Good choice. I had to watch it.

The R2 UK Arrow disc of OPEN CITY also lacks a whole load subtitles for quite a bit of the dialogue too - no doubt to be put right in the new set... I guess we have a preview glimpse of some of what the CC set will look like with the clips excerpted in Tag G's visual essay on LOUIS XIV - work in progress then as regards the digital restoration etc...

Did Tag G do a visual essay on FRANCIS? It's not listed in the specs on the CC site - would be interested, have the MoC, but that would be a supplement that might persuade me to double dip when I'm picking up the WAR TRILOGY in the New Year...

The standout film in this set, for me, is PAISAN... I still rely on a DVD-R from a 20 year VHS recording off the BBC until now... PAISAN, even more than OPEN CITY, is a radical breakthrough in cinematic storytelling - it's fragmented episodic structure, with no overall protagonists - but each of the three are really fascinating in their interrogation of the reality and fallout of WWII, and simply landmark sea change cinema... In the freshness and authenticity of their treatment of actual experience, creatively fused into fiction film, they broke the sanatised stranglehold of Hollywood melodrama forever...

As Tommasso says, this is a return to gold standard Criterion...

You are quite right to remind us of the excellent quality of Mr Gallagher's visual essays, at least the ones I have watched on Rossellini and Ophuls DVDs (Caught and Letter from an Unknown Woman specifically); others are waiting for their turn. I would suppose this coming one covering three films would be very substantial, both in length and content. So a single appearance in the extras might indeed be worth several of other types.


The one that you describe as amongst his finest is the one prepared for the trilogy or the one for Francesco? In that last case, M. Gallagher describes it as an "orphan" on this page. I suppose it has only been shown in festivals or repertory screenings of the film?

Sadly it never made it to either the MoC or the Criterion discs. I have it on a copy of numerous Tag intros/essays.

I just pulled my old abomination from 2005 out to look at it-- and it's the Arrow ed. I love the banner running up top of the box "DIGITALLY RESTORED", and the blurb on the back of the case-- "Due to the scarcities of war, scraps of film acquired from photographers had to be used, giving the film a uniquely gritty style. Now digitally restored, Rossellini's masterpiece appears as never before."

The sentence is incomplete: it should read:

"Now digitally restored, Rossellini's masterpiece appears as never before: in a transfer which accomplishes the previously impossible-- renders a great film completely unwatchable."

It's ONE TIME that a movie was completely ruined in this fashion by a transfer. I've never had to Not Watch a film before just because of the transfer. I guess my coming up age watching roof-antennae TV, as well as smaller TV's with tin-foily rabbit-ears, has left me very appreciative and tolerant of non-CC level quality. I can watch Alphas and be perfectly fine with them. This on the other hand was just too much to take.

Oh man, I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels this way. Rossellini in general doesn't push my buttons, but PAISAN is my favorite by him.

It will be the 1995 restoration. You have to thank our la-a-azy Cineteca Nazionale for this...

However, this is not a bad restoration: it should look like this.

Since that's out of the bag I guess we can say the Cineteca LOST the new restoration!! I understand the whole project was delayed for months over this nonsense.

So I gather it was the Francesco essay you were referring to as showing TG so spiritually attuned to his subject. Too bad this visual essay (and some others by him) remain unavailable to most of us.

We may be able to see some of these after all.

If someone knows how to convert a more-than-1GB VIDEO_TS file, with optional subtitles, to a subtitled avi or Quicktime movie that would be a smaller file, then pm me. It will come from Tag himself.

I can do a TS to avi conversion but each piece is around 500-600 Megs.

Now that the whatever's out of the bag, care to elaborate? I don't know the backstory, but a quick Google search shows me nothing but screenings of the Cineteca restoration, so I gather prints are still going around. You're saying that they lost the restored negative, or digital master (was it restored digitally?), or something along those lines?

Losing the best copy of a pivotal work of film history seems like a newsworthy item with a story worth telling.

That's a strange story.

Cinecittà Holding, who made the 1995 restauration, owns film's copyright, so when Criterion bought rights also got the old print.
Cineteca Nazionale, instead, owns the new restauration, so Criterion had to talk with them in order to get the new video. At first the Cineteca men seemed very collaborative, but then they delayed and delayed...
I don't think they LOST the digital master... probably they simply don't care so much about having a good DVD version out there
(It's a shame, I know.)

Beaver review of Rossellini's War Trilogy.
Again, Criterion have pictureboxed the films.

Apart from the pictureboxing, which is regrettable, the restorations look fantastic.

They actually look like films that are less than 100 years old! Can't wait to have this in hand.

I do wonder about Criterion sometimes. Naturally this will still be the first item in my basket in the next B&N sale but I'm disappointed by the pictureboxing (if it's like Berlin Alexanderplatz you lose 34 pixels vertically and horizontally). At least I can manually crop when watching with VLC.

This release looked great on paper alone. Beaver's comments confirm it will be absolutely indspendable.

Returning now to the topic of Tag Gallagher's "orphan" video essays:



Any developments on that front?

Thanks.

The set looks absolutely stunning. . . and the pictureboxing issue is nothing compared to the extreme excellence of the fact of this box's existence, and the work that went into securing the proper-- and hugely restored-- versions of these films. I just can't wait to get my greezy niggling mitts on it.

i want to pre-order this SOOOOOOOOO bad, but my criterion budget is not large, and word is B&N will be doing another 50% off sale this spring some time, so i'll have to wait...it's just too good a deal to get this for $30 instead of $50+....but that beaver review has me salivating at the idea of it all. Amazing how they started the year off with perhaps their greatest accomplishment yet!

So i'm guessing this will have the full torture scene in Roma, Citta Aperta and the italian title at the beginning? Unlike the terrible uk disk...

(Gotta have that torture)

Have it in my hands and on the deck - it's a quite superb set - will take a while to absorb it all, especially the copious extras, but certainly the best these 3 films will ever look on DVD...

Anytime anyone goes soft and starts thinking anything written in marketing or advertising to sell product to the hungry consumer might actually be true, they should read this quote.