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I am mostly surprised that the two most obvious Griffiths for Blu-ray upgrade (so obvious, I believe, that I'm not even going to name them) are taking the back burner to these two.

From a commercial viewpoint, I think The Birth of a Nation was the most obvious choice as I believe it's usually the best-selling Griffith title, no doubt partly due to its notoriety.

Otherwise, the next two are not obvious to me, though I imagine it comes down to Intolerance, Broken Blossoms or Orphans of the Storm, all of which need new non-synthesizer scores as much as a Blu-ray upgrade. Photoplay recorded orchestral scores for all of these (also BoN) though I don't know if they'd fit the Kino prints, even if they were able to license them.

From a purely personal viewpoint, the two most obvious choices would be Hearts of the World and the superb Isn't Life Wonderful?, important Griffith films which as far as I know haven't even received proper (or any?) DVD releases. (Kino did issue the latter on VHS - and probably laser?) I don't know if the surviving materials are considered good enough for Blu-ray, but they certainly deserve a new commercial issue of some kind.

I was referring to the first two you mentioned. You're probably right that BOTN is likely a best seller though.

My vote would go for Intolerance, which I found to be excellent without the moral repugnance of BoaN. Release that on blu, and I'm definitely picking up a copy for myself and for my school's library.

For those of us wondering which Wakamatsu's Kino have planned...

Kino on Facebook wrote:The Wakamatsu films (UNITED RED ARMY and CATERPILLAR) are looking like early 2012 releases...

Kino and Redemption have put up a promotional website for their Jean Rollin titles, and a three minute video (featuring clips from the new transfers, and footage of the restoration process) is the centrepiece. I laughed at their canny selection of two 'deleted scenes', each carefully excerpted to hint at greater deviant pleasures on the final discs for the perverts among us. Archival interviews with Rollin are confirmed, and hopefully the Encore interviews will be carried over. Even better, I hope FASCINATION (which never made it to an Encore release) is as supplement heavy as those earlier special editions were. These look great and I hope Nigel Wingrove's godawful traditional gothic Redemption designed sleeves and nudge-nudge wink-wink liner notes are barricaded from these discs by the folks at Kino with better taste.

Kino Lorber January 2012 schedule:

Okay, folks -- here's what's on the home entertainment docket for January:

1/3 - SWASTIKA (Philippe Mora, DVD only)
1/10 - FILM SOCIALISME (Jean-Luc Godard, Blu-ray/DVD)
1/17 - UNITED RED ARMY & CATERPILLAR (both Kôji Wakamatsu, both DVD only)
1/24 - Redemption Classics: THE NUDE VAMPIRE, SHIVER OF THE VAMPIRES, LIPS OF BLOOD, ROSE OF IRON, FASCINATION (all Jean Rollin, all Blu-ray/DVD)
1/31 - TBA! [we can't announce quite yet]

We'll show off all the Wakamatsu and Redemption cover art as soon as it's finalized!

I'm glad to see that the llama got onto the cover of Film Socialisme!

Has anyone seen the extras for A Farewell to Arms and Nothing Sacred? I'm particularly interested in Nothing Sacred. The absolutely awful Lumivision disc I have includes two Mack Sennett shorts with Lombard, Campus Vamp and Matchmaking Mama. If those were to show up on the Kino, I could roundfile the Lumivision.

Great announcement. I have never heard about that Mora film, only own/seen Mad Dog Morgan.

More from the Selznick collection: A Star is Born (1937) in February 2012.

The Rollin titles are my most anticipated. I am a little bit bummed that the Koji Wakamatsu films won't be on Blu-ray.

Yeah that hurt/was a bit surprising, considering how new those Wakamatsus are.

It could be that the rights holder will not let Kino release the Wakamatsu films on Blu.

True, particularly since they haven't been released on blu in Japan.

The slipbox for the Moroder Metropolis is pretty badass.

Is the Moroder going to have both versions?

Nope.

I saw the Moroder version over 15 years ago and have never really wanted to revisit it. Knowing that he did the soundtracks to things like Top Gun and Flashdance during this same period adds no incentive for me to see if I'd get anything out of another viewing of his Metropolis. I think the film might have been interesting if he'd gone with more of a post-acid house sensibility, or something like that, rather than including stuff like Loverboy, Pat Benatar, and Jon Anderson, whose sounds, for me, make it almost laughable at times. But I don't remember it extremely well. Aside from the music and overall feel, it would be interesting to see if his edits of the film were convincing.

It would probably be impossible to include other cuts of Metropolis on the disc, due to the music being so scored to the action of the version of the film as existed at the time, and the film itself likely being timed to match the same (for example the music and effects continue over still images in order to fill in 'lost portions' of the story, similar in style to those used in a couple of sequences of the 80s restoration of A Star Is Born). There are also all of the special intertitles (subtitles too!) and tinting of this version that would need to be preserved to get a truly accurate impression of the Moroder version of the film. So better that it is available separately in addition to the most recent fully restored versions.

I've always had a soft spot for the Moroder version of Metropolis, mostly because it was the first version of the film I saw! It obviously depends on your tolerance for 1980s synth music but that is something I've always liked - plus the decadent, somewhat tinny electronic music of the 1980s somehow works as a nice contrast to some of the hedonistic decadence of the 1920s! And in contrast to that the music that Gregory finds laughable (such as I assume the Here Is My Heart scene with Maria) I feel is a great example of the music totally going with the, overly naive and far too romantic, painful earnestness of our lead characters, but an earnestness which sees them triumph (though the robot also triumphs I guess, and has far more fun doing so! She's the true hero of the film!) It is a score which is in no way trying to tone down any extreme of emotion on display, instead underlining and italicising almost every action!

It is not just the musical numbers that make this version interesting (though my favourite sequences involving the musical numbers would have to be that moment in the Cage of Freedom song that covers the Freder meeting his father in his office, where the opening of the windows to show the images of the city of Metropolis coincides beautifully with the instrumental portion of the song, which then immediately becomes more subdued on the abrupt return to the office before building in intensity up to the point where Josaphat is prevented from committing suicide - it blurs the line between the musical number and score quite nicely. I also quite like the amusing Love Kills scene!), since a lot of the ambient effects work quite nicely too. For example the roar of the crowds during Freder's race, the 'whoosh' of the huge doors that reveal Maria and the children entering the garden to captivate Freder, the screech of Death's blade during Freder's hallucination or the bubbling of the test tubes in Rotwang's laboratory, or the thumping of the gong in the flooding city and the sound of the rushing water, which are all very nicely done.

So while I'd certainly point towards the recently restored versions of Metropolis as being far more definitive, I'm certainly very appreciative for the nostalgic pleasure of seeing the Moroder again too!

DVDBeaver comparison of The Birth of a Nation. Look to the bottom flag of the third comparison for lowlights. Look to the rest for highlights (ok, most of the rest...and it depends on your view of Kino's tinting).

I'd say that's a massive improvement. You could actually see the faces in that first short for instance.

The lowlight looks like it's mostly just that things are harder to distinguish under that loud red tint. Goddammit, I really don't want to buy that movie, but it does look pretty impressive...

The extra short films are more than worth having that bore around. The His Trust films are absolutely delightful and show that Griffith was a more complicated figure than 'racist'.

Haha, in addition to being racist, maybe. Dude was a brilliant artist and his work does a lot of stuff beyond race baiting, but there's no question that he had attitudes towards race that reflected the time and place of his upbringing, which is to say racist as hell.