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Criterion Collection in High Definition

A nice article about the Criterion Collection’s process of producing Bluray copies of the films they release:

Direct link:

http://gizmodo.com/5052324/how-criterion-hones-its-restoration-magic-for-hd

Lee Kline, the Technical Director at The Criterion Collection, was in Italy. He had tracked down and original print of Il Posto, the classic 1961 Ermanno Olmi film, and he needed a digital master of it. The problem? It was far too valuable and delicate to ship to the States, so he had find a local studio to handle the transfer for him.

Sitting down in the lab, the local technician started the process of loading the film up, running it through the incredibly expensive machine to create a 2K super-high-def digital copy for Lee to take back to the States with him. The technician was deftly handling the irreplaceable film and the machine with both hands. All the while, a cigarette dangled from his lips. Lee, neither the owner of the print nor an employee of the lab, could only sit back and bite his tongue, hoping no wayward chunk of smoldering ash would find its way onto the decades-old piece of film. You could call it one tense moment in a film nerd’s life.

When you go to the headquarters of the Criterion Collection, you sort of expect it to be a gigantic library. You know, one with lots of dark wood, a fireplace and a globe, complete with a dapper man in a smoking jacket sitting in an overstuffed chair. Instead of books, though, the walls would be lined with some of the greatest films ever made, DVDs that set the bar in terms of image quality and extras and packaging and liner notes. Criterion is the undisputed champ in all these things, yet the Criterion offices are simple, its walls adorned only with a collection of movie posters and framed letters from directors. There is a lovely screening room with a gigantic screen and projector setup, and there are edit suites, but it doesn’t feel like you are entering into a world belonging to film historians. Until you talk to the historians.

Essentially, the people at Criterion are a combination of film geeks and A/V nerds, equally excited at the prospect of getting a great print of a classic Fellini film as they are about creating a killer 5.1 surround sound audio track.

These people act as a curator and a publisher, hand-selecting a wide variety of films, mostly foreign, classics and indies. They painstakingly create the definitive digital version of that film, completely restoring both the audio and video, gathering up the most complete supplementary features available and releasing it all in beautiful packaging. It’s a film buff’s dream.

The Criterion staff gathers their own supplementary features themselves, traveling to find talent and record original interviews and audio commentary tracks, finding scholars to write essays and gathering up any additional footage or video that they can find.

It’s an incredible company, responsible not only for introducing hundreds of films to audiences who would otherwise have no other way to access them, but also pioneers who helped introduce many DVD features we take for granted now, such as commentary tracks, elaborate special editions and even letter boxing. And now they’re preparing to deliver innovation to a new format: Blu-ray. And man, are they excited about it.

David Phillips, who works on DVD Development for Criterion, told me that “We’re offering people the ability to see what is essentially 95% of the visual quality of our high-definition tape masters, something that we’ve dreamed of for a long time.” After all, these guys have been working with digital masters that clock in at about 2K resolution for some time, which is far higher than HD. “As good as standard-def DVD looks, we’ve been looking at these HD images for so long and feeling like it’s a shame that we can’t share this.” HD is the way most of these films are meant to be seen, and the people at Criterion get visibly excited when talking about the possibilities.

But with that huge uptick in resolution for the consumer, Criterion is faced with a lot of problems that they didn’t have when their masters were converted to standard definition for DVD. After all, they’re often dealing with old films, created before there was fancy low-grain filmstock and digital processing. And with the technology they have today, how much restoration and processing is too much?

Really, the mission of Criterion is “trying to replicate the original experience of seeing that movie when it was first released,” according to Phillips. While they certainly have the ability to process old films until they look like they were shot on a DV cam, that’s not the goal.

“Grain reduction has become such an industry standard that people, when they see grain, they think it’s a problem rather than what film looks like. Film is a physical medium that has this grain structure to it,” says Phillips. That being said, they realize that consumers buying restored HD films on Blu-ray are expecting near-pristine quality prints. It’s a tough balance to strike. Essentially, “it’s trying to stay on the side of not overprocessing but not leaving so much film artifact that it’s distracting from getting engaged in the film.”

So how do they go about getting a film prepped for Blu-ray? Well, they start with the best version available, be that a camera negative, a positive or a print, depending on the qualities available. Most of the time, they need to travel to the negative rather than having it shipped to them, especially if it’s an original print. So if it’s a Kurosawa film, they go to Japan; if it’s a Truffaut film they go to France; and if it’s an Olmi film, well, they go to Italy.

Once they get their hands on the film, they use Thomson’s Spirit DataCine to digitize the print at a local facility. If available, they’ll try to get the director to consult on the color of the print, making sure it’s accurate to the original as they digitize it to tape in 2K—sometimes even 4K—resolution. Once done, they have their tape master, which they then can bring back to their headquarters to begin the restoration.

Once they have their master back at their offices, it goes through what they call the restoration workflow, which involves painstakingly restoring both the audio and video frame by frame. For video, this involves using a system called MTI Film, which allows a technician to go through the film and not only remove dirt and edit marks, but also fix warped frames and things of that nature. This isn’t some automated procedure, either. It involves a technician sitting at an edit station with a stylus going frame by frame, ensuring that each one looks as good as possible. With two shifts a day working on a film, it still takes weeks to get through this part of the process.

For audio, they work in ProTools HD to both create surround-sound audio tracks as well as to clean up the original audio. They often get prints with extremely hissy or distorted mono tracks, so much like with the picture, they need to go through with a fine tooth comb and clean it all up. Their goal, according to Kline, is to “create a track with the original acoustics, bringing it back to clean and straightforward mono that sounds crisp and clear.” I stood in while an audio technician was working on the opening of Lars Von Trier’s Europa (due on DVD in December), and the difference between the original print’s audio and the restored audio made the narration and the sound effects resonate much more without feeling like the original had been sterilized.

What about films they’ve already restored for DVD? Can they just be released on Blu-ray without much extra effort? Unfortunately, not usually. The good news is that once they’ve done their tape master, they have a high-def copy of it on hand and don’t need to re-transfer the original print. The bad news is that once they got those masters, half of the process needs to be done again because the original restorations were just done in standard definition. Making a quick rerelease of all of Criterion’s films to Blu-ray something that just isn’t going to happen.

Once they’ve finished their process, though, it’s like viewing a film for the first time. I got a chance to sit in on a quality-control screening of their restoration of Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express. A scene in a crowded marketplace seemed to jump off the screen, and the surround sound perfectly placed the bustling sounds of the market behind me while keeping the dialogue front-and-center. I felt like I was in a theater in Hong Kong, watching the first, perfect print of the movie when it was first released. It was breathtaking.

These are the releases that film buffs have been upgrading their home theater setups for. After all, the best way to take advantage of thousands of dollars of AV gear is to give it material pulled carefully from the source.

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Criterion is releasing its first Blu-ray films in November, starting with The Third Man, The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Last Emperor, Bottle Rocket and Chungking Express. They plan to release two films a month in Blu-ray next year, with HD releases ramping up as sales shift from DVD to Blu-ray. [Criterion Collection]

D.O.A

Free, public domain file:

D.O.A. (1950)
Directed by: Rupolph Mate
Small-town accountant Frank Bigelow goes to San Francisco for a week’s fun prior to settling down with fiancée Paula. After a night on the town, he wakes up with more than just a hangover; doctors tell him he’s been given a “luminous toxin” with no antidote and has, at most, a week to live! Not knowing who did it or why, Bigelow embarks on a frantic odyssey to find his own murderer.

Direct link to download:

Runtime: 83 min

The Ingmar Bergman Archives

Hardcover + DVD 16.2 x 11.8 in., 592 pages. Contains previously unseen images from Bergman’s films, and selected unpublished images from the personal archives of many photographers, plus written as a narrative that, for the first time, will combine all of Bergman’s working life in film and theater, it also includes a DVD full of rare and previously unseen material, and a film strip from Fanny and Alexander.. It’s $74 cheaper than the Taschen website if you shop Amazon

La Bella Confusione

Frederico Fellini faced an unusual challenge while beginning the follow up to his most commercially successful film La Dolce Vita. His problem was that he had finally garnered critical and artistic success; La Dolce Vita was the film he had wanted to make, he claims he made no compromises during its long production, therefore fulfilling his personal artistic demands. It was also Italy’s highest grossing film up to that point, being both a critical and commercial success with the masses. He was beginning to be widely regarded as a genius, a true auteur, he was an overnight sensation whose every move and decision was watched and recorded with precision. Everyone was waiting to see what this “genius” would produce next. His film company threw a large sum of money at him to start his next film… they didn’t need to know anything about it; they just wanted to strike while the iron was hot. Fellini was about to become a victim of the pressures of expectation, he was finally given every freedom he had ever wanted, after claiming for years that it was precisely what he needed to craft a true masterpiece. He had everything he, as a filmmaker, had ever desired, then suddenly and frighteningly realized that he had no film in his head… he froze up. He became seized by his existential angst. He had no idea what he wanted to say or how to say it. He began to suffocate; the pressures of the everyday events he’d imposed on himself were too much. Then it came to him: make a film about a director in his exact situation. Make an introspective and thinly veiled semi-autobiographical drama/comedy about his plight. Showcase the struggles, the depression, the fear, the absurdities, the glamour, the emptiness, etcetera; all sides reflected simultaneously, just as his life so clearly did.

The opening scene to this film, which came to be known as 8 ½ (although, interestingly, the film’s original title was “La Bella Confusione” – The Beautiful Confusion), is one of the most memorable in all of cinema, it shows, with the use of no dialog, exactly how he was feeling at the time leading up to creating this film. It was the perfect opening to his cinematic autobiography in the barest, most pure sense imaginable, presented via Surrealist-like metaphor. It shows the slow suffocation, the distorted, fever dream-like anxieties of people watching him and expecting something, it also shows his sudden liberation. How do you portray these presumably complex emotional dispositions with no dialog? Is it possible to relay such a textured message on the strength of images alone?

The first shot we see is the camera, omnisciently floating behind Guido’s car, then we get an establishing shot; a huge amount of cars surrounding him on the road; everyone seems to be languishing around him. We enter a tunnel, but we stop, we do not make it out the other side in our automobile, we are trapped. Guido becomes self-aware, surrounded by these people he doesn’t understand, staring back at him… he feels everyone looking on disapprovingly, he is judged, mocked. Apprehensively, Guido wipes at his window with his handkerchief attempting to clean up his appearance perhaps, make sure he is presentable; re-affirm his mask. He first notices an unknown figure staring back at him intently from the car in front of him, almost in shadow, and immediately gas starts filling his car. What is this man a harbinger of? Guido tries to escape, yet he is trapped in this modern cage where everyone just stares, watching his every move. The gas continues to pour in, he continues trying to break the window and then suddenly he is out, but did he break the window himself or did someone else just allow it to open?

So we saw the mundane occurrence of being stuck in traffic used as a metaphor for being, as explained earlier, slowly suffocated, which of course, the noxious gas filling the car very literally represented. Fellini paused on the faces of the other drivers as they watched our protagonist, waiting, expecting something, the pressure of their expectations. Also present are various people personally connected to him in his life, distractions perhaps, or even excuses for avoiding his art. They all seem grotesquely distorted through this glass ‘house’ Guido is currently residing within. He tries to break the windows of the car out, yet he is unable, only through the manipulation of his reality is he able to escape, to find freedom. He is suddenly able to crawl out of the window with no real indication of how. He is just able, where once he was trapped, he is now suddenly, in a flash, freed… much like the strike of true artistic inspiration; sudden and inexplicable. This is the very plight Fellini was going through while trying to write this film. Only through the examination and subsequent abstraction of his personal situation did he finally find he did have a story to tell. Then we see the main character of Guido flying through the clouds, liberated and soaring. However it is only for a short while, as soon he finds he is still tied down to the real world; he tries to unfetter himself, yet is ultimately yanked down from his peaceful and lucid isolation by the sordid dealings of reality. “Down for good”, read off from some documents as if it is an official sentence, then, as he falls back to the cruelly imposed earth of business and anxieties he is awoken in his hotel room, engulfed by both of these avatars of his despair.

Definitely one of the most brilliant opening sequences to a film I can recall. With just the basic language of film; image and sound, we are given all the information we need. To discerning viewers this must surely stand as a definitive benchmark for the powers of purely visual story-telling, the foundation of film as an art form.

THE DEVILS

Based on the book The Devils of Loundun by Aldous Huxley
It is basically a film about the hypocrisy of the Catholic church, namely their prejudiced dealings with the government, the absurd practices of sexual repression and the general social perils of the sheep mentality found within organized religions. It stars Oliver Reed and Vanessa Redgrave, who both give great performances. The Huxley book was of course adapted with the usual, insane Ken Russell flavor.

From the The Wikipedia entry :

The film’s combination of religious themes and imagery combined with violent and sexual content was a test for the British Board of Film Censors that at the time was being pressured by socially conservative interest groups.

In order to earn an “X” certificate, Russell made minor cuts to the more explicit nudity (mainly in the cathedral sequences) and removed some violent detail (notably the crushing of Grandier’s legs). However, the biggest cuts were made by the studio itself, prior to submission to the BBFC, removing two scenes in their entirety, notably a two-and-a-half-minute sequence of crazed naked nuns sexually assaulting a statue of Christ and about of half of a latter scene with Sister Jeanne masturbating with the charred tibia of Grandier after self-administering an enema. However, even in it’s released form, the film was considerably stronger in detail than most films released prior to that point.

Its fate in the United States was even more stringent, with a further set of cuts made to even more of the nudity with some key scenes (including Sister Jeanne’s crazed visions, exorcism and the climactic burning) shorn of the more explicit detail.

All of this material was presumed lost or destroyed until critic Mark Kermode found the complete “Rape of Christ” sequence and several other deleted scenes in 2002. The artist Adam Chodzko made a video work in which traced and interviewed many of the actresses who had played the nuns during the orgy scene. Although some material may have been lost forever, the NFT was able to show The Devils in the fullest possible state in 2004. This uncut version premiered at the Brussels International Festival of Fantasy Film in March 2006.

The British version remains the most complete one in circulation, although there are long promised plans to release the uncut version on mass-market DVD. On April 25, 2007, The Devils was shown for a second time in its fullest possible state to a group of students and staff at the University of Southampton, followed by a question and answer session with the director, moderated by Mark Kermode. It was the first significant event to take place during Russell’s tenure as a visiting fellow at the University of Southampton in the English and film departments, April 2007 to March 2008.

An NTSC-format DVD edition on the Angel Digital label appeared in 2005, with the so-called “Rape of Christ” scene and other censored footage restored, and featuring a documentary by Mark Kermode about the film, as well as interviews with Russell, some of the surviving cast members, and a member of the BBFC who participated in the original censorship of the film.

DVDActive.com announced on February 28, 2008 that The Devils would finally be released on DVD by Warner Home Video in the U.S. on May 20, 2008, in the uncut (111 min) version, but without additional material. However, a day later, a DVDActive forum post asserted that the release had been dropped from Warner’s schedule.

Now I own the aforementioned ‘Angel Digital’ release of the film and honestly it’s not too bad looking, it seems as if it’s a direct transfer from PAL tapes, but I believe they were broadcast quality tapes so it’s not as poor looking as a regular VHS transfer… Unfortunately as of yet, the Warner home video release still is MIA with no word on it ever returning, so if anyone is interested I’d recommend just biting the bullet and picking up the ‘Angel Digital’ copy. It even contains the aforementioned documentary about the making/banning of the film that originally aired on the BBC.

Find it, rent it, watch it…

Some clips for your viewing pleasure:

Sister Jeanne dreams of her Grandier/Christ coming down off the cross to get down:

That Catholic repression and the exorcist arrives:

The rape of Christ:

Grandier’s trial

David Lynch says not to litter!

THE STANLEY KUBRICK ARCHIVE

A fantastic new article about Stanley Kubrick, originally posted on Telegraph UK here:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/07/07/bfkubrick107.xml

Or read the entire interview compiled into one, ad-free page below.

The Stanley Kubrick files

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 07/07/2008

Scripts, letters, designs, props, photographs – as many as 900 boxes of material belonging to one of the greats of cinema have been made available to a wider audience. Stanley Kubrick’s widow, Christiane, has donated the auteur’s paperwork to the University of the Arts, and the collection, carefully sifted for this Kubrick retrospective by Chris Hastings, gives us a fascinating insight into the public and private worlds of an inspirational film-maker

An interview with Stanley Kubrick’s widow, Christiane, by Chris Hastings