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Consider Alphaville, one of the titles I’m happy to own. The transfer is excellent for a film of its age. It’s doubtful this film ever looked better in your home. However, it is not presented in its original 1.66:1 theatrical aspect ratio, but rather as an unmatted, full-frame version. There is simply no reason for this. Even if Godard intended the film to be shown full frame, or Criterion felt this was a better format for home presentation, one of the great things about a DVD is that it can hold multiple versions of the same film. Criterion could easily have included both versions, allowing us to compare the two ourselves. Additionally, this DVD contains no extras, something that is also true of other Criterion DVDs such as M.
Enter anamorphic encoding. The name is taken from an analogous process used to shoot wide-screen films for the theater. In this process, a film transfer is formatted for a 16:9 high-definition television instead of a standard 4:3 set. This wide-screen image is then squeezed to fit into a regular 4:3 frame. Played back in normal mode, everything would look too tall and thin. But played back on a 16:9 screen or one of the ever-increasing number of 4:3 sets that can emulate one, this image is unsqueezed back to its correct size. The net of this is that the image actually stored on the DVD, because it is taller than the unsqueezed image, makes use of more of the 480 available scan lines to draw the film instead of black bars. This provides about one-third greater vertical resolution on the screen, making a large difference in how the film appears to the viewer. (For those without the capability of displaying 16:9, the DVD player converts the films to a normal letterboxed image.)
Evanston
