After reading Pictures at a Revolution, Mark Harris’ history of the crazy movie year that produced Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate et al., I’ve been on one of those Easy Riders, Raging Bulls kicks. Just the other day I was watching Shampoo, Warren Beatty and Hal Ashby’s hilarious, bruising look at the loneliness of the long-distance hedonist.

The ending, while melodramatic, is quite lovely, with Beatty standing on a ridge in the high Hollywood Hills with an inland canyon spread beneath him. Part of what made the image so lovely is the graininess of the film, which, at that point in the narrative, puts an emotional gauze over the wounds Beatty’s character had suffered.

A recent blurb in one of the Wired News blogs took me to the DVD site The Digital Bits, which had an interesting alarum about what might happen to scenes like that when the artistic effects of one generation meet the digital realities of a new one. The column, Bill Hunt’s “My Two Cents,” is here; scroll down to the May 8 entry.

We’ve been getting a few e-mails a week (over the last month or so) from readers who are new to Blu-ray, who say they’re disappointed in the quality of older catalog titles on the format. They disappointed not so much the selection, but the actual video quality. One person said the colors weren’t as vibrant as they were expecting. Another thought the image looked too soft. Several have complained of “noise” on their TV screens when they watched certain older films. It actually took me a while at first to understand what they meant, but now I’ve figured it out… and as a serious film enthusiast, it’s troubling to say the least. That noise some are complaining about? It’s film grain! It seems that many people who came to home theater more recently via DVD, and so who may never have seen older films in an actual movie theater before, simply don’t understand what film grain is. They don’t realize that it’s SUPPOSED to be there.

The writer says this problem is already being “fixed” in some releases.

Unfortunately, what seems to happening right now is that the studio marketing folks are conducting focus groups with new Blu-ray consumers, who are saying they want perfect pictures every time. As a result, a few of the Hollywood studios are currently A) using excessive Digital Noise Reduction to completely scrub film grain from their Blu-ray releases, or B) not releasing as many older catalog titles as they might otherwise for fear that people will complain about grain. Some studios are even going so far as to scrub the grain out of NEW releases that have been shot on film. Case in point: New Line’s Pan’s Labyrinth Blu-ray Disc. When I saw this film in the theaters, it was dark and gritty. The grain was a deliberate stylistic choice—part of the artistic character of the film. New Line’s Blu-ray, on the other hand, is sparkly and glossy—almost entirely grain-free. So much fine detail has been removed that the faces of characters actually look waxy. Everyone looks like a plastic doll. It’s worth noting that the European release doesn’t suffer the same fate.

Note however, that, with the exception of the film he cites, here are no real examples of a classic film’s grain being neutered by a Blu-ray release, nor a source for the stuff about the focus groups. So this may be overstated.

In any case, this has become fairly routine when a new technology comes around. There will be artists who understand the new medium, and those who resist it, and, here and there, some cretins who screw up everything in their purview. Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the CD era took hold, you could get classic albums that sounded dark and muddy on CD, and others that were overmastered and sounded … not tinny, exactly, but weirdly bright.

Still, it would be nice if the expressiveness of several generations of filmmakers did not go through a spit-shine process as the Blu-ray era dawns.