On 4K UHD - David Hare enthuses over BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (Ang Lee, USA, 2005) + THE CONVERSATION (Francis Ford Coppola, USA, 1974)

 New arrivals.

Brokeback Mountain has a very nice new 4K scan and transfer from Universal, released on Kino Lorber. I have plenty of time for it still, especially for the critically ignored beauty of Michelle Williams’ sweet, nuanced performance. Lee was and still is too sophisticated a chronicler of sexual mores for the Anglophone world where Brokeback died in a welter of Bumfuck Texas gaggery. Alas.

The new 4K scan and especially the color grade for Coppola's The Conversation is absolutely astonishing. It’s as though he’s finally enabled a kind of dual extreme hot-cold color scheme for razor sharp blues, grays and greens which are always in some sort of aesthetic suspension with fiery reds and skin tones. The opening telephoto shots have a previously unseen warmth, as though they had magically gone back to the original dye transfer printing in 1974 (which closed shortly after The Conversation was made.) The new image looks in some ways like IB printing on acid, but without a hint of fakery or artificiality. This single disc bare bones option is backed up for English and German options and gets an Oz release here at the most competitive price. There’s no regular Blu-ray in the box, nor any of the deluxe edition tat. A must get, but you need to be 4K enabled.

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.

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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