Flicker Alley

[MichaelB]

Film is spread over two dual layered discs. Bitrates hovering nicely within the 5-7 mb/s range. Image is wonderful, and brings the original 32 reel (subsequently reduced by gance to twelve... then cut down again to 8 reels for a 1928 revival)from previous lows back up to twenty reels... and is considered by far the most complete version seen anywhere since 1923.

I had a brief chat with Andrew Youdell, who (heroically) supplied the piano accompaniment for the NFT screening that I caught twenty years or so ago, and he reckons four and a half hours is about right. (Obviously, with this length, even a slight shift in projection speed can make a huge difference to the overall running time, so he couldn't be precise).

A review copy landed on my desk this morning - sadly, it turned out to be Region 1 (despite the packaging and disc labelling explicitly claiming they were region-free) so I haven't had a chance to watch them yet as my laptop's locked to region 2. But fingers crossed I'll get a chance to watch the whole thing over the weekend.

[SoyCuba]

A review copy landed on my desk this morning - sadly, it turned out to be Region 1 (despite the packaging and disc labelling explicitly claiming they were region-free) so I haven't had a chance to watch them yet as my laptop's locked to region 2.

Use VLC media player, it ignores region coding. It also has a great deinterlacing filters so it's a great DVD player.

[MichaelB]

A review copy landed on my desk this morning - sadly, it turned out to be Region 1 (despite the packaging and disc labelling explicitly claiming they were region-free) so I haven't had a chance to watch them yet as my laptop's locked to region 2.

Use VLC media player, it ignores region coding.

Not on a MacBook it doesn't (notoriously) - at least not without installing Windows, which seems a tad drastic.

Anyway, I don't especially want to watch La Roue on a 13" screen, so it's not a huge problem - but I thought I'd warn people that it's not as region-free as it claims to be. (I don't for one second imagine non-US readers of these forums aren't fully multiregion-compatible, but it's always worth mentioning!)

[Oggilby]

Does anyone know if the TCM documentary on Gance scheduled for April 27th will appear on either of the extraordinary-sounding Flicker Alley releases?

It's actually Kevin Brownlow's 1968 documentary, which is 50 min. long. The version of J'accuse on TCM is listed as 166 min., so the 2nd disc must be the remake (100 min.) or have the documentary.

[What A Disgrace]

It's actually Kevin Brownlow's 1968 documentary, which is 50 min. long. The version of J'accuse on TCM is listed as 166 min., so the 2nd disc must be the remake (100 min.) or have the documentary.

I'll take both, please.

[unclehulot]

Not on a MacBook it doesn't (notoriously) - at least not without installing Windows, which seems a tad drastic.

Anyway, I don't especially want to watch La Roue on a 13" screen, so it's not a huge problem - but I thought I'd warn people that it's not as region-free as it claims to be. (I don't for one second imagine non-US readers of these forums aren't fully multiregion-compatible, but it's always worth mentioning!)

A work around I've heard mentioned (but not tried) on a Mac is to use an external disc burner/drive as a dedicated R2 playback drive. If what I've read is true, you can change THAT drive to R2, and it doesn't affect the countdown of region changes on the primary drive. I went ahead and installed XP on my Macbook anyway.....just couldn't live without my pet Windows progs during long trips out of town!

[domino harvey]

I went ahead and installed XP on my Macbook anyway.

That's like buying a Porsche and remodeling it to look like a Honda Civic

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

Well, see, there's this little thing called Boot Camp and it's pretty neat. It's not as if anyone's installing XP over MacOS. It's more like a Porsche that can instantly switch between looking like a Porsche and a Civic, for those odd instances where you need to park your car in East St. Louis or something.

Some Macbook drives (not all) have unofficial firmwares that defeat the region encoding, although they don't work with Leopard (unless flash the firmware under Tiger and then upgrade to Leopard). There's also the outside chance it'll brick your drive.

[HerrSchreck]

One thing I will say, after working further thru this, is that the intertitles can be pretty bad sometimes. I mean-- and I hate to say this-- really bad.

One of the innovations of La Roue was the in-the-camera fusing of intertitles and image... transparent intertitle cards superimposed over a part of a moving image so that it wasnt necc to cut to a "title card"... the film could keep rolling.

Because in this case there was no way to remove the intertitle from these scenes... and hamstrung by the decisions to replace rather than sub... you've got scenes like this very reminiscent of the subs in vampyr where the whole bottom of the image is blacked out, so they could overlay the new subs, rather than sub over subs. So you lose a large amount of image in these shots.

Very Shepardian, and very disappointing in this day and age. The hell is the point of attempting a "definitive" edition of this notoriously mangled masterpiece, if you're going to go a head and fucking spraypaint black over shots?

I can live with replaced intertitles-- but this shit bugs me. I hate saying it because I love these guys, but this is bonehead crap.

[Donald Trampoline]

They did it in Judex too. Animated in-shot text is covered by half-assed English computer-inserted credits.

[domino harvey]

I can't imagine who this decision is geared towards.

"Well, I'm gonna watch me this four hour silent French film but goddammit mother, if there's one word of non-English on-screen, we're switching over to Joe Dirt again!"

It's useless to bitch about this because the company knows they have the film lover over a barrel and we'll ultimately buy the damn thing no matter what, as there's little risk of anyone else even attempting to release it and we've all been clamoring for this title forever, but still.

[MichaelB]

One thing I will say, after working further thru this, is that the intertitles can be pretty bad sometimes. I mean-- and I hate to say this-- really bad.

I'm really annoyed to hear about this - I last saw La Roue about twenty years ago, so my memory is a bit hazy, but I distinctly recall that many of the intertitles consisted of quotes from classic French literature, which should obviously have been left in the original. (At the NFT, they ran an unsubtitled French copy with a voiceover translation on the PA system, which worked pretty well).

I had similar issues with Tartan's otherwise very good edition of Eisenstein's Strike - intertitles that were designed at least as much for visual impact as verbal content were replaced with indifferent English ones. Very occasionally they'd try to achieve a rough equivalent of Eisenstein's original, but I don't know why they bothered in the first place. Let's face it, people who buy a film like Strike (and La Roue) aren't going to be fazed by subtitles, are they?

[Kinsayder]

One of the innovations of La Roue was the in-the-camera fusing of intertitles and image... transparent intertitle cards superimposed over a part of a moving image so that it wasnt necc to cut to a "title card"... the film could keep rolling.

L'Herbier did this with great artistry in L'Homme du large (1920), so Gance wasn't strictly innovating here. As far as the L'Herbier is concerned, I don't believe the original titles could be replaced without wrecking the film.

[HerrSchreck]

They did it in Judex too. Animated in-shot text is covered by half-assed English computer-inserted credits.

Dude trust me I was one of the first ones to get Judex. Judex has nothing like this-- judex has newspaper, or letter, etc type shots either frozed/digitized, or with the letters reprinted in englished and airbrushed INTO the shot... not superimposed over a huge portion of a moving, still progressing shot which itself has been 1/3 blacked out. It resembles the SHepard VAMPYR more than anything else... dynamic shots are half obscured by these black zones because the intertitles were originally transparently laid over the shots.

On the L'Herbier, I have Du Large, and there is some pretty innovative stuff going on there, especially with sreen dividing/in camera. I stated it because Burel took credit for the innovation. The film La Roue premiered in 1922, and had been in production for three years... maybe L'Herbier beat him to the cinema but not the innovation?

Probably too close to judge-- doesnt matter-- they're both amazing.

EDIT: Domino re "over a barrell". There is hope: I'd keep my eyes open for a french release. This was done in tandem w Blackhawk and Lobster in France.. so I'd wager an unsubbed french edition is forthcoming.. I'm sure this was essential to their involvement-- getting a disc out.

[Tommaso]

I'm shocked to hear this, too. Well, I guess I'll have to wait now until some reviews with screen caps are up somewhere, but if Schreck's comparison to the Shepard "Vampyr" rings true, I feel like abstaining from this release at this point. This is totally unacceptable practice. And as said above, if Lobster is involved, this reeks very much like an arte france or MK2 version coming in the not all too distant future. Or at least a TV broadcast.

[denti alligator]

I'm going to cancel my pre-order, if possible. This is unacceptable.

[HerrSchreck]

TCM on the two Gance/F.Alley projects..... and specifically La Roue:

The digital restoration of LA ROUE, a Flicker Alley Digital Edition, was carried out by Lobster Film Studios in Paris under the direction of Eric Lange, who also produced the restoration with David Shepard. Serge Bromberg and Jeffery Masino served as associate producers. The film’s score was composed, arranged and conducted by Robert Israel.

[MichaelB]

A work around I've heard mentioned (but not tried) on a Mac is to use an external disc burner/drive as a dedicated R2 playback drive.

...which is exactly what I do at home, but it's not practical for watching DVDs on my commute. But I'm happy to confirm that this does work perfectly, because the region code is set by the hardware, not the operating system - in fact, in theory, you could have separate drives for regions 1-6 inclusive, if you were completely mad.

Well, see, there's this little thing called Boot Camp and it's pretty neat.

It may be pretty neat, but it requires me to shell out for a full retail copy of Windows XP in order to do anything with it - as well as setting aside a huge chunk of hard drive space for the installation. Which isn't worth doing just for being able to watch non-region 2 discs on the move.

[unclehulot]

I went ahead and installed XP on my Macbook anyway.

That's like buying a Porsche and remodeling it to look like a Honda Civic

Or buying a Civic and finding out that it's engine is that of a Porsche?

Sorry to continue OT here: Whatever it IS, it has finally allowed me to travel and do everything I want to do on one machine. I certainly didn't shell out the full price for a copy of XP just to defeat region coding. I generally use the Mac side for as much as I can, and I enjoy doing so, but among other problems I have are several portable hard drives full of things from my 10 years of existing solely in Windows land. Because these drives are formatted in NTFS file format, they are read-only in Mac-land, and I can't add anything to the drives in Mac either, unless I wipe them out and start over in FAT. Also, I prefer editing and burning audio recordings using Windows programs. Mac is still too restrictive in this regard, and I'm not a fan of say, Audacity among the free programs.....at least I wasn't after it ate several important files!

Everyone has different opinions about living with one system or the other, but for ME, I wouldn't have bought the machine without the perk of being able to run XP on it, and it does so very easily, and very well with Boot camp, IMHO.

[sshhhh]

Oh the suffering that goes on in this forum. I'll be straightforward. I'm a good friend of Jeff Masino of Flicker Alley. I like to check in on forums like these to see how Flicker Alley is doing in the eyes of silent film fans. Yes, I'm an outsider. I know how hard he works on these titles. In order to keep his company running, he needs to generate income. I think the need to use English titles has already been made clear in an earlier post. Viewers across the country will be able to enjoy a spectacular version of La Roue on TCM tomorrow night thanks to Jeff, hopefully generating new interest and an increased audience in masters like Gance and silent films in general. I was fortunate enough to see a press screening of La Roue at the Silent Film Theater is L.A. with Jeff and composer Robert Israel and the response by the press and film experts was overwhelmingly positive. The 4 and a half hours flew by (and I'm not even a big silent film fan!).

Flicker Alley is not some huge corporation sitting back and counting their money. This is a labor of love for Jeff and profit margins are slim at best. And for someone to "obtain" a FREE press copy of the film and proceed to heap profanity laced criticism on the film's translated titles to the point where others change their minds about purchasing the DVD - that's reprehensible. The film isn't even released yet. Watch the film for yourself on TCM and if the fact that the English titles block a part of the film causes you to not purchase the DVD, then don't buy the DVD and be proud of yourself (and please HerrSchreck, return the press copy to its rightful owner). But don't incite others to knee-jerk react to over-the-top negative criticism.

I understand that you all are passionate about films. (Trust me, I have my own obsessions that involve little metal cars from the 60's - but that's another forum.) But what is the point if such criticism drives Flicker Alley into the ground? More classic films will never see the light of day. Constructive, not destructive criticism is always welcome. And there is no need for the expletives. Flicker Alley always strives to provide the best product with the limited budgets it has to work with. Jeff is a class act and does not deserve this kind of treatment. He's probably going to give me a hard time for posting this message. He respects his customers and will, I'm sure, offer refunds to pre-orders without comment.

La Roue is a wonder film and the new score from Robert Israel is transcending. It truly carries the emotional thread throughout the film. It would be a shame not to experience it.

[domino harvey]

"Constructive criticism" is criticism that aims to better the target via explaining the subject's weaknesses and explicitly suggesting what can be improved-- the term is used to differentiate between "This fucking sucks" and "This film's presentation is flawed, and here's why." Schreck has done nothing wrong here. Has he misrepresented the intertitle situation? By your own admission, he has not. In fact, he's honestly presenting the facts of the transfer, and if those facts stop a sale than that sale deserved to be stopped. No one is calling into question Flicker Alley's commitment to releasing films-- you're on page seven of an existing thread all about the label. But this isn't a thread to merely fellate your friend's label: we bite Criterion's hand, we bite MOC's hand, we bite Second Run's hand, and you better believe we'll bite Flicker Alley's hand if they do something wrong.

If Flicker Alley wanted to avoid criticisms like this, they'd have taken steps to avoid them by transferring the film correctly without replacing the original intertitles. If the replacements were conditional to receiving funding (which seems very likely), they should have alerted the consumer to the alteration. The Criterion message board shouldn't be the Woodward and Bernstein of DVDs, but we often are.

[MichaelB]

And for someone to "obtain" a FREE press copy of the film and proceed to heap profanity laced criticism on the film's translated titles to the point where others change their minds about purchasing the DVD - that's reprehensible. The film isn't even released yet.

But it does nonetheless already exist in its final form, so I don't really buy that argument.

For what it's worth, you can rest assured that my review in the July 2008 Sight & Sound (out early June) will be a total foaming-at-the-mouth rave for the film and - on the basis of what I've seen - will also be pretty upbeat about the DVD. But it would be remiss of me not to mention the intertitle situation, especially as those readers lucky enough to have caught one of the NFT screenings would have seen it with the original French titles. On the other hand, they'd only have seen it with piano accompaniment, so it's swings and roundabouts.

I have every sympathy for independent distributors operating on shoestrings - but Second Run will confirm that for all my unstinting support of what they do on principle, I don't pull my punches in my reviews when it comes to flaws in their DVDs, whether it's Passenger in the wrong aspect ratio, Romeo, Juliet and Darkness being VHS quality, and so on. In both cases and others, these issues were arguably beyond their control - but that still doesn't mean they should have been brushed under the carpet. And neither should flaws in La Roue's presentation - or anything else from Flicker Alley.

[denti alligator]

Schreck's tone is, well, Schreck. So no need to take that too seriously.

And Schreck's a BIG supporter of Flicker Alley. Anyway, the point is not the translated intertitles. We knew Flicker Alley was doing this and accepted it as an annoying fact. What Schreck alerted us to was the need to go overboard in providing on-screen translations of text that may be part of the image (not an intertitle) so that the original French text needed to be blocked out in order to impose English text. An intertitle is an intertitle; and although I strongly believe they should always be presented in the original language (for god's sake, we're reading one way or the other!), I can (reluctantly) accept replacing them because some wrong-headed producers at TCM feel it needs to be that way. What I can't accept is messing with the image of the film itself. I mean, where do you stop? I a character enters a building labeled "Police Station" in the original film, do you think we should digitally cover up the original language and provide an English version *on screen*?

[Donald Trampoline]

I am pretty sure it's cheaper to subtitle than to generate text, block out the original, and insert into the picture. So this is a purposeful creative choice by the DVD producers to expend extra money to do something that we would kindly like to advise them is one of the least preferred options.

I can appreciate your feelings about seeing a friend's labor of love criticized even before it's released, but the accurate representation of historically important works of art is important to us. It is our sad lot to sit here as consumers with no power to prevent people from slightly messing up what we consider important aspects of works of art. For example, with paintings, some protections for basic principles of presentation exist because it's run by professional institutions. Moving image distribution is trickier since it is of course market-based and requires capital. Subtitling of intertitles and in-shot text material (animated or otherwise) is preferable to replacing them with newly generated text (in situations when the original intertitles exist). We can perhaps argue about straight intertitles elsewhere, but in-shot material and especially animated text material is a different story. I do feel it is pretty darn weird when I'm watching the 1916 film Judex and a television screen (there is some ahead-of-its-time technology within the film) or something is in the shot and all of a sudden newly-generated English text is animated and inserted to appear on the screen-within-a-screen in this classic film. I can't tell you the relief I feel when I watch an Eisenstein film on DVD with very creative intertitles (sometimes animated I think, or at least he varied them in size to indicate loudness increasing) with just some nice subtle subtitles at the bottom telling me what it says. Seeing that original, powerful Cyrillic is wonderful.

I feel bad that you are hurt for your friend, but the basic problem is if people don't squawk, stuff doesn't get fixed. And this stuff is important. This easily could have been avoided, since as I mentioned, it actually cost more money to do the wrong thing. Add to that the intelligent case we make for why it is a very bad decision, and it would seem the decision going forward should be easy.

[colinr0380]

What I can't accept is messing with the image of the film itself. I mean, where do you stop? I a character enters a building labeled "Police Station" in the original film, do you think we should digitally cover up the original language and provide an English version *on screen*?

I quite liked the way that Pioneer handled their 2000 DVD of Akira where you could choose a subtitle track that brought up a symbol during the film that if you pressed it while it was showing paused the film and brought up a translation of whatever Japanese text was going past on the screen at that moment.

The good thing about that was the various set up options for the film allowed a number of options from the dubbed English version with no subtitles or translation symbols, through the Japanese track with just subtitles to the fully subtitled and translated version (you could even have the English dub with the onscreen text translation symbol activated).

Of course this was an all stops out edition of one of the most famous anime films in the West so I suppose there were no particular problems in terms of the cost of working on the project but I remember thinking that this was quite a good approach to take with a film that contained a lot of dense onscreen text that couldn't be quickly and easily translated in a normal subtitle stream.