jsteffe wrote:tenia, besides THE TREE OF WOODEN CLOGS, could you supply me with some additional examples that you have observed of L'Immagine Ritrovata restorations affected by this color shift? I am very much interested in this question and want to research it further.
Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key, The Black Cat, What Have You Done to Solange? (color corrected for Arrow), Deep Red (color corrected for Arrow), Dragon Inn, A Touch of Zen, Mariage Italian Style, Death Walks on High Heels, Death Walks at Midnight, The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave, The Red Queen Kills Seven Times, The Bloodstained Butterly, Fist of Fury, The Big Boss, Game of Death, Way of the Dragon (all 4 color corrected for Shout), The 10th Victim, Manila in the Claws of Light, Property is no longer a theft, A Better Tomorrow, Once Upon A Time In America, White Vertigo (Olympic movie), Rome 60 - The Grand Olympics (Olympic movie), Purple Noon (Studio Canal restoration), Fellini Roma, Amarcord (new 2015 4K restoration), Hunebelle's Les 3 mousquetaires, Pane e cioccolata, and probably some others I forgot or aren't available on video yet (Santa Vina and KAKABAKABA KA BA? look like they have a similar grading).
What worrying is that their Asian venture titles (the Bruce Lee, notably) show the exact same grading, so they're geographically expanding it.
In some regards, L'amant and Indochine are often perceived as revisionisticly graded. Same goes for Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources. I would also argue that Banzai seems very modernly graded.
They're also not the only ones doing this (though their restorations' grading really have a very specific aspect). Digimages with Les demoiselles de Rochefort and Les parapluies de Cherbourg isn't far away when it comes to white balance, and Eclair have done very yellow things for Gaumont (many many Gaumont Découverte titles are very modernly graded : La 7e victime, Il était une fois un flic, La valise, Une saison en enfer, Coup de tête, Laisse aller c'est une valse, Un nuage entre les dents, Eaux profondes..., but also some Classiques titles like Black Moon, Atlantic City, Marie Antoinette, ...) but not only : Ran (Studio Canal) is also quite off regarding white balance, and many Pathé titles are modern-looking now : La reine Margot, Mort d'un pourri, Pour la peau d'un flic, Garçon, ... Finally, Eclair also are the ones behind L'argent, or the recent Costa-Gavras restorations.
Rather than being overly yellow or pale, their work usually is cold, with strong modern blues.
It's all the more fascinating that I can pretty much pinpoint when it started to happen, because the very first restoration I remember seeing and thinking "god, I've never seen a movie graded that way" was L'homme de Rio in May 2013 (through the TF1 Video release). This is a work by Eclair.
Now, when they do the scanning only but not the grading, the result isn't looking the same at all. A typical example is what Criterion is doing / has done (ie Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, A Brighter Summer Day or Breaker Morant), because they only very rarely relies on the labs grading, instead using their own colorist Lee Kline. Arrow has started doing this, it seems.
Finally, you don't see Vinegar Syndrome, or Shout, Criterion, Arrow, Warner, Sony, Universal or Fox's restorations looking this way. None of them look yellow like this or blue like this, and more specifically, their movies don't end up having one unique look !
NB : note that I can't say, factually speaking, that Bologna's grading is faithful or not. What I'm debating is how they're giving all the restorations they're grading the same look, despite the concerned movies being totally different and many many other labs never grading movies this way. I'm also debating why we never had movies graded this way before circa 2013, and now, movies graded like this are a recurring thing. I just look like specific laboratories' thing, and my concern is that this is a pretty much the new Magenta Push.
As I wrote in the past, it seems abnormal to me that the movies' photographies are now lost behind the lab's signature. This movie was lit this way ? Printed on this stock ? This person was the DoP ? Marvelous, except it just looks like a Ritrovata grading and there's just no way to find out the movie's specificity now.
For instance, I can already predict how Legend of the Mountain will look, and probably Memories of Underdevelopment too.