It may well be the case that, as with the Dufaycolor materials on the Humphrey Jennings volume, what Gary calls the "striation issue" is a by-product of the Thomson-Color process that's been rendered more visible by the high-definition transfer. But I don't know enough about the technology to be certain, and my own copy hasn't turned up yet.
Talking of which, Jonathan Rosenbaum's 1998 piece on the film is well worth reading.
Can anyone throw any light on why Beaver refers to My Uncle as being "1984-compiled"? The date also appears beside the title in the review's "Edition details". My understanding is that the English-language version has always been around and it's definitely how I first saw the film in 1970s 35mm revivals in the UK. I still own a 1982 commercial VHS tape of it (which incidentally cost me £40 then - about £115 in today's money!)
The Mondo Digital review states My Uncle is 107 minutes, presumably the Blu-ray length. When I read that, I was a bit concerned that this "1984-compiled" version had lost a minute or two of footage. But the BBFC site gives the running time of the BFI's My Uncle as 104m 42s, presumably the DVD length with PAL speed-up (not the Blu-ray) as that is almost exactly the same as my PAL tape.
BBFC submissions for dual-format releases are invariably on DVD-R for reasons of convenience, so the running times in their database won't be accurate for the Blu-ray disc.
It may well be the case that, as with the Dufaycolor materials on the Humphrey Jennings volume, what Gary calls the "striation issue" is a by-product of the Thomson-Color process that's been rendered more visible by the high-definition transfer. But I don't know enough about the technology to be certain, and my own copy hasn't turned up yet.
Just to update my own post, it seems that my educated guesswork was spot on. According to someone who actually worked on an early attempt at rendering Jour de Fête in HD:
It's quite similar to the Dufaycolour process as utilised by Mr Jennings, or going back even further, the two-colour system created by Friese-Greene. Exhibiting these antiquated systems on digital formats is somewhat less organic as well as less forgiving than when these processes appear on film, because the seams of the processes show up that much more clearly.
Still, if it's too distracting in HD, the included DVD should be less so - and of course there's still the Tati-approved black-and-white version elsewhere on the Blu-ray.
Gregory wrote:Not sure how to react to the new Mon Oncle. Shouldn't white appliances be white? In the first two caps, sunlit exterior shots now look gloomy and overcast.
I think they look plenty white, they don't have to be "pure" white. For comparison, look at the whites in the shirts in the first caps - clearly blown out in the older editions. That shot outside the cafe now looks naturally like an afternoon (or was it morning? I haven't watched it in a long time...nevertheless.) I think it's a case of contrast boosting and color manipulation being returned to normal on this new version. It looks great to me.
Gregory wrote:Not sure how to react to the new Mon Oncle. Shouldn't white appliances be white? In the first two caps, sunlit exterior shots now look gloomy and overcast.
I think they look plenty white, they don't have to be "pure" white. For comparison, look at the whites in the shirts in the first caps - clearly blown out in the older editions. That shot outside the cafe now looks naturally like an afternoon (or was it morning? I haven't watched it in a long time...nevertheless.) I think it's a case of contrast boosting and color manipulation being returned to normal on this new version. It looks great to me.
The skintones (particularly in that kitchen scene) are absolutely pallid in the DVDs, so the new colors do look quite nice I think.
My copy of Jour de fête has just arrived and I can see what Gary means - the entire image of the colour version is covered with very faint vertical lines. It looks a bit like a lenticular postcard, only without the 3-D effect underneath.
It's much more obvious in framegrabs, and is easy enough to tune out in motion, but technical producer Doug Weir's booklet note makes it clear that it's an indelible part of the film:
Thomsoncolor was an additive colour system, much like Kodacolor. Microscopic grooves are embedded in the film and, when projected, light is refracted through a special rotating filter wheel to recreate the colour on the screen.
The book Jour de Fete de Jacques Tati ou la couleur retrouvée, published by Cahiers du Cinema in 1995, expands on this. They even enlarge a portion of a frame to more clearly show the vertical lines.
So it's as much a part of the image as grain is to other films.
The BFI Blu of MON ONCLE is an enormous treat. Beautiful, filmic encode from a new 2K restoration (with qualities on Blu-ray that you'd associate more with a 4K restoration). I wasn't expecting it to look this good (don't know why, perhaps the Eastmancolor prints that have been used for previous editions), but the IP scanned here has gorgeous stable colours and wonderful detail. One of the best Blus I've seen this year (I'm keeping a tally... Criterion LETTER NEVER SENT, Sony LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, Universal REAR WINDOW, Criterion LOLA MONTES (from 2010), and BFI MON ONCLE. There are others too, and I'm trying to remember them (need to keep better notes!), but these are in the top tier I've seen).
One of those discs that makes a revisit a whole new experience and thoroughly worthwhile.
I know I've said it before, but this guy is just hopeless. How can he dismiss a package as "rather thin" when he clearly didn't bother to even play the second Jour de Fête disc?
If he had done - or even if he'd read the press release - he'd know that it also contains three shorts (combined running time over 50 minutes) and the trailer, of whose existence he was clearly blissfully unaware.
It's hardly that surprising. How many other labels can you name that put their extras on the DVD-only in a dual format package? He presumedly assumed that both disks would be identical.
It's kind of annoying actually that Tati's first short at least wasn't included in 1080p on the Blu, missed opportunity.
Peacock wrote:It's hardly that surprising. How many other labels can you name that put their extras on the DVD-only in a dual format package? He presumedly assumed that both disks would be identical..
That argument would stand up if he'd never reviewed a BFI package before, but he's covered loads.
Bear in mind that this is the guy who once argued with a straight face that booklets shouldn't count as extras.
MichaelB wrote:Bear in mind that this is the guy who once argued with a straight face that booklets shouldn't count as extras.
This shocked me. I then went about asking a lot of my friends, sort of an informal poll, if they agreed and almost all of them did. Thanks, MichaelB. Now I hate all my friends.
Since I've been responsible for considerably more booklets than I have on-disc extras, you can probably work out where I stand on this.
I can also confirm that writing the 6,000-word booklet essay for Second Run's Szindbád (a film about which very little of any substance had previously been written in English) took one hell of a lot more time and effort than spending an hour interviewing a filmmaker and half a day editing and titling the end result.
Did anyone think BFI's "Jour de fete" lacked in the subtitles? Many parts of dialogue in the color version were left untranslated, some long sentences were short and simplified in the subtitles. As for the 1964 version, nothing seems to be translated! I have the subtitle button on, but none of the dialogue is subtitled!
Christ, I thought exactly the same when I watched it last week, but decided against posting. It's kind of the same for the next two Tatis too. I read in one of the booklets that Tati refused to have his films subtitled initially, as he felt it lended the dialogue too much importance. However, if you're going to subtitle the films then at least do it properly. So much isn't subtitled and when it is, it's often grossly paraphrased. Thankfully these are films you can largely watch without subtitles, but it doesn't change the fact that the ones present are utterly dreadful. If you tried to submit these as fansubs on a well known film group online, you wouldn't be getting anything for your work.
It's been a while since I've see Jour de fete, but it sounds like what I experienced with Playtime when I saw a 70mm projection of what turned out to be the "international version" at Lincoln Center. In that case, there were no subtitles - only small snippets of dialogue were in English but had they been in a different language I wouldn't have missed anything anyway. I actually dug it - it allowed you to focus on the visuals even more, and considering how dense so many of the scenes were with the visual details, that definitely helped. Maybe this wasn't the case with Jour de fete?
Meh. The three Tati's I've watched in preparation for Playtime have all come across as tedious to me. L'École des facteurs in some ways is better than the three features that I've seen. It succinctly summed up how I felt about what I've watched so far, in that they are series of shorts stretched out to the interminable length of features.
TMDaines wrote:Meh. The three Tati's I've watched in preparation for Playtime have all come across as tedious to me. L'École des facteurs in some ways is better than the three features that I've seen. It succinctly summed up how I felt about what I've watched so far, in that they are series of shorts stretched out to the interminable length of features.
Mon Oncle's my personal fave though I understand the lengthy short criticism. That said Tati uses this technique well in Playtime as all of the shorts occur at once since his large canvas shows several completely unrelated events from any one instance allowing the film to largely be a chose your own adventure type thing.
FWIW, I never really appreciated Playtime until I saw it on the big screen. I saw it on DVD and thought it was pretty good, and then saw it a few years later at MoMA in 35mm, and man, did it make a difference, especially as the film wears on and you realize he's packed in so much in every frame of the film. (e.g. the restaurant scene)
Shorts stretched out to features? I don't understand that. There's no way anyone could make everything these films contain fit into one or two reels. If Tati had tried to fit the same amount of activity into a much shorter time frame, the comic timing and rhythm of the films would have been drastically altered. If you were merely bored and thought they should have been shorter, that's a different type of criticism.
knives wrote:That said Tati uses this technique well in Playtime as all of the shorts occur at once since his large canvas shows several completely unrelated events from any one instance allowing the film to largely be a chose your own adventure type thing.
