Celluloid Goes Digital: Historical-Critical Editions of Films on DVD and the Internet: Proceedings of the First International Trier Conference on Film and New Media, October 2002 (review)

Unquestionably, the DVD (Digital Versatile Disc) is the most successful carrier medium in moving image history. Introduced only in 1997, the DVD has managed to become the most influential and innovative platform for the moving image. In 2002 every fifth household in Germany and 40 percent of American households already had a DVD player. The Motion Picture Association's published revenues for 2002 indicate that American studios organized by MPA earned $37.3 billion, of which commercial theaters earned $6.7 billion and the home market had a share of 43.7 percent ($16.3 billion). The VHS format lost 12 percent market share, while DVDs increased theirs by 82 percent.¹ The fundamental consequences of digitalization for movie production, postproduction, and distribution can probably only be compared with the sea change brought about by the transition from silent to sound film at the end of the 1920s.²

The DVD integrates ideas of a "Gesamtkunstwerk" not only by allowing the transfer of film to disc, but also by capturing for the consumer separate language tracks, varying subtitles, the making-of material, interviews with directors, actors, cameramen, composers, or visual effect supervisors, as well as written sources or deleted scenes. Seemingly the dreams of cinephiles have come true. Today the DVD has surpassed the videocassette in most markets, its phenomenal expansion almost unbelievable given the present economic crisis in many countries. The DVD revolution also entails the redesign of the private viewing sphere, creating perfect home cinemas with highly developed sound systems. The superior image quality allows DVDs to compete with broadcast television as well, since the introduction of high-definition television has lagged behind expectations.

Usually, a new medium takes several decades from its genesis to finding a successful place in the market. If it fails to find a market, it disappears. Compared to the unsuccessful attempts to introduce laser and image discs in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the DVD immediately earned a reputation as the industry's fastest-growing media for distributing moving images.

Strangely, digital content on DVD has not been surrounded by discourses of conflict between educational aspirations and crass commercialization. That battle raged in film, radio, television, video, and the Internet, where the classical conflict between pure entertainment versus education and enlightenment was won by the for-profit sector by selling to the public the argument that these new media would educate people and democratize media usage. Furthermore, it was promised that everyone would participate in and learn from the general availability of high culture. In other words, the social introduction of new media was legitimized as a distribution mechanism to the masses of cultural artifacts and events previously accessible only to the wealthy. Media history thus inevitably ends sooner or later with the victory of commercial entertainment, the final argument being that not enough people cared about serious content.

DVDs, on the other hand, have been created and accepted as commercial products for distributing mainstream culture even as they seek to create a veneer of respectability as a medium conducive to serious experiment. Given the critical mass of educational and intellectual material now available on DVD, it is surprising that only now have academics, film historians, archivists, and people involved in educational media begun to reflect on the social, political, aesthetic, and economic value of DVDs, DVD-ROMs, and the Internet. Furthermore, discussions have begun on the methodologies of creating historically accurate, critical editions of films. In October 2002 the University of Trier on Germany's far western border organized the conference "Celluloid Goes Digital."³ Probably one of the first of its kind to deal with academic utilization of DVDs, the conference offered vendors like Criterion Edition and Film Preservation Associates the opportunity to present some of their brilliant examples, but it also allowed participants and speakers to discuss strategies...