Michael Mann was right: Hi-tech DV is the only way to capture modern Miami--its sunburst flares that turn rolling whitecaps to soft-serve ice cream, its ominously gray night skies that seem flecked, like the water below, with little neon pixels, the picture of industry impinging itself upon nature. I’ll say it: Mann’s Miami Vice (at least in its now-rare theatrical cut) is some kind of new-millennial masterpiece, an aptly oversaturated signpost of how to shoot “America” in extremis.

And yet, as the city itself is full of wild contradictions (what Tony “Scarface” Montana once said of “great big” Miami is vulgarly true), the strongest filmmaking at the 25th annual Miami International Film Festival happens to be a 35mm Techniscope epic from 1969: Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, presented last weekend at the city’s lush ‘20s-era movie palace--the Gusman on Flagler Street--in a print painstakingly restored by Paramount’s veteran archivist Barry Allen under the guidance of Martin Scorsese.

As explained at the Gusman by both Allen (in person) and Scorsese (in a pre-film video message to Miami), the Preservation Screening Program of Scorsese’s nonprofit Film Foundation exists to save great celluloid from the ravages of time and present it (on celluloid!) at select festivals around the world. This heroic endeavor, akin to the Wild Bunch blazing to glory as the Old West fades to black, is well-timed to the extent that repertory cinema lies somewhere between dying and dead in the hi-def era. Blu-ray discs are tantalizing, to be sure. But will the inevitable HD version of Leone’s widescreen Western fantasia begin to approximate all that’s in the rich, gorgeously imperfect Techniscope frame--not just the good and bad, but the ugly, too?

As far as my own eye can see, the industry’s super drive to sell hi-def hardware to the mass audience has knob-twiddling video masterers scrubbing old film images clean of what made them cinematic (and beloved) in the first place--the New West all over again. After the MIFF’s screening, I found Allen in the lobby, congratulated him profusely on his year-long effort, and shared with him my fearful suspicion that the “picture-perfect” future of movies at home will be like beach sand sans grit--without grain, in other words. Allen’s reply, albeit brief, said it all: “Don’t get me started on that.”

# posted by Rob Nelson @ 3/08/2008 10:47:00 AM

Comments (1)

 
Funny, I thought "incest is best"...
# posted by  Anonymous @ 3/10/2008 9:33 AM  

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