Page "Pan and scan" Paragraph 9

Some directors still balk at the use of " pan and scan " versions of their movies because they feel it compromises the directorial vision with which their movies were created.

For instance, Sydney Pollack brought a lawsuit against Danish TV after screening his 1975 film Three Days of the Condor in pan-and-scan in 1991 ( The court ruled that the pan scanning conducted by Danish television was a ' mutilation ' of the film and a violation of Pollack's ' Droit Moral ', his legal right as an artist to maintain his reputation by protecting the integrity of his work.

Nonetheless, the court ruled in favor of the defendant on a technicality ).

Steven Spielberg initially refused to release a pan-and-scan version of Raiders of the Lost Ark but eventually gave in ( although he successfully ordered the letterboxed format for the home video releases of The Color Purple and Always ); Woody Allen refused altogether to release one of Manhattan, the letterbox version is therefore the only version available on VHS and DVD.

Any tampering with the original image of a film, particularly to crop it to fit a television screen, implies a compromise of the original image, and the cropping of a widescreen image to a full screen image for standard televisions requires skill by a film editor to prevent undue loss of elements of the composition.