In the City of Sylvia

I've noticed the film mentioned in end of year lists etc, but hasn't its own separate thread. It currently has an extended run at BFI Southbank as part of the José Luis Guerin season.

What narrative exists is slight; a young man returns to Strasbourg to search for "Sylvia", the woman he met and fell in love with six years ago. He observes women, sketches their images in his notebook and one morning he spots a woman whom he thinks is Sylvia. He then follows her through the labyrinthe streets of Strasbourg. One might see this as a misogynist fantasy with each woman objectified to the hilt though it's more a treatise on memory and its unreliability, a man in love with an image that he projects onto others.

The sound design and mise en scéne is especially terrific; overlapping conversations are heard, usually off screen and there's a genuine sense of geometry in how each scene is framed; the conflicts between background and foreground, with slight changes in camera positions totally changing how scenes appear to us. Also, as the man follows the presumed Sylvia, it's intriguing how Guerin fixes his camera to a specific position and she will move into the shot and then out, followed by him shortly after. He doesn't really track his characters during the pursuit.

The two leads are also stunningly attractive and coupled with the tourist-friendly sights of Strasbourg, ITCOS is a dizzying, seductive experience.

I've seen the UK trailer for it and was intrigued enough to see it theatrically if it ever shows in Edinburgh. Coincidentally I checked on amazon US if a Region 1 release is on the cards but as yet apparently not. The Spanish DVD is a bit too expensive for my taste at close to, or over £20 at the Amazon UK Marketplace but this is a film I'm almost certainly going to blind-buy in whichever region it comes out first (UK or US).

I tried to start a thread on this film 2 years ago but I guess it was too early. If you feel the slightest inclination to blind buy, I'd say go for it. The Spanish release is terrific, though only a DVD5.

Thanks for bringing this film to my attention and I have just discovered a companion documentary by Guerín called Unas fotos en la ciudad de Sylvia. From what I read on an eBay seller's listing this doc is a black-and-white silent film which offers that "first contact" as it sets up a capricious voyage to several European cities to try to discover a woman the filmmaker had met 22 years earlier. The director undertakes a kind of literary journey, following in the footsteps of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarch and the cities of their lives, as he follows images of a Beloved who might not exist or, in any event, cannot be found.

I overpaid for the Guerin box from Versus, but I still think my money was well spent. These beautiful transfers of Innisfree, Trains of Shadows, and Unas fotos are essential for anyone that loves In the City of Sylvia, which will be most of this board once it finally gets proper international distribution, I'd suspect.

I posted screen caps of the Spanish DVD here about 2/3 of the way down the page. The transfer is great, but be warned that it's slightly (and noticeably) vertically squished. Watching it on my laptop after un-squishing it to 16:10 with VLC solved the problem, but I couldn't do anything about it on my TV. Hopefully Axiom will encode it properly when they release a DVD over here.

The Versus boxset is amazing - zedz & I voted for it in the best DVDs of (last) year thread. As much as I like Sylvia, I think I'm one of the few who prefer Unas fotos... - the Versus set is the easiest way to see it at present, so it's almost worth it for that alone. Innisfree is essential viewing for Ford/Quiet Man fans.


Next month: Filmhouse 3-9, Cameo 17-23. Don't miss it! I sometimes think that Guerín's films are more about the reproduction of light than anything else, so an opportunity to see it on film can't be passed up (mine is tonight).

Dagnabit, it's tax year end in the first week of April (work in finance admin) and I'll be in Portland from the 17th onwards. I'll try my best to catch a screening but at this stage it looks as though the DVD will have to make do. Thanks for the heads-up anyway!

Unas fotos is really an ideal partner film to In the city. . . - it presents the same ideas in a more intense, more personal and more perverse way. Even though, in one sense, they follow the same template, they're very different films in tone and effect. One seems to be modelled pointedly on La Jetee, the other owes more to Vertigo, so there's a knowing film-historical dimension (given the relationship between those two films) to the intertextual relationship as well. (And, of course, the two other films in the Versus box set are as much about films and filmmaking as they are about the light and texture of their environments).

Well, it'll probably be a digibeta anyway, which was what I ended up seeing last night. Although HD projection is light years better than DVD, it still has that thin, filtered, digital look (with noise struggling to replicate grain and light reduced to a pixellated approximation). It's particularly harmful to a film like this, in which (pretty much) every single shot is nothing short of gorgeous.

Yeah I noticed that it was on at the BFI place, and I was a little surprised. If only I lived closer I would be there straight away. This was one of my favourite films for a long time. I'm glad its getting some recognition in viewings at picturehouses in the UK. I contemplated going to see it a local picturehouse, even though I had already seen it on DVD, but the thought of watching a film with the typically disrespectul viewers who frequent my local picturehouse put me off. Not the kind of film that you would appreciate people talking every other minute about their day at work, like what usually happens It's a big shame, as I think if any film deserved to be seen at a picturehouse, it is this one.

I still need to get hold of the other films of his, so will take a look at the prices I can get for the set.

UK DVD from Axiom out on 22/06 - pre-orders are up at HMV, Amazon & others.

How exciting! Thanks for bringing this to my attention. But what a horrid cover!

Did you click on the wrong link?

The Axiom disc looks good. I can't figure out what it is with this film on DVD, but 16:9 still looks too vertically "squished" to me (16:10 looks totally wrong too).

Axiom have ported over a couple of shorts from the Versus box, and there's 3 useful interviews included as well (Guerin's was shot at EIFF and is subtitled in English).

since the film's OAR is 1.66:1, if you show it at 16:10 (1.60:1), it still won't be correct. Since it's lose-lose (16:19 and 16:10), I ripped the Cameo DVD and made my own copy of it in the correct aspect ratio and keep it in the Cameo box that it came in. I did it all losslessly so it looks great.

Oh, I see. What's weird is that Cameo (and then Axiom) don't seem to have simply cropped the image to 16:9 but actually stretched it to fit - very unusual and annoying...

DVD Times review. There's no mention about a squished transfer though?

Apparently not.

Can somebody offer a second opinion on this? Have a look at the caps I posted about 2/3 of the way down this page - is it just me, or do they look a bit off? (For example, the "oval" coaster in the first cap and the dreamer's face in the second.) Perhaps my eyes are playing tricks, but I can't remember thinking that anything was up when I watched Axiom's digibeta in a cinema (after using the Cameo DVD for my first viewing)...

the Cameo DVD is absolutely squished, made all the more obvious by how correct it looked after I ripped the video and 'unsquished' it to 1.66:1. If you are watching this film on a 16:9 display and the image fills up your entire screen then it is wrong, plain and simple.

Fierias, I don't think it's just us! I'm simply surprised that nobody else seems to have noticed the issue (or at least brought it up). I e-mailed Axiom about the problem with the Cameo DVD before ordering theirs, but they didn't reply - probably because they were simply porting it!

Strange to me, though, that the Cameo DVD is single layer and the Axiom is (supposedly, according to that DVDtimes review) dual-layer (but I also don't know the details of porting transfers, if the porting company gets the HD telecine and compresses to their liking or if they are handed over the MPEG2 or what).

Sorry for the useless post but I have to admit that I have never noticed any vertical stretching issue on the Cameo DVD. Kind of shame on me since I first saw the film in cinema. Maybe the people just look nicer stretched

Not stretched, but squashed. Fierias and Foggy are in agreement that the image should be 1.66, and that there should be little black bars to either side on a widescreen monitor. So, in other words, the pretty people are fatter than they should be.

Right! 1:66 to 1:78 is squashing. That's not good. I will have to check my disc some time.

What a shame! I was looking forward to the Axiom disc but I won't buy it if the picture's distorted. Why it was given a 9/10 rating at DVD Times is utterly beyond me.