961 Shame

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swo17
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961 Shame

#1 Post by swo17 » Thu Nov 15, 2018 5:32 pm

Shame

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Ingmar Bergman's Shame is at once an examination of the violent legacy of World War II and a scathing response to the escalation of the conflict in Vietnam. Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann star as musicians living in quiet retreat on a remote island farm, until the civil war that drove them from the city catches up with them there. Amid the chaos of the military struggle, vividly evoked by pyrotechnics and by Sven Nykvist's handheld camera work, the two are faced with impossible moral choices that tear at the fabric of their relationship. This film, which contains some of the most devastating scenes in Bergman's oeuvre, shows the impact of war on individual lives.

SPECIAL FEATURES

• New 2K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Interviews with director Ingmar Bergman and a brief excerpt from a press conference for the film, recorded in 1967 and '68 for Swedish television
• New interview with actor Liv Ullmann
An Introduction to Ingmar Bergman, a 1968 documentary made during the film's production, featuring an extensive interview with Bergman
• PLUS: An essay by critic Michael Sragow

phoenix474
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Re: 961 Shame

#2 Post by phoenix474 » Thu Nov 15, 2018 8:40 pm

Shame is pretty underrated, imo. I firmly believe that it's one of Bergman's masterpieces alongside Persona, Cries and Whispers, Fanny & Alexander etc. and I'm so happy that those who opt out of the behemoth box set can still have it in their collection. I might even get it myself later on if the encode is better cause it's not sharing a disc

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Omensetter
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Re: 961 Shame

#3 Post by Omensetter » Thu Nov 15, 2018 10:26 pm

Yes, I'm very grateful for this release, especially so quick after the box-set. Naturally, I hope at least The Passion of Anna and Hour of the Wolf see similar releases; the timeframe shouldn't be too long, and I'd rather the box-set be more a great deal than an exclusive for a number of his big titles---there's an audience for standalones of his MGM films.

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furbicide
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Re: 961 Shame

#4 Post by furbicide » Sat Nov 17, 2018 6:26 am

One of Bergman’s best! Safe to presume this doesn’t have any extras that aren’t in the boxset?

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Re: 961 Shame

#5 Post by Rupert Pupkin » Sun Nov 18, 2018 2:16 am

I've discovered this movie later after The Silence (with its pre-Shining geometric in the hotel, room + quoting T.Browning "Freaks") or Persona. At that time I thought I had seen all the essential Bergman since "Shame" was difficult to rent.... How wrong was I. The photography is absolutely stunning. This was quiet a shock. You are completely hooked since the beginning of the movie. This is totally surreal. This is almost the Science Fiction movie that I.Bergmann never made with a kind of feeling much more closer to The Sacrifice than Louis Malle's "Black Moon". I've wonder what Andrei Tarkovsky said about this movie (if he liked it?). The use of editing, camera, close-ups and especially the use of sound is fascinating and haunting. There's this bombing scene with the horse and the children which looks to me like a Tarkovsky tribute/influence (Tarvoksy would have done a scene like this, but I wonder what he said about this fascinating I.Bergman's movie). This reminds me a lot Mikhaïl Kalatozov's best movies (especially "Letter Never Sent")
I think it's one of Liv Ullmann best role after Persona.
This movie had probably a lot of influence even on some recent movies, for instance the last shots/scenes of the movie seems to have been borrowed by John Hillcoat for his movie "The Road". It's much more like a post-apocalyptic movie in the end. "Shame" is such an haunting and totally frightening... Liv Ullmann's character quote about being into someone else dream (rather a nightmare) is perfectly accurate with this frightening cinematographic experience.
I remember that there was some dark humor which were not that common in that Bergman era.
SpoilerShow
It reminds me what Woody Allen would do later with "Kafka". Even some more daring scenes (for instance try to burst the head of a chicken with a shotgun). There's this "surréaliste" nonsense scenes of interrogations (something between Sartre and Bunuel). They are always in the "wrong" side. And a kind of critique of a bourgoisie social class even if they live in a farm; could they be called some "bobos" in France nowdays? ; how derisory their lives are (at the beginning Max's character is complaining about his tooth; he is a musician, etc...)

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Re: 961 Shame

#6 Post by black&huge » Tue Dec 10, 2019 11:22 pm

phoenix474 wrote:
Thu Nov 15, 2018 8:40 pm
I might even get it myself later on if the encode is better cause it's not sharing a disc
I think I may have read it in the thread for the Bergman Box but didn't Criterion just take the same encode from the shared disc in that set and directly put it on this individual release? So it's not a different encode at all?

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tenia
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Re: 961 Shame

#7 Post by tenia » Wed Dec 11, 2019 2:31 am

Yes, it's the same encode. It explains why the solo release of Shame barely uses its BD-50 disc space, with the movie having a clearly non-optimized video bitrate.

Bergman set BD Info :

Code: Select all

Disc Title: SHAME_THE_PASSION_OF_ANNA
Disc Size: 49,970,115,606 bytes
Size: 20,462,948,352 bytes
Length: 1:43:44.676
Total Bitrate: 26.30 Mbps
Video: MPEG-4 AVC Video / 22750 kbps / 1080p / 23.976 fps / 16:9 / High Profile 4.1
Audio: Swedish / LPCM Audio / 1.0 / 48 kHz /  1152 kbps / 24-bit
Subtitle: English / 26.593 kbps

Playlist: 00002.MPLS
Size: 20,217,538,560 bytes
Length: 1:41:08.228
Total Bitrate: 26.65 Mbps
Video: MPEG-4 AVC Video / 23078 kbps / 1080p / 23.976 fps / 16:9 / High Profile 4.1
Audio: Swedish / LPCM Audio / 1.0 / 48 kHz / 1152 kbps / 24-bit
Subtitle: English / 38.855 kbps

Shame solo release :

Code: Select all

Disc Title: SHAME
Disc Size: 29,788,956,769 bytes
Size: 20,462,948,352 bytes
Length: 1:43:44.676
Total Bitrate: 26.30 Mbps
Video: MPEG-4 AVC Video / 22750 kbps / 1080p / 23.976 fps / 16:9 / High Profile 4.1
Audio: Swedish / LPCM Audio / 1.0 / 48 kHz /  1152 kbps / 24-bit
Subtitle: English / 26.593 kbps

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961 Shame

#8 Post by MichaelB » Wed Dec 11, 2019 5:09 am

We did that with the US editions of Arrow’s Immoral Tales and The Beast - features and extras alike are the exact same encodes as the UK versions (as in we directly ported the .m2ts files across), but the permutations were different for rights reasons.

(Arrow didn’t have the US rights to the UK edition’s supporting shorts, so we dropped them and added extras from elsewhere in the big Borowczyk box that they did own.)

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tenia
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Re: 961 Shame

#9 Post by tenia » Wed Dec 11, 2019 8:27 am

If the encodes are good to begin with, except if the encoder thinks it's useful to spend time and money again on trying to improve on them, there's indeed no reason not to simply re-use them.

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Re: 961 Shame

#10 Post by MichaelB » Wed Dec 11, 2019 9:09 am

Yup, we were perfectly happy with the Borowczyk encodes, and saw no point in reinventing the wheel.

Similarly, the Rivette releases that are shared between Arrow and Carlotta are exactly the same encodes - the only difference is that the menus are localised. With the Arrow and Flicker Alley noir releases, because they're in different regions they really are exactly the same discs as far as the machine-readable side is concerned - you get the locally appropriate ident depending on the player's region. (This wouldn't work with a UK/French release, of course.)

In the case of Out 1, this made especial sense since the entire film only needed one QC pass for both labels - a pretty major consideration with this particular film!

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tenia
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Re: 961 Shame

#11 Post by tenia » Wed Dec 11, 2019 9:58 am

And I also recall David M directly re-using his MoC encodes for Carlotta's A Touch of Zen and Dragon Inn.

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Re: 961 Shame

#12 Post by MichaelB » Wed Dec 11, 2019 11:01 am

Again, they weren't broken so didn't need fixing. If you honestly do the best job that you can first time round and there's no obvious way that you'd do it differently, you might as well just recycle the same thing.

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swo17
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Re: 961 Shame

#13 Post by swo17 » Wed Dec 11, 2019 11:19 am

The difference here being that the Criterion set adds a whole other film (The Passion of Anna) to the disc, so if they perhaps felt they had to compromise the encode a little to fit both films, the standalone disc for just Shame could have remedied this

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tenia
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Re: 961 Shame

#14 Post by tenia » Wed Dec 11, 2019 1:08 pm

swo17 wrote:
Wed Dec 11, 2019 11:19 am
The difference here being that the Criterion set adds a whole other film (The Passion of Anna) to the disc, so if they perhaps felt they had to compromise the encode a little to fit both films, the standalone disc for just Shame could have remedied this
Such a case probably just says a lot about their way of thinking their encodes. They most likely deemed the original double-bill encode good to go, and thus still good to go for the stand-alone release. Moreover, this is a 2K restoration from an IP, so not the things that usually visibly challenges their authoring houses' encode (it's usually rather 4K-based stuff). Judging from caps-a-holic samples, it indeed seems to hold well enough here.

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swo17
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Re: 961 Shame

#15 Post by swo17 » Wed Dec 11, 2019 1:12 pm

True. It might also seem to devalue the larger set if they implicitly acknowledged that they had compromised some of the transfers to cram more content onto less discs, even if the difference is practically negligible

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