Home Video Philology: Methodological Reflections

Digital home video is an extremely useful means of watching and analyzing films. However, scholars often neglect the fact that official home video or streaming releases of a film can have differences from the original version of the film itself. Such variances typically are lack of film grain (resulting from digital noise reduction), differences in color grading, and soundtrack remixing. This can depend on the fact that the technicians who work on home video releases are unprepared, or are instructed to adjust the look and the sound of the film to the current taste, or because the filmmakers changed their mind and requested some modifications. At any rate, film scholars must be aware of such possible inconsistencies, otherwise their study could be fallacious. In this article I discuss upon philological problems of home video releases mainly from a practical point of view.