Nothing wrote:The problem is with the telecine, not the materials - soft with edge enhancement and a thin, ugly short spectrum of colours. This looks like it was taken from a 1980s D1 - and probably was...
Probably not a
1980s D1, given that the film didn't receive its world premiere until 1990! But yes, there's every chance that the master was created in the 1990s for a Czech TV screening: I suspect most of my Czech-label DVDs came from a similar source.
Adelheid, for instance, hails from the same production year and has similarly pasty colours and clear onscreen evidence of an analogue video source.
Whilst 2K mastering and restoration might perhaps not be profitable for a title like this or Red Psalm (although still not as bank breaking as you make out, at perhaps <£10k a film)
Sorry, but £10K (or anything close to that)
is bank-breaking on a release like this. Can you convincingly argue that if they'd spent that money, they'd make it back in increased sales of
Larks on a String? I certainly couldn't.
(or, in the case of this film, just wait for the HD master since it's going to be available within five years).
It
might be available within five years, if current targets are met, though in my experience of similar large-scale initiatives they very rarely are. But Second Run didn't know about this project until after
Larks on a String had been put to bed - and it's worth noting that they've delayed other releases because of similar initiatives elsewhere, but such delays have their own problems attached.
For instance, Andrzej Munk's
Eroica got as far as a confirmed release date, only to be postponed indefinitely after the possibility was raised of a full-scale restoration being undertaken. Unfortunately, this new master still hasn't been made available, and since Second Run signed the contract some time ago, they now have less time to recoup their investment if the release ever goes ahead, as these contracts almost always come with a cut-off date after which the rights revert back to the rightsholder. Which is of course another factor that always has to be borne in mind - a five-year wait for better materials simply isn't a realistic prospect in most third-party distribution situations given that the meter will have been ticking for that long.
Basically, if Second Run were to release half as many titles as they do at present, making sure only to license titles whether either a/ a good master is available or b/ they have access to the original film elements, then spent a few hundred pounds extra to make sure they have a decent telecine to work from (+ license out to others), upping the price point of their discs to compensate, they'd very quickly raise their reputation into the MoC arena, doing the films in their catalogue justice - and profits would likely follow. Instead, they've had this haphazard "release as much as we possibly can in whatever condition we find it" attitude from the very beginning, which has only marginally improved over the last few years.
Well, for starters, they've been in business almost as long as MoC and have released only half as many titles - roughly eight or nine in a typical year, by my reckoning. That's hardly prolific.
Secondly, calling for them to raise prices misses the key point that Second Run's business model
relies on people blind-buying - probably far more than with most other labels. Although the RRP is usually £12.99, in practice you should never have to pay more than a tenner - and that makes a big psychological difference when deciding to take a chance on, say,
The Lighthouse, the only film from a completely unknown Armenian director that never opened theatrically so has no real critical momentum behind it. Same with a film by someone like František Vláčil, who has a huge domestic reputation but whose films were never released in Britain. Or Zoltán Huszárik - I've just finished the booklet essay for the upcoming
Szindbád, so I could hardly be more aware right now of how much Huszárik and his films have been ignored by English-speaking critics!
Thirdly, if you specialise in titles from places like eastern Europe and India, dodgy masters of decades-old back catalogue entries are the rule rather than the exception - and commissioning new telecines either involves relying on local facilities or importing the materials at your expense (not to mention researching the materials in the first place, which can be a major task in itself), so this "few hundred pounds" can quickly escalate. And that's even assuming that you're allowed access to film materials at all, which often isn't the case - I was told by a Czech rightsholder that a short that I was offering to telecine to higher standards than the letterboxed Digibeta they sent me was "too fragile" to access again in 35mm form - which I suspect translated as "you're not paying us enough money to make it worth our while".
So while you could notionally draw comparisons between, say, MoC's Pialat releases and Second Run's Jancsó discs (given that both filmmakers, while undoubtedly hugely important, are hardly prominent names even in British art-cinema-friendly households), MoC had a massive advantage in that superb masters and extras had already been created in France. Same with their Murnau titles, their Japanese titles and indeed a pretty hefty chunk of their catalogue across the board. But the whole nature of Second Run's operation is that they specialise in neglected and marginalised films - which as often as not means films that have been neglected and marginalised
by their rightsholders, usually because they don't think there's any money to be made out of them to make it worth striking a new master to current technical standards.
In other words, while undoubtedly well-meaning, your advice that they should "mak[e] sure only to license titles whether either a/ a good master is available or b/ they have access to the original film elements" reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the label's entire ethos. They're not trying to compete with the BFI, MoC or Criterion, they're trying to release the titles that the BFI, MoC, Criterion and the films' own rightsholders, for whatever reason, have ignored. And indeed titles that have been ignored by the critical establishment for far too long, assuming that they picked up on them first time round.