVDs) and the quality of the display that turns an electronic signal into vivid drama, comedy or hurtling action. Although theater owners would rather not hear it, home-entertainment components currently available for much less than a king's ransom -- large flat-panel screens, progressive-scan DVD players, surround-sound speakers and authoritatively thumping subwoofers -- can do impressive if not full justice to most films that most movie lovers are likely to watch on them.
This means not only quaint old animal stories like "All Things Great and Small," great small features like "Big Night," or distinctive Hollywood fantasies like "Big," but films with densely populated frames that would seem to suffer from anything but theatrical exhibition: Robert Altman's "McCabe and Mrs. Miller," Barry Sonnenfeld's "Men in Black," Martin Scorsese's "Goodfellas" or, to cite a more recent release shot partly in Kenya, "The Constant Gardner," with its remarkably intense sense of place.
I talked about this a few days ago during a chance encounter -- at a kids' pumpkin-carving party -- with Jon Amiel, the director of the 1986 BBC miniseries "The Singing Detective." His production still stands as one of the few masterworks of the TV medium and is so richly detailed as to blur the distinction between big and small screen. "People talk a lot of nonsense about screen size," he said, and misunderstand the wide-screen format, which is often thought to be appropriate mainly for spectacles or outdoor vistas. In his view, the wide screen, whether in a theater or a home, provides us with valuable context. Instead of being confronted by screen-filling close-ups of faces on conventional screens, we're able to see where people belong in relation to one another or their surroundings. This was a new notion for me, and significant in the context of today's home theaters.
But what about watching movies on personal computers, as many airline passengers already do? (We won't talk about the primitive projectors, dim screens and fuzzy images that most passengers put up with.) That's a different class of experience with a different potential benefit, along with the obvious loss of image size and aesthetic stature. It's an intimate experience, one that is related, albeit at some distance, to reading a book. You can put the movie down. You can pick it up again and study part of it closely, or flip through it to find and revisit a favorite passage.
This sort of intimacy with moving images may well be part of a future in which huge spectacles will still be projected on huge screens in a few big theaters and the majority of movie lovers, young and old (old meaning the over-30s or 40s who've lost the theatergoing habit) will watch hot new DVDs on cool home screens. At the same time, little computers, or devices like them, will become the exhibition medium of choice for small, esoteric films that may enjoy the same limited status as today's literary novels. A bright future for some, a dim one for others, but definitely a wide one.
Saludos.
