German Filmmuseum Edition

[MichaelB]

Judging by all the comments here, however, a commitment to Blu-ray quite clearly isn't a must. It would be ideal and desirable for certain, but not at the same expence of a label having financial difficulties and being unable to be adventurous with their curation.

The BFI's DVD Publishing arm is staffed with absolutely frothing Blu-ray evangelists, and yet they still put out DVD-only releases - even when there are HD masters to hand (the Children's Film Foundation titles, for instance, or most of their documentary output unless there's a big name like Humphrey Jennings or John Krish attached). These decisions aren't taken lightly: I'm sure they'd be thrilled if everything was on Blu-ray (materials permitting), but the fact that their CFF and COI titles exist as HD masters and yet still only get DVD-only releases does rather illustrate how much more expensive it is just to master and manufacture a Blu-ray release. Because there's no other logical reason for these releases to be DVD-only.

I don't get why you are so obsessed with Blu-ray. The Blu-ray market is still miniscule on a global basis, in comparison to DVD, especially outside certain countries like Britain and America.

The impression I get is that it's not that big in Britain either. I still know plenty of people who haven't upgraded yet and have no immediate plans to do so. In fact, the prevalence of dual-format releases in Britain maintains the illusion that the BD format is doing better than it actually is, because such titles register as BD sales even if the purchaser is only interested in the DVD.

I have no idea about the quality of this release, but it got a very positive review here on DVDTalk, even for video content. What's so terrible about them that it harms the DVD label? Criterion still retails many releases that have far worse video content than this.

Indeed - hence my point about the essential silliness of slagging off an entire label because of one less than optimum release (I haven't seen this particular disc, so can't comment directly). If every Second Run release was as bad as Knights of the Teutonic Order or every BFI release was as bad as their original Salò, or every Arrow release was as bad as Tenebrae, the reputations of all three companies would be deservedly rock bottom. But they're not.

[bdlover]

Judging by all the comments here, however, a commitment to Blu-ray quite clearly isn't a must.

50% of their customer base?

Re: that DVD Talk review, I think there is an assumption amongst some people that because the films were shot on 16mm it's okay for them to look like crap. Not so. Also, the idea that a DVD is capable of reproducing 16mm film grain, even in a sparkling modern transfer, is laughable and undermines the credibility of the review. He also fails to spot that the "scratches and pops" are primarily analogue tape noise as opposed to film artifacts. Hell, just look at those screencaps - the lack of definition in the skies, the softness of the Modesto signage and the edge enhancement around the trees in the same capture, the appalling colour reprodution in the shot of the yellow flowers. I just threw up all over again.

Re: Blu-ray: each to their own, but given both limited film-watching time and limited funds I personally try not to buy DVDs anymore, this being one of maybe two or three DVDs I've purchased in the last two years. I know I'm not alone in this. Given the choice between a second tier German silent in a questionable transfer on a DVD or, say, the Masters of Cinema blu-ray of Tabu for half the price there's no contest I'm afraid... Now if EF were to release a blu-ray of Ruttman's City Symphony that's something I would be interested in (to replace my 16-year-old Image Entertainment DVD, which until then will quite suffice).

Criterion still retails many releases that have far worse video content than this.

Name one produced within the last ten years.

Oh and Micheael, given Benning's 7 votes on the BFI poll, surpassed by Jennings thanks only to a preponderance of British critics, how can you not consider him a 'big name'? I would imagine this is actually one of EF's best sellers.

[MichaelB]

Oh and Micheael, given Benning's 7 votes on the BFI poll, surpassed by Jennings thanks only to a preponderance of British critics, how can you not consider him a 'big name'? I would imagine this is actually one of EF's best sellers.

I think you must have got me mixed up with someone else: I've made no comment whatsoever about Benning's fame or popularity.

[bdlover]

I think the implication was there. It's an inevitable fact of life that some of the BFI's most obscure titles don't make it onto blu-ray, especially with such a full and otherwise satisfying release schedule. However, I don't think this has any baring on the viability of the Benning titles on blu-ray. Indeed looking at Amazon.de, the two mature Benning releases are their 4th and 5th best selling catalogue titles respectively, the top three being Hokuspokus, Sinfonie der Grosstadt and Napoleon ist an allum schuld. All five of these clearly deserving a blu-ray release.

[MichaelB]

I think the implication was there.

Trust me, it wasn't.

[TMDaines]

Re: Blu-ray: each to their own, but given both limited film-watching time and limited funds I personally try not to buy DVDs anymore, this being one of maybe two or three DVDs I've purchased in the last two years. I know I'm not alone in this. Given the choice between a second tier German silent in a questionable transfer on a DVD or, say, the Masters of Cinema blu-ray of Tabu for half the price there's no contest I'm afraid...

And you're projecting your purchasing decisions onto everyone else. The number of people who stubbornly refuse to buy DVDs is completely dwarved by those who aren't interested in Blu-ray. Many of us here, if not most of us, especially those of us posting in this thread, put the films first and foremost, hoping to just see them in the best condition available, and don't cut off our nose to spite our face just because we're not getting the optimal experience. If you're genuinely interested in exploring world cinema and importing discs from around the world, and not just those covering the canon, I simply cannot see how, even now in 2013, the majority of new releases you'd be interested in aren't still only available on DVD. Only a fool would dismiss them.

Again, though, you're talking out of your arse: "questionable transfer on a DVD"? EF's work on silent film is repeatedly stunning. I wish they wouldn't picturebox stuff, but there's no-one else in the world who does as much for German silent cinema.

[accatone]

The idea is to make people pay a second time for a product they allready own.
Germany is very driven by electronics and people spent enormous sums to have the newest home-cinema-hifi equipment. Its (for many) economically desastrous and don't let me even start talking about the ecological effects…. There are of course people and cinephiles that have high end projectors etcetera, but lets face it, its a total minority. The average BR/hightech dude is a blockbuster driven turbo consumist!

The cinephiles i know talk about movies in terms of their content and not about wether the release is available as VHS, DVD or Blue Ray. The cinephiles i know are very thankfully not interested in shopping for the newest high tech equipment but rather live a way cinema made them aware of (social, political, humor…).

Obviously this is a very special forum where quality issues must be discussed, rightly so! But making bold normativ statements like above (bdlover), is very idiotic, sorry.

[bdlover]

Michael, were you not defending the lack of a blu-ray release for Benning's documentary on the grounds that:

The BFI's DVD Publishing arm... still put out DVD-only releases [for] most of their documentary output unless there's a big name like Humphrey Jennings or John Krish attached). These decisions aren't taken lightly

If not, why bring it up?

TMDaines - good to know that Schroeter's Malina, Keen's experimental shorts and, say, Shindo's The Naked Island are all "part of the canon" and therefore not worth the time of a serious cineaste. The crappier the transfer and more obscure the film, the better. Note made for future reference

[MichaelB]

If not, why bring it up?

Because I know the people at BFI DVD Publishing well and am very familiar indeed with their output. Conversely, I don't know anyone at EF, and I have no idea how popular Benning's films are in terms of sales or rental income (critical reputation being relevant only insofar as it impacts on that bottom line) - so I'm not in any position to make any comment along those lines, either directly or by implication.

I've now made this clear three times, and I think that's quite enough.

[TMDaines]

TMDaines - good to know that Schroeter's Malina, Keen's experimental shorts and, say, Shindo's The Naked Island are all "part of the canon" and therefore not worth the time of a serious cineaste. The crappier the transfer and more obscure the film, the better. Note made for future reference

You're kind of proving my point. I argued that the majority of those outside the cannon are still only being released on DVD around the world. Of course, there are exceptions and I'll happily snap them up, although I wouldn't class Malina or The Naked Island as particularly obscure. I tend to view IMDB as a decent barometer of how well films are known and these two have 232 votes and 1506 votes on IMDb respectively. Benning's three films have 58, 56 and 24 votes respectively. The two Schroeters in EF's first set have 35 and 117 votes. The two features in the second have 10 and 48 votes, and this latter film already has a DVD release. If you can find any DVD label who are consistantly releasing Blu-rays of work with this kind of fame, then I'd love to hear about them.

I don't understand the correlation you make between a film's canonical status and it's actual artisitic merit either. There's plenty of films that have been lost to the ravages of time for various reasons. A true cineaste would surely delve beyond a prescribed cannon, no? And that surely means leaving any obsession with Blu-ray behind.

[MichaelB]

I don't understand the correlation you make between a film's canonical status and it's actual artisitic merit either. There's plenty of films that have been lost to the ravages of time for various reasons. A true cineaste would surely delve beyond a prescribed cannon, no? And that surely means leaving any obsession with Blu-ray behind.

It also depends on where this "prescribed canon" hails from. If you have any interest at all in central-eastern European cinema (to cite just one of many examples), you're stuck with DVDs for the foreseeable future - most likely topped up with YouTube and off-air recordings. As far as I'm aware, there are just four pre-2000s Czech films available on BD to date, and that's including the Swiss-German-UK co-production Alice. Equivalent figures for Poland and Hungary are three and one - and believe me, I'd love to be proved wrong!

[TMDaines]

It's not hugely different for Italian or German film. OK, you're looking at 30-50 titles on Blu-ray, but the number of classic titles on Blu-ray in comparison to DVD is virtually none. I'm not really bemoaning that either. I love Blu-ray, but give me DVD labels who are constantly making new films available over Blu-ray upgrades everytime.

[bdlover]

If we consider for a moment the classical period in music, there were a great many composers working at the time, far too many to count. A specialist in such matters can no doubt still name a few dozen of these, but as far as human history is concerned the only names that really count are Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Three individuals who retain their significance out of close to one hundred years of musical composition. Imagine then reviewing our cinema culture in two or three hundred years time. Will anyone even remember Walter Ruttmann, let alone some obscure contemporary of Walter Ruttmann? Chances are, our culture will be similarly reduced to a small handful of key names: Hitchcock, Kubrick, Godard perhaps. Welles and Tarkovsky? With luck, although Spielberg and Lucas might be a better bet. As for the Czechs, they'll be lucky if Marketa Lazarova goes the distance, let alone anything else. The point being, there's more to life than sitting in a darkened room watching films that no-one else has ever heard of and which, in a hundred years, no-one will remember.

[MichaelB]

The point being, there's more to life than sitting in a darkened room watching films that no-one else has ever heard of and which, in a hundred years, no-one will remember.

So remind me why you're so exercised about James Benning's work coming out on Blu-ray? After all, surely his work is the very epitome of "films that no-one else has ever heard of and which, in a hundred years, no-one will remember"?

And do you really allow your tastes to be dictated by an extremely narrow coterie of critics and distributors? That's almost inexpressibly sad.

[TMDaines]

If we consider for a moment the classical period in music, there were a great many composers working at the time, far too many to count. A specialist in such matters can no doubt still name a few dozen of these, but as far as human history is concerned the only names that really count are Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Three individuals who retain their significance out of close to one hundred years of musical composition. Imagine then reviewing our cinema culture in two or three hundred years time. Will anyone even remember Walter Ruttmann, let alone some obscure contemporary of Walter Ruttmann? Chances are, our culture will be similarly reduced to a small handful of key names: Hitchcock, Kubrick, Godard perhaps. Welles and Tarkovsky? With luck, although Spielberg and Lucas might be a better bet. As for the Czechs, they'll be lucky if Marketa Lazarova goes the distance, let alone anything else. The point being, there's more to life than sitting in a darkened room watching films that no-one else has ever heard of and which, in a hundred years, no-one will remember.

And you're posting on this forum? Why are you here? You were just telling me that all this stuff should be released on Blu-ray, ready for you to snap up. Now it's all too obscure for you.

I don't think too many of us watch film worrying what will be relevant or remembered in fifty years. If history has shown us anything, then it's the fact that although the majority of stuff will fall away to the ravages of times, there will still be a significant group of people interested in delving into it, as there is now. Furthermore, criticism in one period is hardly representative of what will be championed in years to come. People will would have been laughed out of town for suggesting at the time of their release that Citizen Kane and Vertigo would be considered the greatest films of all time in sixty to seventy years time.

[Timec]

So even if there are other directors from the same period who are just as great as the more well known names, we should base our viewing choices based solely on what may or may not be remembered in 100 years? Why should whether or not something is hypothetically remembered after we're dead have any influence whatsoever on what we choose to watch now?

As TMdaines said, surely one of the joys of cinephilia is going beyond the "canon" and finding those forgotten gems that have been obscured by time. Some of us (not me, but some here who actually work in the industry) may even be able to do their part to bring those directors and films greater recognition.

Incidentally, having known a few people who really love classical music and the classical period specifically, I'm quite confident that there are some people out there who would be able name you other great composers from the same era that rival Haydn, Mozart, or Beethoven in terms of quality of output. You would suggest that they should ignore those other composers simply because they aren't as well known to the public? After all, there's more to life than music, and (therefore?) when making decisions about what to listen to the enjoyment one gets out of a composer's music should be secondary to how "influential" that composer is.

[MichaelB]

People would have been laughed out of town for suggesting at the time of their release that Citizen Kane and Vertigo would be considered the greatest films of all time in sixty to seventy years time.

Actually, Kane did indeed get reviews calling it the greatest film of all time on its original release, but Vertigo is an excellent example. As indeed is Marketa Lazarová, a film that to all intents and purposes was totally unknown not just in the English-speaking world but outside its native country until the last half-decade.

As TMdaines said, surely one of the joys of cinephilia is going beyond the "canon" and finding those obscure and forgotten gems that have been obscured by time.

Absolutely. For me, there are few pleasures greater than discovering something that may have been around all my life or longer, but which has failed to cross my radar because it didn't get noticed by anyone influential at the time. It's one of the reasons why I love the BFI's Flipside strand, and would be even happier if equivalent organisations in other countries did something similar.

Some of us (not me, but some here who actually work in the industry) may even be able to do their part to bring those directors and films greater recognition.

I'm currently working on a multi-disc project that's aiming to achieve nothing less than the wholesale artistic rehabilitation of an unjustly maligned figure. But now that I've read bdlover's post, I think I'll pack it all in and catch up with my son's Star Wars Blu-ray set instead.

Incidentally, having known a few people who really love classical music and the classical period specifically, I'm quite confident that there are some people out there who would be able name you other great composers from the same era that rival Haydn, Mozart, or Beethoven in terms of quality of output. You would suggest that they should ignore those other composers simply because they aren't as well known to the public?

Franz Schubert ticks all those boxes and very much is as well known to the public. And that's even when taking the narrowest possible definition of "the classical period" (i.e. the death of Bach in 1750 to the death of Beethoven in 1827, by which time Schubert had produced the overwhelming majority of his output).

In fact, Schubert is an excellent example of someone who was all but unknown until decades after his death. What would an equivalent of bdlover posting in the 1860s have to say about him? Or indeed J.S. Bach, who arguably took even longer to be widely recognised? (His son C.P.E. Bach was considerably more famous than he was for a great many decades).

[swo17]

Oh man, have you guys seen this release? (Worst of all, it isn't even on Blu-ray!) Worst label ever.

[bdlover]

So remind me why you're so exercised about James Benning's work coming out on Blu-ray? After all, surely his work is the very epitome of "films that no-one else has ever heard of and which, in a hundred years, no-one will remember"?

Can't agree with that. Benning is a living filmmaker, his masterpiece (13 Lakes) is less than a decade old and he has remained relatively obscure to this point only because he has prevented commercial distribution of his work. Whereas, let's face it, it's time to count Fritz Freisler out of the running.

Taste is a different matter, of course, if one wishes to delve into one particular area of cinema or another, but I simply wished to counter the suggestion that cinephilia requires the obsessive and strict consumption of films with less than 50 votes on the IMDb.

You would suggest that they should ignore those other composers simply because they aren't as well known to the public?

I would suggest that these people are talking out of their arse to show off!

Schubert is classical-romantic.

swo17, that's a 13 year old release...

[swo17]

Well, it's the only Criterion release I've seen, and it didn't exactly inspire me to seek out more of their releases. I'll never understand why everyone else is so chuffed about them.

[bdlover]

p.s. what Michael is now talking about isn't cinephila, it's a full time job. If you enjoy picking through hundreds of hours of sub-standard junk in search of that one hidden, maligned gem, and you can get paid to do so then fair play. Let me know when the blu-rays are out.

[Michael Kerpan]

Am I hallucinating -- or did the administrators not previously ban (several years ago) a Blu-Ray-only fanatic who sounded rather like the current bdlover? Nothing wrong with preferring Blu-Ray, mind you -- but this non-stop truculence and consistent over the top rhetoric sure gets boring.

[What A Disgrace]

Cinephilia *is* a full time job. What you're ascribing yourself to is pretty darn close to casual film admiration.

And while there's nothing wrong with not wanting to see every piece of rubbish in order to find the masterpieces (I cut my Hulu queue down because I can only stand so much Korda and Kinoshita), trumpeting its virtues because it doesn't take up so much time is dangerously close to the old adolescent standby "get a life, nerd", which isn't doing fair-weather movie goers any favors, in addition to appearing to take pride in laziness (since it is the ones who are "picking through hundreds of hours of sub-standard junk" who actually write the canon). Not to mention your classification of their cinephilia as "watching a lot of films with under 50 votes on IMDB", which is missing or ditching a whole Hell of a lot of nuance in everyone's movie going approach for the sake of diminishing their side, which is also a petty teenager thing to do, and incredibly snobbish to boot. Not to mention that most of Bennings's films have very few votes on IMDB, anyway. Bennings's films could be exactly the sort of works you're talking about, there, so maybe you should change your approach and say what you mean in plain English instead of trying to look like a wise-ass.

[AidanKing]

I'm currently working on a multi-disc project that's aiming to achieve nothing less than the wholesale artistic rehabilitation of an unjustly maligned figure.

Is it Ken Russell at the BBC? It's probably not because of the Richard Strauss copyright issue (and maybe he's not maligned enough) but that would be a fantastic project.

[OnOnt]

An interview with James Benning in the latest Sight & Sound points to Deseret and Four Corners making up the next scheduled DVD set.