Poor Image for Poor College Students :p

“In Defense of the Poor Image” by Hito Steyerl is a very interesting and courageous article.  I thought it spoke for a lot of the population.  Sure, people could argue that poor image is offensive to the original piece, but there are advantages as well.

At the rate technology is moving, the high quality today will probably be low quality tomorrow.  As quality gets better and better, the beauty of today will be forgotten.  When DVD films stop producing any more copies, it’s really hard to get hold of an original copy and so the film vanishes – lost to the survival of the fittest (um…highest resolution).  This is probably where sites like youtube come in.  Although the quality is quite low, long forgotten footage are revived and shared among many, many people.  It’s like free promotion!

There are camera-recorded versions of airing films on the Internet.  Many argue that it’s wrong but I find it okay in some cases.  For example, I was at a friend’s house and she kept telling me how good Tangled was.  She quickly pulled up a camera-recorded version of Tangled from online and I watched it for the first time, her the fifth time.  Afterwards, I realized how much I liked the film (even though it was such bad quality) I decided to watch it in 3D the next day.  Of course the 3D was way better than the poor image, but if it hadn’t been for the poor image, I probably wouldn’t have bothered to watch it in 3D.  Now, I am desperately waiting for the DVD to come out (3/29/11) so I can watch it all over again!  As I’m waiting now, I occasionally search for poor image clips from Tangled on youtube (just to satisfy my thirst for time being!)

Another occurrence with film and poor image would be Inception.  (I am a mad Inception fan).  After watching the film in theaters three times, my wallet was empty and there was about six months before the DVD was coming out…so guess what I did?  I went online and watched poor image version to satisfy my thirst.  Of course now I have the DVD but I have to give credit to the poor images.  They are certainly a type of promotion!

I know someone can easily argue that poor image does not justify the original film and may even offend the creator but honestly it’s not as bad as it sounds.  At least it’s not as harmful as China and their making of fake eggs, shark fin soup, seaweed, salt, bird’s nest soup (okay, I can go on all day listing things but I think you get my point).