Second Run General Chitchat

[Langland]

I'll check it out. This came to mind because I ordered for a friend a dvd of the animated film Ra Path of the Sun God by Scottish artist Lesley Keen. I used to own a vhs obtained I think from the BFI, recalled it recently and tracked it down. A beautiful film. Any admirer of Son of the White Mare, released recently of course by MoC, would love this. You can get it on Vimeo I think and the artist has also posted a piece based on Greek mythology called Invocation on YouTube.

[ryannichols7]

impressively Second Run have only run one upgrade so far this year, sticking to new releases instead. wonder what the balance will be like the rest of the year?

January: El Mar La Mar
February: The Cassandra Cat
April: Laurin
May: Morgiana
June: Twilight
July: The Circus Tent

I have listed potential upgrades in this thread several times so don't feel the need to be redundant with it, and even same with new titles. even then, Laurin and The Circus Tent seemed like surprises. [b}The Cassandra Cat[/b] and Twilight were no brainers for SR. curious what we'll see going forward - I know some of the bigger holdouts are The Fifth Seal, the Paulo Rocha double, Kazuo Hara's films, and of course literally anything from Poland after the "floodgates have been opened", if you will. Golem may well be from Second Run and it was confirmed that Skolimowski's Walkover and Barrier will be coming from the label. should be an exciting second half of the year!

[rapta]

Ooh interesting, when was The Fifth Seal confirmed? I only heard of one Rocha title coming, and only one Hara too (Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974), and those were teased quite a while ago now...

Agreed that Golem does seem likely to come from Second Run of all the UK boutiques (if not, perhaps Eureka since they're doing Polish titles too), seeing as it's definitely not with Radiance. Excited for more Skolimowski, hoping that's a double-set of the two films so I can pick it up alongside the recent BFI releases and have a little marathon (and even Le départ is on Netflix)!

[Bikey]

Second Run Sale now on at BFI Filmstore - selected Blu-rays at £12.99, DVDs at £7.99

[hearthesilence]

FWIW, Glenn Kenny gave a pretty great endorsement of Second Run in general. It's virtually a gift to the advertising department:

"Second Run is almost unique among labels in that every single title it puts out is worth your time. Not just a cinephile’s time, not just a collector’s time; but your time as in you, a human being presumably invested in life on this earth. Taste doesn’t come into it. Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but I think a rhetorically useful one, as a challenge. Someone name me a title in the label’s catalog that doesn’t meet my exaggerated claim. Whether you’ve heard of the picture before or not, you’re going to get something good out of watching it."

[Langland]

I would like to endorse this comment. I have just returned from a tour of Armenia mainly based in Yerevan and partly to visit the Parajanov centre there (beautiful). I mentioned the film Mayak The Lighthouse by the late Mariya Saakyan to the tour guide and she wasn't aware of it even though they both were from Yerevan! Really we're spoilt with what we get from Second Run and nowhere else will you find the breadth and uniqueness of choice on offer.

[Bikey]

I would like to endorse this comment. I have just returned from a tour of Armenia mainly based in Yerevan and partly to visit the Parajanov centre there (beautiful). I mentioned the film Mayak The Lighthouse by the late Mariya Saakyan to the tour guide and she wasn't aware of it even though they both were from Yerevan! Really we're spoilt with what we get from Second Run and nowhere else will you find the breadth and uniqueness of choice on offer.

Thank you, Langland, for your very kind words. It means a lot to us to be so appreciated.

[Langland]

Before Second Run I was a moviegoer rather than a cinéaste but something I enjoy doing is following up wherever possible directors I wasn't aware of before and have made many great discoveries. But there's an exception to every rule and after her My C20th On Body and Soul by Ilkidu Enyedi was a disappointment for.me. But I have managed to track down her film Simon Magus with English subtitles on dvd and I am hoping for great things nonetheless. By the way re Hungarian cinema why is István Gáal (or Gáal István if you're being pedantic)'s film The Falcons called Magasiskola which means High School. I don't recall a high school. Did the Hungarian producers get it confused with Kes?

[balintantal]

Before Second Run I was a moviegoer rather than a cinéaste but something I enjoy doing is following up wherever possible directors I wasn't aware of before and have made many great discoveries. But there's an exception to every rule and after her My C20th On Body and Soul by Ilkidu Enyedi was a disappointment for.me. But I have managed to track down her film Simon Magus with English subtitles on dvd and I am hoping for great things nonetheless. By the way re Hungarian cinema why is István Gáal (or Gáal István if you're being pedantic)'s film The Falcons called Magasiskola which means High School. I don't recall a high school. Did the Hungarian producers get it confused with Kes?

Magasiskola doesn't mean high school in Hungarian - that would be kozepiskola. The title is a play on words: it means masterclass, but also a school up high (i.e. for the falcons).

[Langland]

Like Black Narcissus! Thanks.

[Calvin]

There's an Observer article published today where they've asked a bunch of directors to pick a film unavailable on streaming platforms (we'll gloss over the non-argument that somehow this could somehow be attributed to the digital files not being good enough quality for streaming when, in many cases, they were good enough for Blu-Ray!). Peter Strickland picks Peter Solan's The Case of Barnabáš Kos and goes on to say "At the moment you have to order it from Slovakia and with Brexit it’s going to cost you a fortune, but Second Run is releasing it on Blu-ray next year."

[MichaelB]

It's not remotely going to "cost you a fortune" - it's currently retailing for less than nine euros plus postage, and I reduce the latter to a minimum by bulk-buying Slovak Film Institute releases once a year or thereabouts.

But it'll clearly be worth waiting for the Second Run release, as I suspect prices will be roughly comparable and I don't think the SFU disc had any on-disc extras (although it did have an unusually good and fully bilingual booklet, with the original short story that inspired the film).

And the film itself is unreservedly recommended - this was my write-up when I first watched it a few years ago:

The Barnabáš Kos Case (Prípad Barnabáš Kos, 1964)

Barnabáš Kos (Josef Kemr) is the triangle player in a reasonably prestigious orchestra, a job so musically insignificant that his fellow percussionists can easily step into the breach should Kos not be present at the vital moment. And one of the reasons he may legitimately not be present is that because he has more spare time than his colleagues (his practice routine being slightly less demanding than that of, say, a violinist), he's the one who gets nominated as an representative of the orchestra on all sorts of official panels that are a seemingly inevitable by-product of working in communist Czechoslovakia (although it's not remotely hard to transplant this to the subsidised arts sector in the UK or indeed anywhere else). So he's popular with the orchestra because he does the boring jobs that they're not interested in, and similarly popular with the authorities because, while Kos is punctilious about attending the various meetings, he never says or does anything controversial. If you can imagine a union rep who's the polar opposite of the late Bob Crow, Barnabáš Kos would be him.

And so when the position of overall director of the orchestra unexpectedly becomes vacant, the officials think that they have a perfect candidate - and one whose installation will permit them far greater control over the day-to-day operations. Because if Kos hasn't rocked the boat even the slightest bit up to now, there's no reason to assume that he'll be any different in this job, is there?

Their major miscalculation, though, is that for the first time Kos has been given a position of real power - and he resolves to use it in order to redress what he perceives as a grievous historical wrong. This starts off subtly, by programming only pieces that already include a triangle part, but then Kos proposes adding additional triangle accompaniment to existing works. Then, in the guise of progressive thinking and challenging reactionary convention, he changes the layout of the orchestra, with the percussion section moved from the back to the front - I'm sure it's just a coincidence that this puts the triangle player slap bang in the middle. And when the time comes to commission a new work from one of the leading composers of the day, what could be more truly groundbreaking than the first ever concerto for triangle? Surely no-one would have a problem with that?

And if they do... well, Kos is the director of the orchestra, with the power to summarily fire anyone who ill-advisedly puts their career on the line by denouncing all this as megalomaniacal bollocks by a man promoted way ahead of his actual competence. And while the officials who appointed him swiftly realise that they've made a dreadful mistake, they can't do anything about it because any such admission would turn the spotlight onto their own poor judgement, thus putting their own careers and reputations at risk - so instead they double down and back him all the way, defending even his loopiest conceit (for instance, commandeering an entire steelworks to produce the perfect triangle, rejecting dozens of attempts along the way) as being symptomatic of the most laudably radical thinking of a kind that makes other orchestras seem hopelessly hidebound. But neither they nor Kos have any control over the public verdict, and sooner or later their reaction will become impossible to ignore...

Perhaps not surprisingly, The Barnabáš Kos Case took something like seven years to go into production, as the script had to run a gauntlet of Slovak film-industry officials who were convinced that the project was a personal attack on them - although in the event the finished film was remarkably uncontroversial, perhaps because its satirical targets were so universal. Let's face it, if you look at pretty much any government anywhere in the world (and at any time), or the management of any institution of any kind, you're all but certain to find a Barnabáš Kos somewhere on the roster - someone who blatantly owes their elevation to something other than merit. (The former British Cabinet minister Chris Grayling would appear to be a classic example.) The situation posited by the film may be absurd, but there are plenty of real-life equivalents where the changes instituted by the new boss are a fair bit subtler, but ultimately just as insidious and indeed personally self-serving.

Peter Solan is widely regarded as one of the best Slovak directors, although he's largely unknown outside Slovakia's borders (even in the Czech Republic, he rarely seems to be namechecked). Although on the evidence of this and his eye-catching concentration camp drama The Boxer and Death (Boxer a smrť, 1962), it's very much our loss: what struck me most about both those films is the sheer confidence with which Solan handles potentially tricky material - in the case of Barnabáš Kos, via a strikingly geometric approach to set design and composition, with triangles understandably well to the fore, although never in an off-puttingly self-conscious way: Solan is clearly well aware that the script and performances are more than strong enough not to need distracting window-dressing.

[rapta]

There's an Observer article published today where they've asked a bunch of directors to pick a film unavailable on streaming platforms (we'll gloss over the non-argument that somehow this could somehow be attributed to the digital files not being good enough quality for streaming when, in many cases, they were good enough for Blu-Ray!). Peter Strickland picks Peter Solan's The Case of Barnabáš Kos and goes on to say "At the moment you have to order it from Slovakia and with Brexit it’s going to cost you a fortune, but Second Run is releasing it on Blu-ray next year."

Was also mentioned in the blurb for the Skolimowski set when Solan's name was mentioned, so I figured it'd be on its way. Great news!