Moby Dick

We only see the final product when it comes to home video releases, and theatrical screenings of film-based projection elements are only growing rarer, so it's very easy for us to overlook the difficulties that are involved in transferring and preparing the visual qualities of pre-digital-era movies for presentation on DVD or Blu-ray.

The texture of film itself is an amorphous thing, and its appearance varies greatly depending on the era of the production, the specific film stock that was used, the way the film was printed, and innumerable other factors. This level of print-by-print disparity is also true with regard to various other decisions made by the filmmakers and relating to the color palette, such as saturation and brightness levels. In theory, all this specific information is "stored" by the physical negative for the film, and it's this medium that is, ideally, what will be transferred into a digital video file. Or, as in the strange case of John Huston's "Moby Dick" adaptation -- now out on Blu-ray via a limited edition release from Twilight Time -- the intended palette might not even be on the negative at all.

One of the extra features on the new disc, "A Bleached Whale," explains the unique situation quite thoroughly (despite only running for a few minutes). For their film, Huston and cinematographer Oswald Morris hoped to re-create the palette and textures of whaling prints from centuries past. In those prints, detail was intense despite a deliberate lack of vibrancy, and to re-create such a look within moving images would require meticulous post-production work. They achieved that by way of a specialized printing process utilized by Technicolor as exhibition prints of "Moby Dick" were originally struck -- meaning that the effects of that technique are not apparent on the negative itself, which in turn means that prior home video releases, sourced from that negative, did not accurately represent the intended presentation of the film.

In the short piece, preservationist Greg Kimble explains the many steps taken to get to this particular final product. First they found the original negative, which was no longer suitable for high-definition transfer (adding even more restoration work to the queue). Then they needed to obtain a preserved print of the original Technicolor-struck release (no minor task) so that their chosen source elements could be matched up against the 35mm prints Technicolor had struck for the 1956 release. That required further aesthetic detective work, leading to findings some might think counterintuitive: To achieve Huston's intended palette, the team handling the transfer brightened the image, then desaturated those brightened colors afterwards.

In addition to this much-appreciated restoration, Twilight Time's Blu-ray release includes a number of other special features: A booklet featuring an essay by Julie Kirgo (including some characteristically witty quotes from the late Mr. Huston), an audio commentary track (with Kirgo, Nick Redman, and Paul Seydor), an isolated score audio track (the compositions are credited to Philip Sainton), and an archive of marketing materials (including a theatrical trailer, as well as a stills gallery that collects together printed advertisements.)

But the strongest appeal of the release -- the "white whale," perhaps, to Huston devotees -- is the presentation of the film itself. With shooting locations across both seas and soundstages, in Europe and elsewhere, Huston crafted "Moby Dick" as his most physically arduous film to that time. The director, who began as a painter, always had an artist's eye for the composition of close-ups, but in "Moby Dick" he's more of an action illustrator. There is, of course, a focus on his Ahab (Gregory Peck) and his Ishmael (Richard Basehart). They're given a narrative that's been streamlined from the novel, emphasized for action, and stripped of the many workaday passages regarding the process of whaling and daily life within the profession. But all those written details emerge elsewhere, in the rigorously-illustrated compositions of the ship's battered textures, and of the the ominously-tinted waves that do the battering. Huston may have streamlined "Moby Dick," but that's not to say he simplified it. Better to say that he managed the Ahabian task of visualizing it.

"Moby Dick"
Blu-ray
$29.95
Screenarchives.com