BFI (British Film Institute)

[Maltic]

Is rarewaves also your best bet if you're looking/waiting for a BFI sale (Europe in my case)?

I have a bit of a backlog of BFI titles at this point.

[Finch]

Ben Stoddart teased new announcements for tomorrow noon UK time on the BFI's Facebook page with a picture of stacked pots. Jeanne Dielman possibly?

[ryannichols7]

I feel like he's hinted at Akerman in 2025, it's pretty known they're doing an expensive set. I'm curious to see what they're gonna announce tomorrow, especially after Criterion are announcing the same day

[jlnight]

Starve Acre, The Oblong Box, and Cooking Price-wise!! I had no idea he could cook!

[criterionsnob]

BFI shop sale on now until August 29. Too bad I already have these, but there are some pretty great deals, including recent Blu-rays for £8.99.

Chocolat, The Eternal Daughter, two by Skolimowski, Bluebeard’s Castle, Out of the Blue, and others. I’d highly recommend 23 Seconds to Eternity for fans of the KLF.

The recent multi-film Ozu sets also on for £12.99 and £14.99.

[beamish14]

I’ll throw in a recommend for their collection of works by animator Phil Mulloy and this excellent book/DVD on the Arts Council of English/BFI’s Antimate’ program

[Maltic]

BFI shop sale on now until August 29. Too bad I already have these, but there are some pretty great deals, including recent Blu-rays for £8.99.

Chocolat, The Eternal Daughter, two by Skolimowski, Bluebeard’s Castle, Out of the Blue, and others. I’d highly recommend 23 Seconds to Eternity for fans of the KLF.

The recent multi-film Ozu sets also on for £12.99 and £14.99.

Thanks for the heads up!

But it seems BFI, unlike the other UK labels, don't have their stuff together, customswise, for us EU customers, so I'll probably be looking for sales at third party sellers after all.

[ryannichols7]

BFI made the switch to full height cases a little while ago, but the new Michael Powell: The Early Works is the first time I've personally seen them switch to full height booklets. does anyone know if this is actually the first one to do so? I got The Outcasts in the same order and it was still the half height book in a full height case. either way, exciting development! it looks awesome

[yoloswegmaster]

BFI have submitted Cronos to the BBFC for a ratings review of an upcoming home video release

[nicolas]

BFI made the switch to full height cases a little while ago, but the new Michael Powell: The Early Works is the first time I've personally seen them switch to full height booklets. does anyone know if this is actually the first one to do so? I got The Outcasts in the same order and it was still the half height book in a full height case. either way, exciting development! it looks awesome

The Powell booklet should be the first one. I've got their recent BDs of Ikiru and Chocolat and they're still the slim ones. Besides the larger ones looking better, they also don't float around in the packaging any more. Most of my BFI booklets came with damages because of that.

[Finch]

Ben Stoddart confirmed elsewhere that the BFI has All We Imagine As Light.

[GaryC]

Ben Stoddart confirmed elsewhere that the BFI has All We Imagine As Light.

Cinema 19 November, Blu-ray/BFI Player 17 March.

[What A Disgrace]

BFI made the switch to full height cases a little while ago, but the new Michael Powell: The Early Works is the first time I've personally seen them switch to full height booklets. does anyone know if this is actually the first one to do so? I got The Outcasts in the same order and it was still the half height book in a full height case. either way, exciting development! it looks awesome

The Powell booklet should be the first one. I've got their recent BDs of Ikiru and Chocolat and they're still the slim ones. Besides the larger ones looking better, they also don't float around in the packaging any more. Most of my BFI booklets came with damages because of that.

My copies of Starve Acre and The Oblong Box arrived today, and they also have the old style of booklet.

[ryannichols7]

BFI made the switch to full height cases a little while ago, but the new Michael Powell: The Early Works is the first time I've personally seen them switch to full height booklets. does anyone know if this is actually the first one to do so? I got The Outcasts in the same order and it was still the half height book in a full height case. either way, exciting development! it looks awesome

The Powell booklet should be the first one. I've got their recent BDs of Ikiru and Chocolat and they're still the slim ones. Besides the larger ones looking better, they also don't float around in the packaging any more. Most of my BFI booklets came with damages because of that.

My copies of Starve Acre and The Oblong Box arrived today, and they also have the old style of booklet.

man, hope that changes. as nicolas said, the smaller ones get a lot of damage in the packaging - I feel like I have more damaged BFI booklets than from any other label

anyway, posting here because I'm actively surprised BFI went for a full slate of releases Criterion have done. luckily they all seem to be stronger packages than what's on offer from CC, but I thought that was kinda bold!

[Peacock]

Stray Dog is new to an English friendly individual release Blu right?

[ryannichols7]

Stray Dog is new to an English friendly individual release Blu right?

correct, neither Criterion nor BFI released it on BD in the past, and I don't think the previous Toho disc had English subs. this is the first title BFI has upgraded where this is the case so far

really hope The Bad Sleep Well is next, and if they can rescue Ross Gibson (RIP)'s old masterclass commentary from Madman, I will be eternally grateful

[swo17]

I wonder why BFI (and Eureka, for that matter) aren't on Bluesky yet...

[Lowry_Sam]

My vote for the next Kurosawa would be for Red Beard, but at ths point I'm holding out for UHDs as opposed to a blu-ray. If it's a 4K resto there's really no reason not to put it on a UHD. With inflation & current economic climate I think upgrade fatique has set in among those who still collect physical media.

But even more, as a non-UK person, I'd really like to see the BFI get back to restoring UK films that are not likely to get released outside the UK because they aren't well known or didn't get much distibution at the time of their release or aren't by the highest profile directors (Mike Leigh, Ken Loach...). There's so much from the dvd era that is getting lost to time that priveliging Japenese over UK titles (particularly when UHDs are region free) seems to be at odds with what should be the BFI's mission in terms of physical media production.

I recently saw Carol Reed's The Stars Look Down in a theater from a damaged print (supposedly only one available) & loved it, went home and searched, but surprised to find it not available on disc. So we're getting yet another upgrade of The Third Man, which it certainly deserves, but at the same time there's titles sitting on the shelves gathering dust while the same big name titles get revisited every few years. I've also been going through dvd's to weed out titles that had been upgraded and surprised by the number of UK titles that don't have HD/UHD counterparts. It seems like in the early days of blu-ray we were starting to get a lot (Greenaway, Jarman, Clarke, Flipside...) but then it stopped.

[MichaelB]

But even more, as a non-UK person, I'd really like to see the BFI get back to restoring UK films that are not likely to get released outside the UK because they aren't well known or didn't get much distibution at the time of their release or aren't by the highest profile directors (Mike Leigh, Ken Loach...). There's so much from the dvd era that is getting lost to time that priveliging Japenese over UK titles (particularly when UHDs are region free) seems to be at odds with what should be the BFI's mission in terms of physical media production.

The simple fact is that Kurosawa releases underwrite more commercially risky projects. (As does the British Transport Films catalogue, which passes way under the radar of pretty much everyone here, but there's a reason it's stretched to something like sixteen two-disc volumes and multiple reissues!)

So it's not so much "privileging Japanese over British titles" as acknowledging that certain Japanese titles are guaranteed sellers in a way that most British titles simply aren't.

And the BFI's explicit mission, enshrined in its Royal Charter, is:

...to encourage the development of the arts of film, television and the moving image throughout Our United Kingdom, to promote their use as a record of contemporary life and manners, to promote education about film, television and the moving image generally, and their impact on society, to promote access to and appreciation of the widest possible range of British and world cinema and to establish, care for and develop collections reflecting the moving image history and heritage of Our United Kingdom.

Obviously, the Kurosawa releases come under "world cinema", and therefore they're completely in line with the BFI's actual mission (as opposed to what you feel it "should be").

I recently saw Carol Reed's The Stars Look Down in a theater from a damaged print (supposedly only one available) & loved it, went home and searched, but surprised to find it not available on disc. So we're getting yet another upgrade of The Third Man, which it certainly deserves, but at the same time there's titles sitting on the shelves gathering dust while the same big name titles get revisited every few years. I've also been going through dvd's to weed out titles that had been upgraded and surprised by the number of UK titles that don't have HD/UHD counterparts. It seems like in the early days of blu-ray we were starting to get a lot (Greenaway, Jarman, Clarke, Flipside...) but then it stopped.

The basic problem here, which has only got worse since Network folded, is that the overwhelming majority of twentieth-century films produced by major British studios have ended up with either ITV (Gainsborough, London Films, Rank) or StudioCanal (Associated-British, Ealing, EMI) - and The Stars Look Down, bizarrely, seems to have ended up with the BBC. And licensing such titles from such rightsholders these days makes the old blood-out-of-a-stone trick seem like a doddle - Indicator has managed to get hold of a handful of StudioCanal titles and has also come to an arrangement with them whereby they take on exclusively North American and Region A-locked distribution of some others (Family Life, Left, Right and Centre, Orders to Kill, with more to come), but Network was the only boutique label that managed to crack the ITV catalogue, and I gather this involved making a huge licensing commitment upfront.

This is of course why the BFI was never able to release any of its Hitchcock silent restorations - they remained the property of ITV or StudioCanal throughout.

When I was at the BFI myself (2002-11), one of my core jobs was to work out how to increase public access to a vast swathe of British cinema, knowing that - unavoidably - only a fraction of it would ever be licensable for physical media. Hence the introduction of multiple online platforms such as Screenonline, InView, the various BFI Mediatheques, their YouTube channel and (after my time) the BFI Player. We didn't restrict titles to certain platforms to annoy people, we did it because the nature of certain platforms made them the most realistic way of making certain titles accessible at all.

Take Ken Russell's 1960s BBC work - the higher-profile titles were expensively restored and released on Blu-ray, but the more obscure ones tended to end up in the Mediatheque because the non-commercial nature of that platform (and the closed-circuit distribution system) meant that we didn't have to jump through the same licensing hoops - for instance, clearing third-party music and film clips (endemic in Russell's work). Now, I would love to oversee a lovingly-restored Blu-ray box set of Russell's entire BBC output from A Poet in London to Dance of the Seven Veils, but there are sound financial and logistical reasons why such a thing hasn't happened and is pretty unlikely to happen. Even a commercial release of one of my favourite Sixties Russells, Béla Bartók (1964), seems like an insuperably expensive rights-clearance challenge when set against the money it's realistically likely to make.

[Randall Maysin Again]

That's very sad to hear about The Stars Look Down MichaelB. Would a label who tried to license it from the BBC have to pay comparable amounts of cash to that demanded by ITV or StudioCanal? I'm guessing the answer is yes, which means the film is almost certainly never going to be released on bluray, its hardly going to be a moneymaker under any circumstances anyway. Why is The Third Man so much more popular than Carol Reed's other films? I don't even really like it that much, I prefer The Man Between. PS, do you happen to have any additional info about the status of possible print(s) of TSLD?

[MichaelB]

PS, do you happen to have any additional info about the status of possible print(s) of TSLD?

The BFI National Archive is sitting on loads of 35mm materials, including what may well be the original 35mm nitrate negative, but they can't exploit them themselves without rightsholder permission.

This is why the BFI is so meticulous about contractually dotting and crossing every I and T when it comes to rightsholders, because the continued operation of the BFI National Archive relies on rightsholder goodwill.

[tenia]

(As does the British Transport Films catalogue, which passes way under the radar of pretty much everyone here, but there's a reason it's stretched to something like sixteen two-disc volumes and multiple reissues!)

I actually love those kind of releases, just like I love when the BFI includes barely-related short movies but they're restored so why not. This is part of how I got to know the BFI as a video label back to its DVD days : through these, but more specifically the COI releases (and things like Steel, Visions of Change and Shadows of Progress).

I don't doubt a second a title like Seven Samurai will however be a best-seller too (I've seen the recent Behind The Scenes videos : it is indeed), so of course it also makes sense for the BFI to release it if they can. I do admit though that when I discovered the BFI releases 15 years ago, I thought they were solely UK materials, until I also saw Pasolini and Kurosawa and Ozu movies being released too. But once I understood it was a label like any indie label on this aspect : well, why not ?

[rapta]

My vote for the next Kurosawa would be for Red Beard, but at ths point I'm holding out for UHDs as opposed to a blu-ray. If it's a 4K resto there's really no reason not to put it on a UHD. With inflation & current economic climate I think upgrade fatique has set in among those who still collect physical media.

FWIW, someone recently pointed out that The Hidden Fortress might be the next Kurosawa for the BFI to tackle as it's getting a Japanese release in May (alongside Throne of Blood). We'll have to wait and see what the next announcements bring...

I'd imagine Red Beard - as well as Drunken Angel, I Live in Fear, The Lower Depths, The Bad Sleep Well etc - will be the next batch of titles to be restored by Toho, then will be offered to BFI and Criterion. Considering the apparently popularity of these Kurosawa restorations in all territories, you'd hope the wait won't be too long.

[jlnight]

Isn't The Stars Look Down with Renown? They released it on DVD about a decade ago.

I spent a few hours watching Cooking Price-Wise at the Mediatheque earlier this year. A good way to pass the time while waiting for a Jesus Lizard gig!