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John Cope wrote:Anybody know yet whether we'll be getting any extras on the oft delayed Querelle Blu? I had hoped that maybe the delays had something to do with acquiring the otherwise impossible to find Wizard of Babylon but I suppose that's hoping for too much...

Unfortunately it's too much. "Twilight Of The Bodies", is a 30 minute French doc, and doesn't include any on set footage, only film clips. Disappointing, considering the amount of footage which was shot. I prefer when the Fassbinder Foundation do their own documentaries, and not source them out to third parties, as they have done here. It's paltry in comparison to the excellent doc which was made for the "Despair" bluray, "The Cinema And Its Double". In its favour there is a worthwhile contribution from Laurent Malet, who played Roger in the film, but otherwise it's threadbare in comparison to what is available from the era.

The Blue is the Warmest Colour DVD has fixed subtitles. If it has any bearing on it, the production company is Wild Bunch, but it's looking increasingly as if Artificial Eye is no longer bothered about providing removable subtitles.

They're just disappointingly inconsistent on it and have seemingly caved in on fixing them on certain releases. Pity, as I can no longer blind buy any of their releases without confirmation and I'm importing their competitors' releases much of the time.

Curzon/AE are a compromising entity on the whole.

AidanKing wrote:The Blue is the Warmest Colour DVD has fixed subtitles. If it has any bearing on it, the production company is Wild Bunch, but it's looking increasingly as if Artificial Eye is no longer bothered about providing removable subtitles.

This has been painfully obvious for some time. I originally assumed that this only applied to new releases, but the subtitles on Mouchette are fixed too, and I daresay the same is true of Au hasard, Balthazar.

TMDaines wrote:Curzon/AE are a compromising entity on the whole.

Very true. I wonder if they even thought to ask whether there was a version of Theodor Kotulla's otherwise excellent Mouchette documentary without an obtrusive German voiceover drowning out Bresson every time he opens his mouth? Because I found out that there was an alternative version with a clean French soundtrack in a matter of minutes after I watched it, and I don't even own the Criterion DVD.

Amazon U.K. has a Japanese box set of GENTLE WOMAN / 4 NIGHTS OF A DREAMER listed at an outrageous price (732 pounds). As usual the Japanese have released Euro material unavailable elsewhere. No transfer info is available. What is the legal situation in Japan since these films have been withheld in France up to now by the copyright holders (or so we have been told).

Is this a bootleg video copy?

charal wrote:Amazon U.K. has a Japanese box set of GENTLE WOMAN / 4 NIGHTS OF A DREAMER listed at an outrageous price (732 pounds). As usual the Japanese have released Euro material unavailable elsewhere. No transfer info is available. What is the legal situation in Japan since these films have been withheld in France up to now by the copyright holders (or so we have been told).

Is this a bootleg video copy?

Most probably since the box pictured (Robert Bresson DVD-BOX 2) contains these films:

• スリ=Pickpocket

• バルタザールどこへ行く=Au hasard Balthazar

• 少女ムシェット=Mouchette

MichaelB wrote:This has been painfully obvious for some time. I originally assumed that this only applied to new releases

I was clinging to the hope that it was something to do with certain French production companies insisting on fixed subtitles, but that seems to be an untenable theory now.

Yes, I'm not convinced - I've seen discs from other distributors from the same sources that don't have fixed subtitles, so how come those labels can get around this issue but not AE?

Obviously, I'm not privy to the actual negotiations, but I can't help but notice that some distributors never have fixed subs (can you think of a single Criterion or MoC disc which does? If they exist at all, they must be in a vanishingly small minority), and with others it's so rare that it would be a major talking-point if they did (both the BFI and Arrow used to have fixed subs on their DVDs, but that's certainly not true any more, and I can't think of a single one of their Blu-rays in that position).

I did think (and almost certainly argued in this thread) that Artificial Eye differed from those labels in that it more consistently offered very recent titles and was therefore more likely to be compelled to offer fixed subtitles, but now that they've started doing this on catalogue titles as well this theory is starting to fall apart. And when you combine it with their decision to offer a documentary with a compulsory but wholly unnecessary German voiceover translation, I'm sensing a company that really isn't too bothered about the kind of details that I watch like the proverbial hawk on my own projects.

Oh, and thanks for the Blue is the Warmest Colour tip-off - I nearly bought it the other day. But I have a basic rule that if it's a language that I understand well enough to be able to follow without subs (French and Italian), fixed subtitles is a deal-breaker - especially as there's often an alternative on the other side of the Atlantic (in this case, the optionally-subtitled Criterion - but I might as well wait for the bells-and-whistles edition).

The Blue is the Warmest Colour DVD did have a glitch where, if I stopped the film, turned the player off and then re-started the film using the resume function, the subtitles turned themselves off, but I suspect that might be down to an idiosyncracy of my DVD player rather than the disc itself, and it obviously wouldn't apply to the BluRay.

Incidentally, for what it's worth, I thought the film itself was excellent: definitely a case of believing the original hype rather than the subsequent backlash.

MichaelB wrote:Obviously, I'm not privy to the actual negotiations, but I can't help but notice that some distributors never have fixed subs (can you think of a single Criterion or MoC disc which does? If they exist at all, they must be in a vanishingly small minority), and with others it's so rare that it would be a major talking-point if they did (both the BFI and Arrow used to have fixed subs on their DVDs, but that's certainly not true any more, and I can't think of a single one of their Blu-rays in that position).

Yes, it's the fixing of the subtitles - the making them mandatory - that's the problem. On the very seldom occasion that the likes of MoC and Criterion release stuff with non-optional subtitles, it is usually because they are burnt-in into their available source, e.g. Kiarostami's Gozaresh AKA The Report .

Fixing subtitles simply shows a lack of care.

Oh yes, absolutely - burned-in subtitles in extras can sometimes be completely unavoidable. I've done it myself on Arrow's The Night of the Hunter and The Killers - and the same French-subtitled Stanley Cortez interview is also on the Criterion edition of TNOTH.

In those cases, I doubt very much that an unsubtitled version exists - the raw rushes might still survive*, but I suspect the French subtitles were added at the original editing and post-production stage, given that they were originally made exclusively for French television with (presumably) no thought of foreign sales at the time.

But, as you say, there's a marked difference between subtitles that are unremovably burned into the master and ones that are merely fixed by the software.

(*Raw rushes do sometimes survive - one of the extras on Arrow's Walerian Borowczyk box is based around a lengthy interview that Borowczyk did for Channel 4 in 1985, only the tiniest fraction of which was ever broadcast. But thankfully the production company donated the original Beta SP tapes to the BFI National Archive as part of a general clear-out after it was wound up, where we found them preserved under the catchy title Annecy Animation No.9 (Production Material).)

Found this BD-Info list of the Holy Motors BD:

Disc Title: HOLY_MOTORS
Disc Size: 35,951,148,590 bytes
Protection: AACS
BD-Java: No
Extras: 50Hz Content
BDInfo: 0.5.8
PLAYLIST REPORT:
Name: 00000.MPLS
Length: 1:55:39.766 (hs.ms)
Size: 23,812,478,976 bytes
Total Bitrate: 27.45 Mbps
VIDEO:
Codec Bitrate Description
MPEG-4 AVC Video 20000 kbps 1080p / 23.976 fps / 16:9 / High Profile 4.1
AUDIO:
Codec Language Bitrate Description
LPCM Audio French 2304 kbps 2.0 / 48 kHz / 2304 kbps / 24-bit
DTS-HD Master Audio French 3730 kbps 5.1 / 48 kHz / 3730 kbps / 24-bit (DTS Core: 5.1 / 48 kHz / 768 kbps / 24-bit)
SUBTITLES:
Codec Language Bitrate Description
Presentation Graphics English 8.870 kbps
FILES:
Name Time In Length Size Total Bitrate
00001.M2TS 0:00:00.000 1:55:39.766 23,812,478,976 27,450

Suggesting that the subtitles are indeed fixed through authoring and not burned in.

Thankfully this sort of stuff can be negated with the right software on a (HT)PC, and possibly a few Blu-ray/DVD players, but it's so frustrating.

feckless boy wrote:Suggesting that the subtitles are indeed fixed through authoring and not burned in.

Most definitely the case. I think I wrote at one point about how I use a Panasonic Region A player to play my region free Blu-Rays, and in the case of Holy Motors, I actually cannot get the subtitles to appear at all.

criterion10 wrote:I think I wrote at one point about how I use a Panasonic Region A player to play my region free Blu-Rays, and in the case of Holy Motors, I actually cannot get the subtitles to appear at all.

That's interesting - presumably if the subtitles were switchable, they would appear?

MichaelB wrote:That's interesting - presumably if the subtitles were switchable, they would appear?

I presume so -- And I say this from experience, because my AE Blu-Ray of Berberian Sound Studio with removable subtitles played fine.

My Panasonic Blu-Ray player is Region A, and I use a simply remote hack to by-pass any region coding issues. It's worked so far with every foreign Blu-Ray I've tried -- Even Holy Motors worked, just simply couldn't get the subtitles to appear on it. If I'm not mistaken, when I bring up the subtitle display using my remote, it describes the disc as having subtitles, but that they are marked "Off" and I am unable to switch them on.

blu-ray.com on "Couscous" aka "The Secret Of The Grain"

Pretty good alternative to the Criterion, with many of the same extras, and removable subtitles (!)

I wonder whether the issue with fixed subtitles might be something to do with AE not being bothered about tweaking the DCP set up when it's authored for BluRay and DVD release.

I only thought of this because I thought that the presentation of The Grand Budapest Hotel at the cinema seemed odd, with the various aspect ratios being displayed within a 1.85:1 screen, rather than the better solution for cinema viewing of widening and narrowing the screen through the three aspect ratios used. I then realised that the DCP was set up in the way the film will be presented for home viewing, so the middle ratio will fill a widescreen TV, with the Academy ratio having black bars at the sides and the 2.35:1 ratio having black bars at the top and bottom of the screen. Unfortunately, this had the result of diminishing the effect of the change in ratios in the cinema.

I suppose it's possible that, as the UK DCPs for non-English language films are bound to have fixed subtitles, AE are not bothering to alter that for home viewing. If so, it's a real shame: licensing problems would be more of a justification.

That was a creative choice; I believe Anderson has said he didn't want to give the movie the effect of seeming smaller when he went to 1.33.

The Lars Von Trier Blu Ray boxset has been pushed almost two months to 23 June 2014.

On the basis of the DVD checkdiscs received today, Nymphomaniac has optional English hard-of-hearing subtitles for this English-language film.

Lots of titles coming soon

Many Truffaut titles coming soon on Blu-ray:
All the Antoine Doinel films, Jules & Jim, Shoot The Piano Player, Two English Girls, The Soft Skin, A Gorgeous Girl Like Me, The Last Metro

GaryC wrote:On the basis of the DVD checkdiscs received today, Nymphomaniac has optional English hard-of-hearing subtitles for this English-language film.

DVDBeaver suggests that Part 1 of the Blu Ray is about 20 minutes shorter than the film. Is this true? Any comments as to why?

It shows the runtime for Part I as 117 min, which is accurate for the shorter cut of the film. The longer cut (supposedly around 5 hours in total over the two parts) is not presently available on home video.