So my associative experience with 16mm film projection? Some combination of awe over moon landings, malnourishment (70s health food was a much different [soy-based] beast than what is available today), and primarily discomfort and slight concerns over my safety in case I made a reference to Loni Anderson or Soap. In my mind, viewing a film film in a non-theatrical venue equates to nervousness, low level fear, and hunger.

In the field of film preservation, cinephilia has often been a driving force. However, there has been a gnawing concern in the back of mind that the worm will turn…or has turned. It seems that fetishization of the object – the reification of film, video, or whatever carrier – can equally be a detriment to preservation.

In spite of it all you can still think the whole thing is unmediated reality, captured and being replayed before your very eyes. Outside the frame informs and contributes to creation, but inside the frame lives and breathes and exists as a separate entity.

This dichotomous education either makes me very well-rounded or extremely useless.

I can’t call that an endorsement as I’m not so sure I agree with many of his cinematic tastes (sorry, dad, still haven’t watched the DVD of Tombstone you sent), but then again, I’m not so sure I would be going to things like Hausu at the IFC or W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism at BAM without having been exposed to his glee at certain films (Raising Arizona, So I Married an Ax Murderer) or without my mom’s feeding of a precocious five-year-old’s interest in Hitchcock, Godzilla, and Universal horror films.

Only the successes (or the mega failures) from the deeper past are recalled, giving an skewed sense of what actually happened if one doesn’t do proper research. Without that research, the half-remembered past is not a valid touchstone to base an argument on. An incomplete picture of the past creates a false interpretation of the present.

What I gleaned as one of the core argument from each piece is that the greatness of cinema is in the beauty of the image, the beauty of storytelling, and the creation of a dreamworld of sorts that we access through viewing and are able to keep segmented into its proper place as fantasy and not real life. The other half of this argument is that there isn’t really much evidence that people are compelled to imitate the acts they see on screen, which is one of the big arguments for ratings and censorship. There’s some nice paradoxical reasoning here: You can’t say that moving images dig into the mind and inspire people to do ill, but moving images dig into the mind and inspire people.

Reading this reminded me of one of my pet peeves, one which I have been trying to avoid encountering the past year and a half: The taken as gospel historical interpretation that film attendance rose and movies solaced us during the Depression. This hoary, supposed truism is marched out whenever financially rough times arise or are spoken about, the current recession included.

Actually, I think the real problem here is the eternal confusion over preservation and DVDs, something D’Addario almost touches on but doesn’t state clearly enough, and his confusion over the issue is partly what seems to be fueling his anger over Criterion’s dealings. To state it most simply, a DVD is not preservation. It is the result of preservation work, but it is not the preservation. That is done with the film which is eventually transferred to DVD for a wider viewing pleasure.

I don’t know if my nephew got his Oz on this year or if he watched something like Dragonball Z Saves Happy Turkey Day.