On 4K UHD and Blu-ray - David Hare risks a small fortune and welcomes and asks some questions about the Imprint edition of THE CINEMA OF POWELL & PRESSBURGER - Collection Two (1942 - 1956)

 This is both an exciting and a bewildering release.

On the fabulous side the box includes not only the existing 4K mastered disc of The Red Shoes and I Know Where I’m Going (both of which Criterion has already released in superb editions) but it’s adding more new and newish restorations in Blu only of Black Narcissus, Colonel Blimp and One of our Aircraft is Missing as well as Oh Rosalinda! and Battle of the River Plate. The latter two are very far from peak Powell for me but their inclusion is rewarding for completists. Most importantly the box releases the first 4K UHD Dolby Vision discs worldwide of both The Small Back Room (an underrated Powell to be sure) and the most important title for me a 4K DV of Tales of Hoffmann. Given the whole box is credited to Fidelity In Motion for encoding I have not an atom’s concern about quality. And given my worship of Hoffman as a total, unfettered masterpiece of celestial beauty This box would make me an even happier man than I already am.

BUT….

This press release only presents the Powell box for RRP in tandem with several other boxes including what I consider a redundant Kubrick box bringing the cost over 500 bucks Oz. Does this mean they will perhaps never release the Powell box as standalone? If they don’t they’ve lost a customer. And equally important for people like me who already have everything in this box already except for the world prem 4K discs of Hoffman and Small Back Room, are these titles likely to be picked up in a parallel boxset or singly as 4K discs from somebody like Criterion? We don’t know and these days throwing around this sort of money on something not ideally priced for some of us who are already rabid and going-broke collectors?

(Mike Baard followed this up by sending this info...

David, good news, you will be able to purchase P&P set as a standalone.

Just Click Here

BUT BACK TO DAVID

One thing I didn’t mention: the new 4K discs of IKWIG as well as Red Shoes will have DV/HDR. Criterion’s IKWIG is also mastered and encoded by FIM /MacKenzie but SDR/2160p. Only David MacKenzie could encode something so beautiful in both 8 bit and 10 bit 2160p and make them both sing. This is why I am risking a small fortune basically for the same deft hand with a new 4K of Hoffmann.

This is Imprint’s trailer for the Powell/Pressburger box in August. The music sample track is largely from Brian Easdale’s score for Red Shoes. What a masterpiece, what a score!

A FACEBOOK COMMENT

@jnoe635098 

5 days ago

All the clips (on the trailer) you are showing are in the wrong aspect ratio. Not a good presentation.

On Blu-ray - David Hare looks at CARNAL KNOWLEDGE (Mike Nichols, USA, 1971) and THE BIG HEAT (Fritz Lang, USA, 1953)

 

Two Indicators and a Criterion

Let’s start with Carnal Knowledge. This is a fabulous, visually flawless delivery of an early 70s Panavision/Technicolor “serious” American post MPAA “adult” feature from Mike Nichols, shot for greater arthouse cred by the great Giuseppe Rotunno. I bought the Indicator edition not only because it beat the Criterion by two weeks but because I think Indicator’s extras have the edge. I gather the encode itself which was done by Dave McKenzie/FIM is also the basis for the Criterion. 

Having said all that I still can’t fathom the mountains of cinephilic dedication given to a movie about an unrepentantly toxic man, his trippy, passive buddy and a string of women who don’t seem to mind these appalling men. All the players are great, especially the women, but Nichols never lets the sponge rise beyond Jules Feiffer’s sour, unedifying screenplay. Nichols would go on to much better things - Primary Colours and The Birdcage are unalloyed comedic commentaries on post 70s America, and both are very much enhanced by the contribution of Elaine May.

Which leads us to compare Indicator’s terrific Blu-ray edition of Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat from only a few years ago, and the new Criterion 4K UHD disc. The Indicator is so good as a 2K delivery I am really fighting to find reasons to call Criterion’s new 4K (from Sony) as “better.” But this is always the impossible crux of things. In Dolby Vision, slightly more than HDR, the image is slightly more detailed, but with it the lighting (by the great Charles Lang ex Paramount Noir) becomes revelatory. 

One of the things 4K can resolve and display is grain, and especially the way it disperses light. The new 4K is startling in the way it makes the depth and sheer lighting quality quasi-three dimensional. It certainly emphasises Lang’s decision to shoot every sequence except one in the studio where he and Charles Lang can control not only light and shade but the small, constant camera movements, mostly circular which seem to affirm a dialogue of chance fighting with fate. This is a definition of Lang of course from the very beginning to the very end, and I dips me lid to everyone else who’s called this Lang’s greatest American movie. Watching this again, the penultimate scene with Debbie and Banion had me in tears, as the two of them remained totally alone, and totally without any peace with the furies. What a masterpiece, and what staggeringly beautiful home video deliveries of this masterpiece.

Coming Soon on Criterion Blu-ray - Marshall Deutelbaum alerts to the release of THE UNKNOWN (Todd Browning, USA, 1927)

One of the October Criterion releases will be Todd Browning’s The Unknown. 

It’s a great movie! It was thought for many years to be a lost film. All that time a print of it was at the Cinematheque Française in cans labelled “inconnu” (“unknown”). People thought it was an unidentified movie. 

Only when someone opened a can to look at the film was it discovered that it was actually the Lon Chaney film. Criterion have probably used the Eastman House print for the transfer. 

I haven’t seen the movie in more than 40 years and will be thrilled to see it again. Lon Chaney plays Alonzo the armless circus knife thrower who throws knives with his feet. Joan Crawford plays a woman who loves him because he can’t touch her. She hates to be touched. 

It’s wonderful.

**********************************

Editor's Note: The Unknown will be released in a three film package (cover below) along with two other Browning titles Freaks  (1932) and The Mystic (1925).

Good luck trying to to import Criterion to Australia but there are ways.

On Blu-ray - David Hare welcomes "no more important or more beautiful film" - SANS LENDEMAIN (Max Ophuls, France, 1939)

Screens from Kino Lorber's new Blu Ray of Ophuls' 1939 Sans Lendemain, now with subs, and a terrific, exhaustive commentary by Adrian Martin.

The screens below are so constantly in part or full shadow from the great DP Eugen Schufftan of Edwige Feuillere and Georges Rigaud, the last shot (still below) a frame from the 1926 silent Casanova. starring Ivan Mosjoukine, directed by Alexandre Volkoff .

The leads watch that movie in the last of two substantial flashbacks which "narrate" their earlier life, although the life Babs/Eveline/Edwige (below) is depicting in the present (1939) indeed a second life is again a fabrication that leads to tragedy.

One of the greatest Ophuls pictures, now finally in a retail Anglophone edition. Adrian's commentary is a rare pleasure in these days of video essays and non commentary-tracked editions.

Georges Rigaud

Adrian covers a number of views of Ophuls and this movie in particular from Tag Gallagher and Robin Wood. The movie can certainly be read, as can Lola Montes and La Signora di Tutti as a picture in which show business itself is a means of representing life, in which impersonation, power, and submission are seemingly dovetailed within a fatalistic, late Romantic era, and emotionalism. The difference with Ophuls' treatment of this material is through his mise-en-scene in which form and style are constantly undercutting and amplifying both narrative and emotion, in a direction which is inextricably linked to time, and the fatality, as Tag often puts it, of romantic passion and its power to destroy (Letter from an Unknown Woman).

This Kino Lorber disc feels almost like a throwaway in this current year of Blu-ray deluges from Warner Archive and even Kino Lorber itself. But no more important or more beautiful film will get a disc release this year.

****************************

Editor's Note: Sans Lendemain screened on the opening evening of the very first Cinema Reborn way back in 2018. David Hare wrote the program notes and introduced the film at that first screening. You can read his program notes IF YOU CLICK HERE 

A collection of David's earlier pieces published on the Film Alert 101 blog is available to read or download IF YOU CLICK HERE

On Warner Archive Blu-ray - David Hare is thrilled by the new edition of Fritz Lang's RANCHO NOTORIOUS (USA, 1952)

This great montage above from Rancho Notorious, including the faces of Arthur Kennedy, George Reeves and Mel Ferrer among others, invokes Lang’s great angry mob sequence from M and the montage from that masterpiece. Indeed the last four shots in this Technicolor sequence are, like the M “j’accuse” montage barely half a dozen frames each. (Try getting screen captures from this piece of film!)

 

Indeed, the structure of Rancho Notorious, now released in a staggering new three strip restoration from Warner Archive to revive the glorious new year, salutes every great director who’s taken advantage of the pointed montage as a full-blooded caesura in the narrative to bring it to a momentous dramatic halt. 

 

So any one of these faces might be a rapist and killer, or none of them, despite the privilege of us as audience who witnessed the original crime. Which face is less “human” than the other, which if any is “not guilty”, but of what? Cinema is never purer than this.

 

Marlene Dietrich

Arthur Kennedy’s consuming need for revenge at any expense will of course lead to a confrontation in which the remaining woman in the narrative takes the hit for his anger. Just as Jocelyn Brando and Gloria Graham take a hit for Glenn Ford in The Big Heat. And Joan Bennett takes a hit for Walter Pidgeon, and so on in Lang. 

 

The sheer classicism of the sacrificial female is beyond biblical in Lang’s world and perhaps it’s that sheer outrageousness that now compels us to understand more fully the destructive futility of leading man after leading man in a world no longer making sense. Only the sheer supreme mythologies of the Indian temple, or the need for balance in a contemporary 1928 world gone mad like my favorite Lang, Spione (Spies) can save us. 

 

Rancho Notorious, like Moonfleet three years later, is another of Lang’s morality tales dressed in period costume with a mixture of sublimely photographed exteriors and even more studio and backdrop artifice shots (like the one I’ve printed above in deference to Ms Joyce Carol Oates’ dislike of Hitchcock’s similar tendency to such cinematic primitivism.) I think with Rancho Lang begins a final period in which he returns to the past for context, either as legend like the West and its codes of violence, or the child’s nightmare, missing father tale of Moonfleet with its tireless search through caves, tunnels and the underworld to reconcile both the lost father and the glittering spoils of the pirate overworld. 

 

Ultimately Lang will return sublimely in color and with Debra Paget to his own mythology with the completely wonderful Von Harbou written Indian Tomb/Eschnapur Tiger pictures which play in episodic style like a Feuillade serial, but one originally written by his then spouse, and directed by another, only to be finally realized by Lang himself, one of the first colony of auteurs on earth fifty years earlier. Lang has ridden full circle and just a few years later Godard imagines and directs him as himself directing the Odyssey in Le Mepris in which he addresses us for eternity through Raoul Coutard's camera. 

 

Rancho Notorious, with its many alternating styles, high montage mode with unexpected tracking shots and its tight clipped narrative, and meditation on the obsession of a wounded man who's lost his future is the beginning of Lang’s very last act. 

 

These are the last two shots from Rancho,  bridged with one of Lang's very rare cross dissolve opticals.

 

From legend to camera to "reality".

 

Not something recognized by the distinguished Ms Oates.

 

This new disc from Warner Archive is a tribute to that great outfit who after a year in hiatus is mercifully back on the boards, with a commitment to five titles of restored deep archive cinema a month. Long may the Archive, and oneself live.

On Blu-ray - David Hare welcomes further restoration work on LA REGLE DU JEU (Jean Renoir, France, 1939)

If you buy this and begin to watch, do not expect to see anything as remotely beautiful as a Warner Archive 4K scan and restoration of a Black and White 1939 movie.

Warner would have made a scan of an original nitrate neg, and access to a multitude of other elements - interpositive, fine grains etc - which enable, simply perfection.

Neither the original neg, nor any first generation element of Renoir’s 1939 La Règle du Jeu has survived. The most recent restoration which is presented here had to be scrounged from much later elements and we are left with a less than perfect composite.

Putting on this new 4K UHD delivers a series of shocks. Never before has the exact quality of the surviving elements been so nakedly on display. What you are seeing, thanks to the optimum resolution and quality of the UHD format is as close to 35mm projection as possible. It is in effect the same. Then you begin to notice how much

“darker” is the image, after the last Blu-rays. And that’s where this new disc really takes off. Sharpness is variable, as it must be and always was given the appalling condition of the elements. But composition and depth are here in spades. HDR has been applied with great skill to extract every last grain of grayscale, shadow detail and degrees of light as they can exist in the 35mm format.

Whether you think this exercise is worth it or not is a quandary. I vote yes, but others may not. Criterion/Janus is one of the stakeholders in this 4K release and when/if they choose to release this in 4K is yet to be seen. The French disc from ESC label only carries a short extra, with none of the plenitude of supplements on the older Criterion (and BFI) Blu's.

On Blu-ray - David Hare is enraptured by the new restored edition of TIH MINH (Louis Feuillade, France, 1918)

 I am unable to hold back any longer.

These two shots of Tih Minh (above and below) are from the end of the first episode in what Jonathan Rosenbaum describes as six hours of a journey through the Garden of Eden.

This staggering new reconstruction and restoration of Feuillade's 1918 serial Tih Minh is one of those movie miracles a great many cinephiles have literally been waiting decades to see.

It's been worth the wait, and I've only begun the journey but I have to say without a hint of exaggeration this is one of the greatest, most defining works of all cinema.

The opening of Episode 1 is a leisurely cast presentation to the camera with portrait-like screen tests for each of the actors and actresses, which is in itself a defining lesson in screen acting, the relationship of the screen to us, and our relationship to the screen.

Only towards the end of the cast call does the final actor, playing M. Placide quickly wink at the camera in one of Feuillade's very rare breaks of the fourth wall. If this opening sequence doesn't rope you in you may as well give up on ever having a relationship with cinema. Everything about this and his earlier Judex also in 12 episodes plus an epilogue from 1917 simply takes the movies once and for all to their most privileged position in human experience.

These new restorations of Tih Minh, begun 2018 and completed last year, and Judex also completed in 2020 are mind bendingly beautiful. The new Blu-ray disc sets from Gaumont are French language but the intertitles are so much easier to manage than spoken dialogue for those of us who have a reasonable but imperfect grasp of French language skill. if you prefer however there is an English subtitle option under the French inter-titles. I commend the two discs to the widest audience possible.

On Blu-ray - David Hare rejoices again in a thing of intense beauty PARTY GIRL (Nicholas Ray, USA, 1958)

"Vicky Gaye" (we know her as Cyd Charisse, click image to enlarge) dances for the mob accompanied by several roaring horns in Nick Ray's fabulous Party Girl (1958).

Ray had a lot of trouble on the production not least not being allowed to direct the musical numbers. These were directed by Robert Sidney, but they still look fabulous if only for the fact the movie was produced by Joe Pasternak, one of MGM's non -Freed musical specialists, so the production values get the works.

The new Warner Archive Blu-ray is a thing of intense beauty and would thrill the souls of the great French Cahier/Positif formalists if only they were all still around to see this incredibly beautiful transfer from an original Eastman neg.

On 4K HDR/DV - David Hare welcomes a restored ANATOMY OF A MURDER (Otto Preminger, USA, 1958) & TAXI DRIVER (Martin Scorsese, USA, 1976)

This is the second big six picture collection boxset from Sony of their “Columbia Classics”, all totally new updated restorations executed in 4K with HDR/DV. Grover Crisp who has personally curated these sets (and much more) through Sony’s still flourishing physical media arm makes a particularly strong case in some of the copious restoration notes on each title in which he really promotes the complete revelation HDR and it’s much wider color gamut, wider dynamic range and more has to seriously sell the superority of the new format over all and any earlier Home Vid platforms.

I won’t take much more space here but to say the movies I’ve sampled so far are breathtaking in these UHD 4K discs, even better than a first 35mm viewing of a revival print of Anatomy of a Murder at Sydney Uni Film Group in 1968. By then (only ten years after it was made) the O-neg had been intefered with after wear and tear leaving ten no less lab shots re-inserted from an inferior later gen neg. Even the very beautiful master Criterion used for its own Blu release a few years ago is still stuck with the dupe shots, although Crisp’s team did an almost total restoration on that occasion. 

For the new release they restarted the elements harvest and in the process found a third gen but extremely high quality neg which yielded clean optical shots which now seamlessly meet the rest of the print’s image quality for grain, grayscale and density.

The new 4K of Taxi Driver is from just a few years ago but Crisp and his team are now able to use HDR to really push saturation and the emphasis on grain and texture in this new disc which is quite frankly, gobsmacking, and once again the image quality once again surpasses the 35mm I first saw in opening week at the old Town Cinema in Pitt Street, Sydney. Another bonus is the discovery of multi track stems of Herrmann’s score for which they’ve added a five channel Dolby track with the score isolated on the rear channels. You’ve got to hear this to believe it. They also preserve the original legacy mono track.

I understand the new 4K of the Preminger was amongst the “rediscoveries” at this year’s Cannes event. This boxset, with marvellous liner notes from Julie Kirgo for the Preminger, and Glenn Kenny for Taxi Driver is worth every cent. The remaining four titles (Oliver, Stripes, Sense and Sensibility and The Social Network) are yet to be plundered by me.

On Blu-ray - David Hare recommends ' without a blink' a new edition of Sandy Harbutt's STONE (Australia, 1974)

Some of the unforgettable faces from Sandy Harbutt's 1974 Sydney bikie movie, Stone.

Rebecca Gilling (above), Ken Shorter an ex-cop who became an actor and whose role draws somewhat from his own life, the irrepressible NIDA comedian Drew Forsythe and the Indigenous actor and star of dozens of movies and TV roles, Bindi Williams (below). 

To say nothing of a huge, stellar cast of Sydney chapter Hell's Angels riding some sublime vintage Kawasakis, and countless other Oz movie stars including Gary McDonald, Bill Hunter, Terry Bader, Reg Evans, Bill Hunter and an unrecognisable Helen Morse.

The movie is an emblem of, and a love song to, the greatest city in the world Sydney was in the process of becoming through the sixties and seventies. This precious golden age gave something unique to everyone who lived through it through sheer force of cultural fusion.

Harbutt's movie was made for not much more than 100 grand in 70s' dollars which is barely a million now. It made back over seven million over the years, not only because or despite the admiration for it by exploitation gurus like la Tarantino But it holds a particularly central place in the hearts of old Sydneysiders of a certain generation.  

It may not have the poise and stylistic proficiency of Philip Noyce's stunning Heatwave, another great film about Sydney but Harbutt's range and control of the material is breathtaking and, frankly, nothing in it seems dated, Ken Shorter's hairstyle (below) notwithstanding. 

The new Umbrella Blu-ray in Oz (region "B") has been scrupulously restored to an original near hypnogenically saturated Eastman stock perhaps given premium LSD inspired lab work by the team at the old Atlab facility. It's a stunner. The print is the 99 minute director's cut, with the legendary 120 minute cut apparently forever lost.

Recommended without a blink.