criterionforum.org

Eight Hours Don't Make a Day



Commissioned to make a working-class family drama for public television, up-and-coming director Rainer Werner Fassbinder took the assignment and ran, dodging expectations by depicting social realities in West Germany from a critical—yet far from cynical—perspective. Over the course of several hours, the sprawling story tracks the everyday triumphs and travails of the young toolmaker Jochen (Gottfried John) and many of the people populating his world, including the woman he loves (Hanna Schygulla), his eccentric nuclear family, and his fellow workers, with whom he bands together to improve conditions on the factory floor. Rarely screened since its popular but controversial initial broadcast, Eight Hours Don't Make a Day rates as a true discovery, one of Fassbinder's earliest and most tender experiments with the possibilities of melodrama.

SPECIAL FEATURES

• New 2K digital restoration by the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• "Eight Hours Don't Make a Day": A Series Becomes a Family Reunion, a documentary directed by Juliane Maria Lorenz, featuring interviews with actors Hanna Schygulla, Irm Hermann, Wolfgang Schenck, and Hans Hirschmüller
• New interview with film scholar Jane Shattuc
• New English subtitle translation
• PLUS: An essay by scholar Moira Weigel

FrauBlucher wrote: Fassbinder's Eight Hours Don't Make a Day has a page and press book.

Janus poster

I started this last night (the Arrow version), planning to watch just a few minutes. I ended up watching the entire first episode. And I can’t wait to get back to it tonight.

Anyway, I like the poster.

Blew through the Arrow last month and it is one of the most joyous and compulsively watchable shows I've ever come across. It's absolutely at the top of the list of favorite Fassbinders for me.

Coming in October

Price is obviously better than Arrow but two discs for five feature-length episodes plus extra is a little tight

It's only six dollars less than Arrow's, and Criterion seems to have less extras (and Arrow has the book)

You’re comparing a price at retail to a MSRP; this is half the cost of the Arrow set

Yeah my mistake, the arrow site lists it as 50 pounds. Having only seen one Fassbinder I'm in no hurry to pick either anyway (and Rublev, Tree of Life and Bergman will take all my money anyway)

Saw this in Philly recently. It's extraordinary, probably Fassbinder's funniest work.

Criterion's runtime is almost 20 minutes longer than Arrow's. Am I correct in thinking that this is a 1080i/50 vs. 1080p situation, where only the Arrow is properly presented at 25fps?

yes. Of course, there is no other way for Criterion to present this.

We should ask Svet.

Oh, I did confirm that my copy of the Arrow is 1080i/50

tenia wrote: Tue Jul 17, 2018 5:51 am We should ask Svet.

*triggered*

It'll be interesting to see how honest Svet is about this. Prior to the Dekalog embarrassment, he appeared to be genuinely ignorant of the 24/25fps issue and knee-jerkily assumed that Criterion must have got it right because Criterion. Although he never had the decency to acknowledge his mistake (although his silence after it was demonstrated beyond any possible doubt was eloquent enough), he can't claim to be unaware of the situation now.

More like 8.33 hours don't make a day, right?

I'm a little unclear as to the technical differences between the Arrow and the Criterion discs. If the Criterion disc is 1080p, isn't this actually higher quality than the 1080i Arrow discs? Also, if the film was initially shot in 16mm, then isn't 24fps the more authentic frame rate? I guess I'm just confused as to what these technical matters are, and I apologize if they are explained elsewhere in this forum.

Thanks!

16mm (like any film) can be shot at different frame rates, and 25fps was the correct frame rate for European television productions pre-digital. Actually, 25fps was the world standard for television during most of its history (NTSC was restricted basically to North and Central America and Japan). The Criterion disc, like those of Berlin Alexanderplatz and The Decalogue before them, will thus be playing at the wrong speed. It's an almost imperceptible difference, and people have been dealing with such slow-downs / speed-ups throughout the history of television, but some people are bothered by it, just as they're bothered by the peas somebody keeps slipping under all their mattresses.

EDIT: The real regret here is that in the development of the BluRay standard, they didn't allow for variant frame rates. Would have saved all these niggles and made a huge difference for the presentation of silent films.

Thanks for the reply! So the issue is that the Criterion is playing each frame a hair slower to convert from 25 to 24 fps. But is the Criterion still higher quality because it is 1080p as opposed to 1080i?

Though I am curious, was the original 16mm telefilm actually shot at 25fps, or is that a rough estimate based on other 16mm television films shot in Europe at the time? I know little about the history of 16mm in film production, but i just presumed that it was 24fps and converted to 25 when the elements were transcoded to videotape for television, as that would have been the norm in this country (where it was converted from 24 to 30fps).

justeleblanc wrote: Thu Oct 18, 2018 8:20 pm Thanks for the reply! So the issue is that the Criterion is playing each frame a hair slower to convert from 25 to 24 fps.

Basically. They're fitting one fewer frame into every second, so all those leftover frames eventually push the total running time out by twenty minutes.

I'm not sure about any quality loss between 1080p and i, or whether a theoretical quality loss would be perceptible, but I'm sure there are more knowledgeable people here who do.

25fps was bog-standard for European television in the 70s and 80s, and in many countries it probably accounted for the bulk of moving image production. British television in the 1970s, for example, was a far more vibrant and generally adventurous medium than feature films, and offered many auteurs the kind of continuity of production they wouldn't have enjoyed with theatrical releases. 25fps was a mainstream filmmaking standard that there would have been no reason to fudge (why shoot something at the 'wrong' speed when there was no expectation at the time that it would ever be presented at that speed?) Over a third of Fassbinder's forty-two films were made for television, with no initial expectation of theatrical release.

The Arrow will actually be 1080p50, in the same way the Criterion is 1080p60. The 1080i designation is simply there because that is all the format allows (i.e. the disc is flagged as having interlaced content, but in reality none of the frames are actually interlaced). So there will be no quality loss on the Arrow, at least not down to this reason.

This is all very helpful, thanks! I guess this means that my Criterion World on a Wire is also a bit longer than the German version. Still, it looks like I'll probably pick up the Criterion due to the price and -- most importantly -- so its spine matches my other Fassbinders.