"The audience too should be respected by being presented with a film as they remember it, and for those who have not seen it, as it was intended to be seen. Anything less is a degradation of the film and its audience"
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Stevens is arguing for fidelity not as nostalgia, but as basic ethics: the viewer deserves the work, not a compromised substitute. Coming from a director who moved between glossy studio craftsmanship and the moral gravity of postwar filmmaking, the line lands like a quiet rebuke to an industry that treats films as endlessly adjustable assets. The phrasing matters. “As they remember it” concedes that movies live in memory and culture, but he immediately pairs that with “as it was intended to be seen,” anchoring taste in authorship and craft. Respect, here, is technical as much as artistic: framing, contrast, sound mix, pacing, even the grain of the image are part of the storytelling contract.
The subtext is about power. Who gets to decide what a film is once it leaves the editing room: the director, the studio, the broadcaster, the restoration house, the streaming platform optimizing for phones? Stevens anticipates the whole argument about pan-and-scan, TV edits, colorization, director’s cuts marketed as upgrades, and today’s algorithmic remastering that can sand off texture in the name of “clean.” By calling anything less a “degradation,” he refuses the polite euphemisms of “formatting” or “updating.” It’s a moral word, implying not just loss of quality but loss of dignity.
There’s also a canny double move: defending the audience by defending the artifact. He doesn’t romanticize viewers as connoisseurs; he frames them as stakeholders. To alter a film without care isn’t merely to vandalize art, it’s to patronize the public - to assume they’ll accept a diminished version because convenience sells.
The subtext is about power. Who gets to decide what a film is once it leaves the editing room: the director, the studio, the broadcaster, the restoration house, the streaming platform optimizing for phones? Stevens anticipates the whole argument about pan-and-scan, TV edits, colorization, director’s cuts marketed as upgrades, and today’s algorithmic remastering that can sand off texture in the name of “clean.” By calling anything less a “degradation,” he refuses the polite euphemisms of “formatting” or “updating.” It’s a moral word, implying not just loss of quality but loss of dignity.
There’s also a canny double move: defending the audience by defending the artifact. He doesn’t romanticize viewers as connoisseurs; he frames them as stakeholders. To alter a film without care isn’t merely to vandalize art, it’s to patronize the public - to assume they’ll accept a diminished version because convenience sells.
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| Topic | Movie |
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