44 Allonsanfan

[EddieLarkin]

Before I go digging through the settings on everything in my system, I am seeing/hearing something odd in the audio of this disc and wondering if anyone else can easily repro it.

My setup is stereo with a center speaker.

The feature is listed as LPCM 2.0 Mono, and it plays in the right and left speakers (presumably identical mono tracks). The commentary however, which is displayed in the playback info on my player (and also from MediaInfo) as Dolby Digital Stereo (2 channels), is only being output through my center speaker.

Curious why I’m not getting Dolby Digital Stereo through the left and right speakers on the commentary, rather than only through the center.

Anyone else seeing/hearing the same thing?

Presumably it has something to do with how your player processes mono tracks in LPCM vs. Dolby Digital. If you switch the player audio from Bitstream to PCM you may find the track plays out of the L and R instead.

Ultimately though, what's the problem? A mono track played through the centre shouldn't really sound any different to the same track played through the L and R simultaneously. Indeed if you're sitting off centre or quite close to the speakers, mono tracks should in fact sound better from the centre alone.

[DeprongMori]

For what it's worth, my commentary was supplied as a 2.0 mono WAV (I've just checked the file).

But I had nothing to do with the authoring beyond that.

(Although I can confirm that it's intentionally mono, if that helps.)

Thank you. That clarifies that part a bit. Though with a 2.0 mono I guess I would have expected a Left/Right rather than Center audio?

[MichaelB]

It's entirely up to the disc author - I know some prefer to render mono titles as 1.0 in order to save on disc space, as 2.0 is double the filesize that's actually necessary.

[DeprongMori]

Thanks again. That clarifies the rest of it. It just surprised me given the metadata provided.

[MichaelB]

RIP Lea Massari, one of whose major roles was in Allonsanfàn.

[Matt]

I watched this earlier this week and was not as keen on it as everyone else seems to be, but I have also thought about it quite a bit since then, which is probably a sign I liked it more than I thought I did. The little surrealistic (or magical realist) touches, like Fulvio seeing his family members in certain colors or the frog appearing as he tells Massimiliano the fairy tale, were cute surprises without feeling overly whimsical. I could see a clear influence on Alice Rohrwacher in these moments, and also in the ways the film feels blackly comic in some of its most seriously played moments.

I think I wanted a more consistent tone, maybe something a little easier to latch onto like some of the politically allegorical Czechoslovak New Wave films, but then again this is not a film about an Everyman crushed under the wheel of an oppressive system but rather about an aging man who's lost the idealism of his youth and has nothing to replace it with except the vague idea of escape. He's sort the of the maker of his own undoing.

I immediately thought about selling my disc after watching it, but now I think I want to watch it again! From the film title and Radiance's trailer, I thought there'd be a lot more of Stanko Molnar's Allonsanfàn in this, but he eventually does get one unforgettable moment.

[MichaelB]

I’m working on Indicator/Vinegar Syndrome’s upcoming Macabre right now and simply couldn’t place the male lead at first until I actually looked him up—and it’s Stanko Molnar, Allonsanfàn himself!

Amusingly, I even namechecked Macabre in my Allonsanfàn commentary, but I hadn’t actually seen it back then:

And I’ll get back to Havelock Ellis in a bit, because, nearly 48 minutes into the film that bears his name, the title character is about to make a very low-key first appearance. This is Allonsanfàn, played by Stanko Molnar, a Croatian actor who was based in Italy, and whose background is rather interesting in relation to the politics of this film. His father Ivan Brnjać was an anti-fascist partisan during World War II who in 1951 was sentenced to seven years’ hard labour for high treason thanks to his loyalty to the Soviet Union. This also caused difficulties for young Stanko, who was unable to enrol in Croatia’s National Academy of Dramatic Art because he was seen as coming from a politically undesirable family. So he emigrated to Italy, where he was granted political asylum, and after taking up evening classes in acting, he was eventually accepted by the National Academy of Dramatic Arts in Rome in 1972. Before graduation, he’d been cast in Allonsanfàn, and the Tavianis then gave him the major supporting role of Sebastiano in Padre Padrone. He was also the male lead in Lamberto Bava’s horror film Macabre in 1980, and played a minor supporting role in Michael Cimino’s The Sicilian, but by the early 1990s his filmography comes to an end.