Pan and Scan - Reactions

Reactions

Some directors still balk at the use of "pan and scan" because they feel it compromises the directorial vision with which their movies were created. For instance, Sydney Pollack brought a lawsuit against Danish TV after a screening of his 1975 film Three Days of the Condor in pan-and-scan in 1991 (The court ruled that the pan scanning conducted by Danish television was a 'mutilation' of the film and a violation of Pollack's 'Droit Moral', his legal right as an artist to maintain his reputation by protecting the integrity of his work. Nonetheless, the court ruled in favor of the defendant on a technicality). Steven Spielberg initially refused to release a pan-and-scan version of Raiders of the Lost Ark but eventually gave in (although he successfully ordered the letterboxed format for the home video releases of The Color Purple and Always); Woody Allen refused altogether to release one of Manhattan, the letterbox version is therefore the only version available on VHS and DVD even though one VHS release includes the typical pan-and-scan disclaimer on the cover. Any tampering with the original image of a film, particularly to crop it to fit a television screen, implies a compromise of the original image, and the cropping of a widescreen image to a full screen image for standard televisions requires skill by a film editor to prevent undue loss of elements of the composition.