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Criterion's telecine supervisors, Maria Palazzola and Lee Kline, scour the world
for the best available film elements, a process that can take months or even
years. In some cases, even restored elements may not be good enough for Criterion
transfers. Before transferring Michael Powell's and Emeric Pressburger's The
Red Shoes, for example, we bypassed a recent restoration in favor of a
35-millimeter negative made from the original three-strip Technicolor
separations, effectively restoring the film specially for our release. To be sure
that the end result was all we hoped it could be, we asked the original
cinematographer, Jack Cardiff, known as the king of English Technicolor, to
supervise the process, and he was so pleased with the results that he recently
wrote us saying that the film looked "better than it did all those years ago."
Filmmakers enjoy working with Criterion to create first-class editions of their films, especially because Criterion has never amputated part of the frame to make it fit into a television set. Criterion was the first label to adopt the practice of "letterboxing" the frame, by placing black bars at the top and the bottom of a widescreen film, so the image you're seeing is truly the image the filmmaker shot. Take this example from David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia. Shot in Cinemascope, the aspect ratio of the image as it was shown theatrically was 2.65:1, or 2.65 times wider than it is high. A television's aspect ratio is only 1.33:1. Some compromise is inevitable, but before Criterion began letterboxing films, the only home-video versions of Lawrence of Arabia, showed barely half the frame. Letterboxing preserves the entire frame, as you can see, fitting it into a television set while respecting the filmmaker's vision.
Every Criterion Collection laserdisc begins with this care and attention to film
transfers, and the success of Criterion's editions has led even the major studios
to offer widescreen versions of their major films. We take pride in the role
we've played in preserving the art of film, and we are grateful to the discerning
audience that has given Criterion its success.