BD 78 Pharaoh

[criterionsnob]

Blu-ray coming soon.

Pharaoh
(Faraon)
A film by Jerzy Kawalerowicz

Poland, 1966


Directed by Jerzy Kawalerowicz and adapted from the famous novel by Bolesław Prus, Pharaoh is a truly epic production, focusing on a young Ramses XIII as he ascends to the throne of the ancient Egyptian empire.

Complete with huge battle scenes, towering sets, stunningly choreographed sequences and spectacular cinematography, Pharaoh became the most successful film in Polish history. But unlike its Hollywood counterparts, Kawalerowicz's authentic epic remains resolutely anchored in ideas as well as spectacle.

[swo17]

Great!

[knives]

This is one of the all time greats. It’s so entertaining in addition to the intellectual stimulation that I’m sure the board is interested in.

[Stefan Andersson]

How long will this release be?

Online info mentions several running times for the film, from c. 190 to ca. 152 minutes, for the Ostalgica bluray. Polish DVD editions seem to erroneusly give a runtime of 175 mins.
Version(s) of about 140 mins. seem to have been intended as international cuts.

There is also mention of a 180-minute VHS edition from Polart, badly subtitled and in 1.85 format. If this master is accessible, maybe Second Run could take relevant scenes from it, as a special feature, a bit like the Madman edition of La Ronde had a featurette presenting scenes cut from the first release version.

Are there any English-friendly online descriptions of the cuts to the long version?

Some sources:

https://culture.pl/pl/dzielo/faraon-rez ... walerowicz

https://www.filmweb.pl/film/Faraon-1965 ... ja,1904463 - informative posts by heathcliff filmaniak and lucky luke about running times and a 176-min. version from TVP.

https://pisf.pl/aktualnosci/faraon-po-c ... nstrukcji/

https://wondersinthedark.wordpress.com/ ... alerowicz/ - on the Polart VHS

[MichaelB]

It'd lay money on it being the 152-minute version, in line with the Studio Kadr restoration.

There are two official versions of Pharaoh that were personally signed off by Jerzy Kawalerowicz, running 176 minutes and 152 minutes (some sources for the latter say 145, but that'll be after PAL speedup has been factored in). Everything else will be either misreported or an unofficial variant. Half the running-time discrepancy is apparently down to dozens of brief trims, usually to the start and end of shots, or the removal of inessential dialogue. I have a more detailed account of the actual scenes that were removed (minor subplots in all cases, I believe), but it's in Polish and so will need a bit of time to plough through.

[Stefan Andersson]

It'd lay money on it being the 152-minute version, in line with the Studio Kadr restoration.

There are two official versions of Pharaoh that were personally signed off by Jerzy Kawalerowicz, running 176 minutes and 152 minutes (some sources for the latter say 145, but that'll be after PAL speedup has been factored in). Everything else will be either misreported or an unofficial variant. Half the running-time discrepancy is apparently down to dozens of brief trims, usually to the start and end of shots, or the removal of inessential dialogue. I have a more detailed account of the actual scenes that were removed (minor subplots in all cases, I believe), but it's in Polish and so will need a bit of time to plough through.

Thank you very much, MichaelB, for this info!

[TMDaines]

Yeah, nice. This never got a standlone Blu-ray in either Poland or the UK, and was only in the Scorese sets, so I need this one.

[MichaelB]

It may well be the case - in fact, it’s more likely than otherwise - that Kawalerowicz made the trims to the original camera negative, with the offcuts then being discarded as per usual in these situations. So a restoration of the 176-minute cut may not be possible - even if 35mm materials survive, there’ll be a very noticeable quality discrepancy at around eighty different points in the film.

[What A Disgrace]

I have a feeling this will be a May release. Usually SR titles are up for pre-order shortly before the most recent title is released, and Happy End is already out.

[What A Disgrace]

I wonder if this might wind up being a two-fer release of films, like Desire evolved into a double feature with All My Good Countrymen. Happy End has been out for a month and we still have no word on the next release.

[Bikey]

Unfortunately, we're still frustrated with the ongoing Amazon UK issue and are therefore reluctant to release anything at the moment, but IT IS coming soon...

[AidanKing]

'Pharaoh' is reviewed very favourably in the new issue of 'Sight and Sound' so hopefully Second Run have managed to sort out the issue with Amazon which has been delaying new releases and it will be out soon.

[MichaelB]

It's the two-page lead home video review, by Adrian Martin.

[andyli]

EXTRAS:
• Faraon – Afterword: an expansive and in-depth discussion of the film by the critic, curator and scholar Michał Oleszczyk.
• Kawalerowicz in the Desert: a 1964 newsreel on the making of Pharaoh, filmed on location in Uzbekistan.
• Trailer
• 24-page booklet with new writing by film historian and producer Michael Brooke.
• New and improved English subtitle translation.
• Easter egg

Release Date: September 2.

[Aunt Peg]

I'm really looking forward to finally see the film as it was meant to be seen rather than in a crudely dubbed 4x3 pan and scan version.

[Bikey]

Pre-order at our webstore

Amazon UK

[Bikey]

Full details now at our website

[Stefan Andersson]

A book about Faraon, Wajda´s The Wedding and Mother Joan of the Angels:
https://www.wuw.pl/product-pol-18018-Ma ... EBOOK.html

[MichaelB]

Worth mentioning upfront that (a) it's in English, and (b) it's completely free.

(It was an acknowledged source for my Second Run booklet essay.)

[Stefan Andersson]

Interesting quotes (Google Translated from Polish) about the photography and makeup:

"All the actors were smeared with a darkening cream to make it look very tanned. Unfortunately, in some scenes, the skin tone - especially on the face - falls into gray or even green, which can be caused by a different type of lighting."

/DoP/ "Wójcik managed to minimize the sharp contrasts between light and shadow that appear in the strong desert sun. He did not have to shadow the actors' faces or be afraid of shadows, which gave him a great naturalness."

"An unusual undertaking was the implementation of the idea of panoramic photos in "Pharaoh". The developers took a lot of risk by installing covers in the camera that flatten the image to a widescreen format." This is unclear in English translation. Does it mean that the camera team was unfamiliar with anamorphic lenses? Or did they modify the lenses to create specifically desired photography?

Source: https://www.polskieradio.pl/39/156/arty ... alerowicza

A cast list with explanatory information:
https://www.filmpolski.pl/fp/index.php?film=121764

Interesting article:
https://akademiapolskiegofilmu.pl/pl/hi ... -prl-u/314

[Bikey]

“Kawalerowicz’s drama of Ancient Egypt has an epic sweep to match Joseph Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra, and a central performance as tortured and naturalistic as anything the stars of Method managed [...]
This standalone release of PHARAOH by Second Run is an event to be celebrated... a beautiful restoration.”

Adrian Martin reviews PHARAOH in the latest Sight and Sound

[Bikey]

"Gives you the illusion that a film crew have been transported back in time to film the everyday Egyptian life of a pharaoh and his elites (only Howard Hawks’s very different 1955 film The Land of the Pharaohs, with it’s astonishing building of a pyramid sequence, has such comparable documentary realism).

Made with great rigour and analysis [...] PHARAOH is stark, uncompromising and suitably forbidding in this fantastically good 2K restoration... Kawalerowicz’s film is a remarkable alternative super-production epic like no other epic."

PHARAOH reviewed at LondonGrip

[domino harvey]

Interestingly, I discovered while looking for something else that this film was quite warmly received by Cahiers du Cinema, with all of the in-house critics awarding it three stars (pretty remarkable in itself). I had no idea it was so well-liked by them. A typically less than enlightening excerpt from Jean Narboni's longer review:

Like the pyramid around which its subject is established, Pharaoh first appears massive, rough, abrupt, off-putting. But little by little, like it, it reveals itself to be hollowed out, drilled with a thousand labyrinths, corridors, secret passages, and mirage rooms where one can get lost, if not find oneself, in front of one mirror too many; and there are no shortage of threats, lurking in the emptiness of possible confusions, if one has not taken care to remember that one turned, for example, twice to the right, before going to the left. And, always like the pyramid, a geometry decidedly not devoid of finesse, Pharaoh gathers its lines of force, ties them together and makes them converge - suspended between heaven and earth - towards a final enigmatic plane of blackness and absence.

[MichaelB]

I can see why it appealed to Cahiers - it has all the immense scale of a Hollywood epic (established right from that extraordinary tracking shot at the start past literally thousands of costumed extras), and yet it's conceived and staged with the intellectual rigour of the most rarefied arthouse puzzler. Aside from Miklós Jancsó's major films, which had yet to be made, I can't think of anything else quite like it - and Jancsó never managed to muster the kind of production resources that Jerzy Kawalerowicz had to play with.

Kawalerowicz was in the very fortunate position of not having to worry overmuch about commercial appeal because Bolesław Prus' novel is one of the most beloved in Polish literary history and so unless he totally fucked it up it was pretty much guaranteed to be a domestic blockbuster. And it duly was; even to this day Pharaoh is at number ten on the all-time Polish domestic admissions chart, and on its release it was number two behind Knights of the Teutonic Order (which is still at number one, and most likely always will be; the big 21st century Polish cinema hits like Wojciech Smarzowski's Clergy are mere foothills compared with its Everest-like peak, and fall well short of Pharaoh too).

And Kawalerowicz's other big advantage was that he was in overall charge of one of the more distinguished Polish film units (Kadr, which had previously produced not just his post-1957 work but also Andrzej Wajda's Kanal and Ashes and Diamonds and Andrzej Munk's Eroica), and so was effectively his own executive producer, at least once the Polish cultural authorities had given it the green light – which they enthusiastically did; they actively wanted another blockbuster along the lines of Knights of the Teutonic Order, and a big-budget adaptation of an equally acclaimed 19th-century novel seemed the best way of following that up. So he had the kind of creative freedom that the director of a Hollywood epic could hardly begin to imagine.

[Stefan Andersson]

An essay, Open Access-sourced, about the film:
https://repositorioaberto.uab.pt/bitstr ... r_1-31.pdf

Text is in Portuguese so I cannot comment on the contents. Footnote no. 48 has info (correct or not) about versions and running times, which may be of interest, along with the bibliography section.