Lancelot du Lac (Spain R2)
Anamorphic. Spanish subtitles fixed but not burnt-in.









For comparison with New Yorker R1.

Robert Bresson's, The Devil, Probably
- Spanish DVD
- French subtitles
- Spanish subtitles
- No English subtitles, unfortunately - where is the Art Eye edition?













From MoC's Bresson News Column page

No French subtitles, either, in fact. Just Spanish subs which, as with Intermedio's other Bressons, are fixed but not ingrained.

Deserto Rosso/Red Desert R4 Madman/AV Channel

















I cannot begin to say how wonderful this restoration is! (But DAMN the yellow subs.)

Yella' subs! Oh, shit. This is one film where introducing the colour yellow is more than just annoying - it's somewhat damaging to the aesthetics. At least they are removeable.

Looks great, but I still wouldn't mind seeing a comparison with the Italian DVD. Here's the DVD Beaver comp of the Image R1 and Russian R5: www.dvdbeaver.com/film/DVDCompare11/red_desert.htm

OMG, that's lovely... My copy despatched from ezydvd last Wed, so should be here soon... And it's the bin for my old Image disc... How's the commentary track, David?...

Not there yet Ellipsis.

I am still reeling from Antonioni's mise-en-scene - the way color becomes the dominant "character" in the movie, intersecting, observing, flooding, enhancing, draining the human beings in this incredible movie.

I have not been able to watch any of the crapoid TV prints since first release when I was VERY young, and my appalling memory was probably guarding many of the usual doubts. But not any more. The fluidity of the camera, seemingly liberated from the narrative requirements of the characters, only ever pausing to engage with shards or blocks of color to bring your eye to a stop. This movie literally "takes off" from the last shot of l'Eclisse. Staggering.

Jesus! havent even watched the documentary yet. Whatever It is.

I too have ordered this and am very miffed by the yellow subs
I sent an email to the DVD producer (it made me feel a little better...) I doubt I'll get a reply!!

Just thought it would be interesting to post Tarkovskij's thoughts on the use of colour in The Red Desert:


(source: nostalghia.com)

I'm tempted to write a reply don't even know where to begin!

Simply hilarious!

Tarkovsky of all people should carry on about the deracination of plot! Can't you hear howls of decadence here?

Surely Solaris is as much an exercise in science fiction as it is metaphysics, just as Desert is an excersie in narrative abstraction in which the mise en scene is subservient to or at least directed by the color to create a parallel emotional "narrative", as though the characters (as the absent hangovers from the final street shots of Eclisse) now inhabited another dimension. The use of color in Desert is perhaps the most radical in mainstream cinema (even Zabriskie Point tones the sheer volume of the primaries down.) Only things like Greg Markopoulos' gorgeous Ektahrome movies, or the Agfacolor sequences from Ivan Part 2 or even Brakhage come near it for meaningful chromaticism.

Red Desert is one of the greatest color movies ever made, with the River, Black Narcissus, Princess Yang Kwei Fei, French CanCan .... and this restoration fully does it justice.

The weekend after next there is an Antonioni retrospective in Melbourne, Australia and all films are apparent NEW prints. This is my schedule:

The Red Desert (Sat Oct 28, 4.15pm)
Blow Up (Sat Oct 28, 6.45pm)
Zabriskie Point (Sat Oct 28, 9.15pm)

L'Avventura (Sun Oct 29, 3.15pm)
La Notte (Sun Oct 29, 6.00pm)
L'Eclisse (Sun Oct 29, 8.30pm)

A great pity this season couldn't include I Vinti, with the original soundtracks (English, French and Italian for the distinct episodes.)

This must now be as hard to see as Chung-Kuo, which they did get.

Satantango from Clavis Film.









--
Jan

Looks Extremely good!

My copy of Gueule d'Amour arrived today but FedEx left a fucking message card so I cant post caps until tomrrow nite.


Ca m'emmerde!

How frustrating! But it looks like you'll beat me to it. My copy's still passing through the bowels of the French postal system.

Very savvy, Marty. Lucky bastard!


La Poste is pretty good, says I. Posta Romana are really terrible. Now that they are in the EU they ought to buck up their ideas.


Fucking annoying when that happens. Just bung the DVD through the letterbox and fuck off in your van, drongo.

Dunno, those Satantango caps are jaggied all over the place. See especially the fourth cap. I hope that's a result of the capturing.

Yes, it looks like interlacing, doesn't it?

Yes, it's an interlaced transfer. Anyone knows a deinterlacing program for the Mac that reads VOB files directly? I could deinterlace by going throgh DV but that recodes the frames AFAIK. (OTOH so does the JPEG )

So the jaggies go away in the normal playback. BUT there remains another problem: the DVD compression is constant-rate and now and then ugly shimmering and sort of "periodic flickering" familiar from cheaply compressed home videos can be seen. Let's hope AE do their own compression of the original whatever-format-it-is-in. The source element, BTW, has reel change marks. Couldn't Bela Tarr insist on a better source? I guess it's a money problem.

--
Jan

You can choose Deinterlace from the Video menu in VLC. I generally use VLC for screencaps, though it's annoying that there's no way to single-step with VLC.

Yes, it's annoying. I'll try to deinterlace those frames tonight, it's only fair to Clavis. OTOH their (is it theirs?) compression is firmly in the Kino and Facets league

--
Jan

Something is funny about either VLC or the disc. No matter which deinterlacing algorithm VLC uses, it produces ugly, blurry, double-image freeze frames. This doesn't make sense since Satantango is a film-derived DVD (obviously) so each interlaced pair correspond to THE SAME film frame. Hence, there can be no ghosting and blurring, by definition. So there is a bug somewhere. Any clues?

A quick note added: it must be the discs because the bad interlacing is seen on freeze frames from Disc III but not on those from Disc II (e.g. Estike with the cat). And on Disc I it changes off and on.

--
Jan

Gueule d'Amour Rene Chateau/TFI R2

I apologize for the volume of caps -I could have gone on freezing every frame.

No eng subs right Dave?



Those fucking caps are stunning...

Quel beau travail! Barely a scratch or a fleck of dust. For a 70-year-old film that looks amazing.

It is sublime!

Schreck no subs.