Otar Iosseliani

[AxeYou]

Not sure if the above restorations are the ones featured in the Carlotta box set. Specs for the box does not mention 4K, only HD restorations "1080/24p/50i • ENCODAGE AVC"

tenia's review mentions the Carlotta BD set featured 2K restorations.

I saw the new 4K restorations of Falling Leaves and There Was Once a Singing Blackbird at Metrograph in NYC. They were credited to Hiventy.

The clarity is remarkable, however... there was serious black crush on both. Almost all detail is lost in darker areas. Very much worse than the caps tenia took of the 2K resto here. (I'm yet to see Pastorale, but I'm not holding out my breath.)

Metrograph also screened a 2K restoration of Georgian Ancient Songs, which, while also credited to Hiventy, did not exhibit the same black crush at all. I believe this is the same master that Carlotta used on their disc. There was just a little bit of highlight blooming, and the 2K resto provided great clarity already.

[AxeYou]

Having picked up the Carlotta box set now, I can confirm that Falling Leaves and There Was Once a Singing Blackbird suffer none of the black crush in the newer 4K restorations. However, the English subtitles here omit quite a bit of dialog, which was improved upon in the ones accompanying the 4K restorations.

From the individual back covers within the boxset: Everything was scanned in 4K and restored in 2K by Hiventy, except Georgia, Alone (1994) which was restored in HD by Hiventy based on SD video elements.

[tenia]

Iosseliani supervised the subtitles included in the Carlotta set, including the lack of subs on some dialogues. Not sure if having more of them is normal.

[domino harvey]

As with Godard wanting “Navajo” subtitles, sometimes it’s okay to ignore a director’s wishes when it comes to just relaying the film they made accurately to others

[diamonds]

In the case of Iosseliani, who drew much inspiration from silent comedy, more detailed subtitles would hardly make the films any more comprehensible. They play perfectly fine with minimal subtitles. (They also don't have a great deal of dialog in general, so I can't imagine the subtitles on these supposed newer versions are significantly more copious.)

[tenia]

Iosseliani also had issues with the State and its censorship and commissions, and not subtitling some movies or part of them was a way to express that the end result isn't what he wanted the viewers to get.

[pistolwink]

As with Godard wanting “Navajo” subtitles, sometimes it’s okay to ignore a director’s wishes when it comes to just relaying the film they made accurately to others

I don't think that's an apt comparison. Godard was being typically puckish and even snobbish; I don't think that's what was going on w/ Iosseliani. His films work much like Tati's, which also have a lot of typically-unsubbed dialogue. In Iosseliani's films, much of the dialogue is just kind of mumbled and/or "filler" mixed low on the soundtrack. It's often meant to signify the tenor of an interaction, and isn't designed to be fully comprehensible—or important in its specifics—apart from a few key, usually simple words, which *are* subtitled. Iosseliani's medium-length film April is the most extreme example of this, with barely any intelligible dialogue at all. In the admittedly special case of And There Was Light, almost everyone in the film's original audience wouldn't have understood much of the language being spoken, by design.

In general, Iosseliani was always aware that he was making films in large part for "foreign" audiences (even if that audience might just be Soviet citizens outside of Georgia) who wouldn't understand the language being spoken, and thus the choice of what to subtitle was a very deliberate choice about how salient he wanted the dialogue to be. Indeed, many of his films, from Pastorale onward, are in part about encounters between people who don't speak the same language, and who have to communicate in large part through intonation, gestures, etc.

I'd go so far as to say that the subtitling choices, which were entirely Iosseliani's own in most cases, are an integral part of the films' design, as much as the staging and the camerawork.

[AxeYou]

Interesting. I didn't know about Iosseliani's intentions and involvement in subtitles. Thanks all!

Tangentially, I'm curious how he was able to make his films in the Soviet Union during the 60s and 70s with Georgian as the primary spoken language, without being forced to dub them entirely in Russian. In contrast, I saw quite a few Ukrainian and Uzbek films from the Soviet period last year, and my understanding was that the Soviet Union was heavily pushing Russification and thus requiring films to be released in Russian dubs only across all Soviet republics.

[TechnicolorAcid]

Interesting. I didn't know about Iosseliani's intentions and involvement in subtitles. Thanks all!

Tangentially, I'm curious how he was able to make his films in the Soviet Union during the 60s and 70s with Georgian as the primary spoken language, without being forced to dub them entirely in Russian. In contrast, I saw quite a few Ukrainian and Uzbek films from the Soviet period last year, and my understanding was that the Soviet Union was heavily pushing Russification and thus requiring films to be released in Russian dubs only across all Soviet republics.

I can’t comment on this definitely but for a lot of the films I have seen that have been dubbed into entirely Russian (Mimino is probably the most notorious example with constant dubbing that often works against the film’s themes of how connections can be formed across cultural divides), a lot of them seem to have been financed from Russian film companies like Mosfilm whereas Ioseliani’s films received funding from Georgia-Film, who I imagine would’ve been okay with a film meant for Georgians to be released without enforcing a dub over the Georgian lines.