A Page of Madness (Kinugasa Teinosuke, 1926)

[Jack Phillips]

NB: There is a Gate of Hell Blu-ray out in Japan: http://www.amazon.co.jp/gp/switch-langu ... uage=ja_JP

[DeprongMori]

Note: For those of you in the Bay Area, The San Francisco Silent Film Festival will be screening this on Saturday, June 3, at 9:30 pm at the Castro Theatre. They are listing a run time of 70 minutes. It will be accompanied by the Alloy Orchestra. http://www.silentfilm.org

[longstone]

Did anyone else pick up the Flicker Alley Blu-ray of this ? Mine arrived in the U.K. over Christmas . It seems to be a burn on demand disc but looks like a normal factory product in all other ways . Disc is printed up nicely and there is reasonable cover art though no booklet or insert. The disc seems to be region free ( it says A,B,C on the cover ) and it is scanned from a 16 mm print with new score by the Alloy Orchestra. I've only had time to check out the first 10 minutes but the quality seems pretty good considering, I'm not technically minded but it certainly looks a lot better than what I've seen online before.
The film is paired with Portrait of a Young Man ( Henwar Rodakiewicz ) which I've not checked out yet so can't comment on that .
The only video extra seems to be " Cinema Then Cinema Now " a discussion about Page of Madness but again not checked that out yet .
I'd be interested to hear what anyone else thinks of the quality of this release .
Personally I'm just pleased it's finally available somewhere .

[mteller]

I picked it up, haven't had a chance to watch it yet. Hoping the new score is good, but I've always been very fond of the old one (which I think was added for the 1973 re-release, but at the moment I can't seem to find any concrete info on it)

[NABOB OF NOWHERE]

Also out on DVD from Lobster in France
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rx4pUyNYfwY" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[spectre]

Haven't heard of that company before – anyone know if they're any good? I'm having a look at their youtube page, and they seem to have some interesting stuff.

[jsteffe]

Lobster Films is certainly a good company. Serge Bromberg is well-regarded in the film restoration community, and Lobster has a close relationship with Flicker Alley. Many of the restorations that Flicker Alley offers were performed by Lobster Films, often in collaboration with Blackhawk Films/David Shepard. Bromberg also co-directed the fascinating documentary Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno.

[longstone]

There is a short review from a screening of the Lobster restoration here
http://www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk/ ... f-madness/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[tenia]

My only issue with Lobster is that they only release a handful of their work on BD, and some of them could have been better (I had issues with how poorly encoded were their Charley Bowers set, for instance). But their restoration work is otherwise indeed very commandable.

[osmin]

I own four versions of Page of Madness: two bootlegs I bought years ago which look worn out and are nearly unwatchable (58' and 59'), the Flicker Alley Blu-ray (71') that must be identical with the Lobster DVD and though it looks better than the bootlegs it is not the first choice. By far the best version is the print from the George Eastman House which was shown on TCM (59'). Not only is the picture quality much better but there is also more picture information on the upper and left side of the frame. The shorter running time must be due to faster projection speed. It contains not the Alloy Orchestra score but another one.

[Zepfanman]

Has anyone heard about the newly-commissioned live score & restoration, mentioned here? https://letterboxd.com/smd929/list/rece ... /by/added/

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

I don't see any reason to think this is anything other than the Eastman House's already-circulating 35mm print, which was apparently made in the early aughts from the dupe negative in Japan. It's had a number of screenings, the most recent of which I can find was at the Eastman House itself in 2018. Perhaps the Eastman House has a more recently-struck print, but I find it vanishingly unlikely that a full-blown restoration would make its premiere at a venue like this, which didn't even bill it as a restoration.

[Calvin]

There's a new 4K restoration, which restores the original blue tinting, premiering at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival and is getting a North American premiere at UCLA in December. There's more info here (in Japanese) on what the restoration involved.

[Marwood]

There's a new 4K restoration, which restores the original blue tinting, premiering at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival and is getting a North American premiere at UCLA in December. There's more info here (in Japanese) on what the restoration involved.

Is this Pordenone screening a different restoration than one done in 2021 by National Film Archive of Japan which screened at Il cinema ritrovata in Bologna in 2023? Seems strange that they would undertake a new one after less than five years.

[Calvin]

There's a new 4K restoration, which restores the original blue tinting, premiering at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival and is getting a North American premiere at UCLA in December. There's more info here (in Japanese) on what the restoration involved.

Is this Pordenone screening a different restoration than one done in 2021 by National Film Archive of Japan which screened at Il cinema ritrovata in Bologna in 2023? Seems strange that they would undertake a new one after less than five year.

Yes, it's difficult to make out exactly from the link but it looks like they're saying the 2021 restoration was an analogue one and they have been working ever since then on this new 4K digital restoration after noticing at that point that the materials were starting to degrade