1043 Christ Stopped at Eboli

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swo17
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1043 Christ Stopped at Eboli

#1 Post by swo17 » Mon Jun 15, 2020 4:25 pm

Christ Stopped at Eboli

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An elegy of exile and an epic immersion into the world of rural Italy during the Mussolini years, Francesco Rosi's sublime adaptation of the memoirs of the painter, physician, and political activist Carlo Levi brings a monument of twentieth-century autobiography to the screen with quiet grace and solemn beauty. Banished to a desolate southern town for his anti-Fascist views, the worldly Levi (Gian Maria Volontè) discovers an Italy he never knew existed, a place where ancient folkways and superstitions still hold sway and that gradually transforms his understanding of both himself and his country. Presented for the first time on home video in its original full-length, four-part cut, Christ Stopped at Eboli ruminates profoundly on the political and philosophical rifts within Italian society—between north and south, tradition and modernity, fascism and freedom—and the essential humanity that transcends all.

SPECIAL FEATURES

• New 2K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• New introduction by translator and author Michael F. Moore
• Documentary from 1978 on Italian political cinema, featuring director Francesco Rosi and actor Gian Maria Volontè
• Excerpt from a 1974 documentary featuring Rosi and author Carlo Levi
• Excerpt from Marco Spagnoli's short 2014 documentary Unico, in which Rosi discusses Volontè
• Trailer
• New English subtitle translation by Moore
• PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by scholar Alexander Stille and a 1979 director's statement by Rosi

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Ribs
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Re: 1043 Christ Stopped at Eboli

#2 Post by Ribs » Mon Jun 15, 2020 4:26 pm

One disc for a 220m feature with a ton of supplements :/

The movie's excellent I'm just very disappointed that Criterion continues to do this

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Grand Wazoo
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Re: 1043 Christ Stopped at Eboli

#3 Post by Grand Wazoo » Mon Jun 15, 2020 4:52 pm

It being 1.33 must help in this instance though.

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tenia
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Re: 1043 Christ Stopped at Eboli

#4 Post by tenia » Mon Jun 15, 2020 5:24 pm

It should, but I doubt it'll change anything considering all the cases Pixelogic could easily have provided great encodes but didn't.

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TMDaines
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Re: 1043 Christ Stopped at Eboli

#5 Post by TMDaines » Mon Jun 15, 2020 6:56 pm

Excited to get my hands on this. Wonder if they have the UK rights too.

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ellipsis7
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Re: 1043 Christ Stopped at Eboli

#6 Post by ellipsis7 » Tue Jun 16, 2020 12:55 am

Superb

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RitrovataBlue
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Re: 1043 Christ Stopped at Eboli

#7 Post by RitrovataBlue » Tue Jun 16, 2020 2:15 am

Looking forward to this release, but I’m also perplexed about Criterion’s consistent policy of cramming too much content onto a single disc. War and Peace has a great restoration but a badly compressed transfer; the same can be said for Fanny and Alexander (TV) and many others. There’s no good reason not to add $5 to the cost and an extra disc.

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domino harvey
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Re: 1043 Christ Stopped at Eboli

#8 Post by domino harvey » Tue Jun 16, 2020 2:37 am

Very cool, let’s see how many more posts this thread can amass before anyone actually talks about the movie

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tenia
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Re: 1043 Christ Stopped at Eboli

#9 Post by tenia » Tue Jun 16, 2020 2:41 am

I've never seen it so I'd have a hard time talking about it anyway (that's 1 post more). Though I don't think the movie was released in such a long version in France.

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domino harvey
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Re: 1043 Christ Stopped at Eboli

#10 Post by domino harvey » Tue Jun 16, 2020 2:49 am

I believe this longer version was done for TV

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senseabove
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Re: 1043 Christ Stopped at Eboli

#11 Post by senseabove » Tue Jun 16, 2020 3:17 am

Whoops—I did that very cursorily in the speculation thread or somewhere else, but not here.

So I'll say again, a little more elaborately but in the right thread this time, that I liked this enough to see all 4 hours of it (including intermissions) twice in theaters, and I'm very much looking forward to some more context for it in those extras. I can't think of another movie that lives so completely in the relationship between politics as ideology and politics as praxis the way this one does, so I'm sure there's a lot of contemporary and historical commentating that went completely over my head. And yet, as abstract as that makes it sound, it's an engrossing, profoundly mundane, physical experience. The main character's being in-but-not-of the world of the peasants of the extremely rural Eboli works as a proxy for us, both of us total strangers to this way of life, as the movie builds a radically different and thorough world through our mutual captivity and patient observance.

But while I'm making comments in the wrong threads, that cover is atrociously inappropriate for the content and themes of the movie. It has some loneliness, sure, but it's still an intimate, broad, and tactile movie—nothing expansive, isolated, or distant about it.

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ellipsis7
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Re: 1043 Christ Stopped at Eboli

#12 Post by ellipsis7 » Tue Jun 16, 2020 7:27 am

The village he seeks refuge is in Lucania, modern day Basilicata, where the local people apparently had a saying that Christ had stopped short of getting there, rather he had halted in Eboli in the region of Campania... So they are living beyond the reach of the hand of God essentially, marginalised & abandoned to their own fate & devices...
Last edited by ellipsis7 on Tue Jun 16, 2020 7:28 am, edited 1 time in total.

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swo17
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Re: 1043 Christ Stopped at Eboli

#13 Post by swo17 » Tue Jun 16, 2020 7:28 am

domino harvey wrote:
Tue Jun 16, 2020 2:37 am
Very cool, let’s see how many more posts this thread can amass before anyone actually talks about the movie
Christ Stopped at 4 Hours of Content on a Single Disc

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senseabove
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Re: 1043 Christ Stopped at Eboli

#14 Post by senseabove » Tue Jun 16, 2020 11:51 am

ellipsis7 wrote:
Tue Jun 16, 2020 7:27 am
The village he seeks refuge is in Lucania, modern day Basilicata, where the local people apparently had a saying that Christ had stopped short of getting there, rather he had halted in Eboli in the region of Campania... So they are living beyond the reach of the hand of God essentially, marginalised & abandoned to their own fate & devices...
Of course. I'll blame my fingers for forgetting the town's name at 1AM and defaulting to the title.

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ellipsis7
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Re: 1043 Christ Stopped at Eboli

#15 Post by ellipsis7 » Tue Jun 23, 2020 6:19 am

Looks as if this is also coming to Criterion UK on the same date.

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Re: 1043 Christ Stopped at Eboli

#16 Post by Calvin » Tue Jun 23, 2020 6:38 am

ellipsis7 wrote:
Tue Jun 23, 2020 6:19 am
Looks as if this is also coming to Criterion UK on the same date.
Looks like just a listing for the US release. Criterion UK releases have Sony under the studio rather than Criterion.

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Ribs
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Re: 1043 Christ Stopped at Eboli

#17 Post by Ribs » Thu Aug 20, 2020 12:37 pm


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TMDaines
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Re: 1043 Christ Stopped at Eboli

#18 Post by TMDaines » Sun Aug 23, 2020 3:15 pm

The Cristaldi DVD I have of the shorter cut is quite dark too. I presume it is intended. It feels right.

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Re: 1043 Christ Stopped at Eboli

#19 Post by FrauBlucher » Sat Sep 26, 2020 4:54 pm


odino
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Re: 1043 Christ Stopped at Eboli

#20 Post by odino » Sun Sep 27, 2020 1:31 am

swo17 wrote:
Tue Jun 16, 2020 7:28 am
domino harvey wrote:
Tue Jun 16, 2020 2:37 am
Very cool, let’s see how many more posts this thread can amass before anyone actually talks about the movie
Christ Stopped at 4 Hours of Content on a Single Disc
Well, I see the complaint but 50GB of data is plenty for what we have as content:
- 1:33 ratio, less screen to compress, naturally
- slow-moving movie doesn't need high bitrate - or did I miss a car chase? :p some scenes have crowds but that's about it, according to Beaver the average is still a whopping 20.81Mbps
- PCM mono, no commentary tracks or anything
- extras aren't high bitrate and don't have to be imho, they are often sourced from TV materials that look, well, crappy, no wait, "retro" to begin with
- extra cost for an additional disk would have cut into the margins for what is already a very "cult" outlier that won't shift many copies

I stand with CC on their good judgement in this case.

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tenia
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Re: 1043 Christ Stopped at Eboli

#21 Post by tenia » Sun Sep 27, 2020 3:42 am

Again, there is the amount of content and how the encoder is setup. Pixelogic has issues at 25 and even 30 Mbps, including on 1.37 movies, so it's asking for trouble to challenge them with a 4hrs long movie on a single disc (even if other authoring houses wouldn't have massive problems with such a configuration). And indeed, if you look at blu-ray.com caps, several are showing the usual Pixelogic LEGO-blockiness : caps 8, 11, 13, 14, 17, 18. Add a challenging element like rain and you get the awful cap 19. No surprise there.

Also, IIRC, they only started to compress properly the extras and prioritise fully the movie over them in mid 2017. Until them, they used to routinely encode SD extras at 15 or 20 Mbps because they were upscaled, which explains why some shorter movies used to have a surprisingly limited disc space dedicated to them, but such a simple quite common-sense thing took them years to apply. That's how My Own Private Idaho, despite being 1h44 long and with no new extra, ended up only having a 22 Mbps AVB, and that was in Oct 2015. Same thing for Dr Strangelove in June 2016 : most of the extras are older ones, but they didn't compress them as much as they could. They also weren't compressing newer extras as much as they could, despite "talking heads" stuff never requiring that much space (and some houses have since long understood that).

I thus doubt it's an economic decision (War and Peace have 2 discs and I don't think it's a big seller), Criterion just trust their encoding house to deliver despite the amount of counter-examples.

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Re: 1043 Christ Stopped at Eboli

#22 Post by mhofmann » Wed Sep 30, 2020 4:36 pm

tenia wrote:
Sun Sep 27, 2020 3:42 am
Again, there is the amount of content and how the encoder is setup. Pixelogic has issues at 25 and even 30 Mbps, including on 1.37 movies, so it's asking for trouble to challenge them with a 4hrs long movie on a single disc (even if other authoring houses wouldn't have massive problems with such a configuration). And indeed, if you look at blu-ray.com caps, several are showing the usual Pixelogic LEGO-blockiness : caps 8, 11, 13, 14, 17, 18. Add a challenging element like rain and you get the awful cap 19. No surprise there.

Also, IIRC, they only started to compress properly the extras and prioritise fully the movie over them in mid 2017. Until them, they used to routinely encode SD extras at 15 or 20 Mbps because they were upscaled, which explains why some shorter movies used to have a surprisingly limited disc space dedicated to them, but such a simple quite common-sense thing took them years to apply. That's how My Own Private Idaho, despite being 1h44 long and with no new extra, ended up only having a 22 Mbps AVB, and that was in Oct 2015. Same thing for Dr Strangelove in June 2016 : most of the extras are older ones, but they didn't compress them as much as they could. They also weren't compressing newer extras as much as they could, despite "talking heads" stuff never requiring that much space (and some houses have since long understood that).

I thus doubt it's an economic decision (War and Peace have 2 discs and I don't think it's a big seller), Criterion just trust their encoding house to deliver despite the amount of counter-examples.
Completely agree, it's a bit of a travesty by now. At the risk of repeating myself, Criterion should know better. And I'm sure they do, they just don't care enough, which is very sad.

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mhofmann
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Re: 1043 Christ Stopped at Eboli

#23 Post by mhofmann » Tue Nov 24, 2020 2:47 pm

Got the disc today and had a brief look. As expected, it looks as bad in motion as it does on the screenshots. I would call it an encoding disaster, with the feared yet well-known swirling Pixelogic chunks in almost all scenes.

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soundchaser
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Re: 1043 Christ Stopped at Eboli

#24 Post by soundchaser » Tue Nov 24, 2020 2:54 pm

This cap in particular is absolutely appalling. The banding is almost as big as his nose.

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Drucker
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Re: 1043 Christ Stopped at Eboli

#25 Post by Drucker » Tue Nov 24, 2020 5:07 pm

Are you referring to the purple line?

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