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Sunday, June 15, 2008
What’s the Original?
When an editor decideds to do a new edition of a classic text, he or she has to decide just what text to print. A text is likely to exist in several different forms - several printings of several editions, perhaps a manuscript or two - which differ in various ways. Some differences among versions may reflect printer error, others are matters of authorial or editorial choice; but it may not be easy to assign causes to variations. Whether the variations are minor or consequential, the editor has to decide just what to print in the new edition.
Similar problems arise in preparing a DVD transfer of a film. David Bordwell discusses these problems while reporting remarks by Grover Crisp, Senior VP of Asset Management, Film Restoration, and Digital Mastering for Sony:
Grover offers this nugget of wisdom: It is almost impossible to get an older film to look the way it does when it was originally released. The color will never look as it did, nor will sound sound the way it did. Film stocks have changed, printing processes have changed, technology in general has changed. Every version is an approximation, though some approximations may be better than others. Take consolation in the fact that even when the movie was in circulation, it may have already existed in multiple versions.
Comments
There’s a rich (and vicious) history of such discussions—I’ve quarrelled over “Jubilate Agno” and the Vertigo restoration myself, and just last weekend I read a (behind the paywall) essay about Edward FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam by one of its scholarly editors: “My own [view] has always been that the first edition of 1859 is incomparably the best. The second edition of the poem [prepared by FitzGerald] is irredeemably bad once you have read the first.”
Crisp’s admission that there’s no unambiguous access to “the original experience” is eminently sensible, but doesn’t give the editor a heuristic to work by or the marketing department a hook to sell. People don’t seem as interested in “the Walter Murch Touch of Evil remix” as in “Orson Welle’s restored Touch of Evil.”