The Wizard Of Oz came out on Blu-ray yesterday. The print is amazing. I’ve never cared one way or the other about the movie, but I’m tremendously fascinated by HD remastering of films from the ’30s and earlier (especially Technicolor). It’s easy to forget that movies we’ve seen for years on VHS and fuzzy TBS rebroadcasts were created at the peak of technical prowess for their time, and only now (*70* years later in the case of Oz) can we really get a glimpse of their production quality. It’s another thing I love about film, you can always go back and rescan it.

Technicolor itself is fascinating, too. The process we usually think of was done by shooting three strips of black and white film through red, green, and blue filters simultaneously in a special camera. A mirror split a third of the light onto the green film, the rest going onto the red and blue films which were sandwiched together in the gate. It required a phenomenal amount of light, and the film speed was only 5 ASA to begin with. I have to wonder if the shallow depth of field throughout the Wizard Of Oz was as much a technical necessity as a stylistic choice.

Here’s to 1080p, may the early years of cinematography live on forever.

(via jstn )