Atom Egoyan’s powerful, and often disturbing early work has just been released on Blu-ray. Unfortunately something more troubling than massively dysfunctional relationships lurks at the heart of these releases. I take a very quick look at these releases.
I discovered Atom Egoyan in the summer of 2000. It was a very formative year for me, through work I had the opportunity to spend three months living in New York, soaking up the atmosphere at ground level in one of the best cities on the planet.
Se7en is a dark crime-horror fantasy, written by Andrew Kevin Walker, directed by David Fincher with cinematography by Darius Khondji. The film was a success both commercially and critically. However due to the complexity of the photographic process, it is difficult to be certain that any of the home-video releases reflect the image seen in first run showings. This article will examine the various video releases of Se7en, and explain the process by which they came about, and attempt to pick the best amongst them.
We will look back on the 1990s as an era of television that was viewed through a smudgey porthole of analogue video technology. This is because television production had shifted from using film as the primary editing-medium to using high-band analogue video tape. This was primarily done to save money, and allowed the use of digitally generated titles and effects, but it has left a legacy of television shows that are trapped within a cage of low-definition video.
To understand this problem, it’s first necessary to look at how television was classically produced. Although video cameras have been around since the 1930s, early video recording technology was of very low quality compared to film technology of the same era. Since techniques (telecine) existed for playing back printed film in real-time as a television signal. This meant that episodic drama was generally filmed, and edited on film for later distribution to local affiliate television stations who would play the film back at the appointed hour through a telecine machine.
Some drama was broadcast live using tube based video cameras. If a repeat was desired a film-camera was pointed at a television to record the episode while it was performed in-front of video cameras (Kinescope). The quality of these Kinescope recording was middling at best. One way around this problem was to use an elaborate video/film camera hybrid called a Electronicam that output a video signal while recording to film for later use during repeats.
The Honeymooners still looks good today thanks to being shot on film.
Electronicam was used to record the 1950s US TV show ‘The Honeymooners’, and the quality compared to it’s Kinescope recorded rivals is cited as one of the reasons for the shows long-term success.
By the late 1950s Ampex ‘Quad’ video tape was available, and a few shows began to be recorded. Video editing was still not possible, so shows had to be recorded live with carefully synchronized cameras. The high cost of tape of around $300 an hour meant that there was terrible temptation to re-use tape, and this led to the first great video hole.