denti alligator wrote:Thanks. This is great to finally know for sure. I am so thrilled about this release. Any extras you can divulge?
Schreck, wanna take me to one of those Vertovs at Anthology? You owe me one now!
Absolutely, completely and totally incredible that at this late date MK2 would do such an absurdly ridiculous thing like reframing such an already-abused-on-vid classic like a VAMPYR resto. Absolutely unbelievable. I know the Chaplins were fucked but this goes back a way. Somebody ACTUALLY made the decision "Yeah, these are some of the most amazing compositions in the whole century of film, and yea, we've seen pillarboxing become pretty much routine in processing film elements such as this... but fuckit... we'll just be a bunch of lazy snobs and fuck with an abused masterpiece..."
Denti, we've a date. BUT... remember all, this film exists in a variety of states, including silent versions released silent. View sonorized films like THE MAN WHO LAUGHS, SUNRISE.. films along those lines which were released in both states like VAMPYR, and you with find that these hyper-painterly cameramen & quality directors (many of whom viewed sonorization as an aberrant passing trend like hand-stencil-coloring) like Murnau & Leni and many more continuing to frame their shots in full 1.33 AOR-- the famous shot of the chopped table lamp in SUNRISE (where the city girl is lodging, the old couple is eating soup or porridge on the famously slanted table) being a prime example of a "sonorized silent" where the sound issue represents an atrophied version of the directors & cameramans original framing intent. To see the full compositions (which most have not, outside of archivists) of Struss & Rosher for Murnau, one would have to view the silent versions of the film (which exist in full, but are not distributed for home vid, except for one example from Leni which I'll mention inna minute). This was what made the Bologna restoration of Leni's masterpiece MAN WHO LAUGHS so fantastic (available on the, although nonpreconverted, very nice, Kino disc), as they did an exclusively digital restoration.... transferring the
fullframe unchopped silent film elements via telecine, and
joining them with the sonorization tracks from the visually atrophied prints with synch-sound (the film, like SUNRISE, VAMPYR and so many other glorious masterpieces from this transition period, was released in both silent and sound versions) to come up with a "dream" version the filmmakers could not have produced at the time... fullframe and with sound. One can see the uncorrupted beauty of these images.
The question for me was what kind of restoration was going to be done... and also, whether or not Dreyer and Mate framed their film for a more-visually-glorious silent version that would simply, a la similar sonorized silents, lose a bit off the left edge during sonorization. This mentality was not uncommon-- with no control over the audio mood-setting in the totally silent version, they would shoot so that the silent version would have the advantage of being more visually rapturous & poetic, whereas the sound version would lose a bit visually but they would have total control of mood on the sonic plane. This was apparently the trade-off these high-art directors felt made sense. The process of home video transfers and telcine frame-in on old sound elements to blow them back up to full 1.33 (as done so sinfully w Clair & Chaplin et al), and the use of anamorphic lenses (whereby cinematographers regularly ignore the 1.33 boundaries of a viewfinder or vid feed in the directors tent during set-ups) over the past few decades has led to the possibly mistaken belief that these early half-silent/half-sound semi-silents from the transition period were downframed within the viewfinder to compensate the later add-on of the sonic strip for the quantity of sonorized prints. Certainly it was done, but even in some askew compositions from the early sound era (folks strangely to the left of compositions, chopped pieces of furniture) in releases that were FULLY SONORIZED (in other words, releases that were totally dialog driven and had no fully silent release in non-wired theaters) one can see that some cinematographers were shooting as they always did, and let fate take it's course during sonorization process. We do see early sound masters like Lang & Von Stern & Pabst getting in the saddle very quickly and mastering the frame-down within the viewfinder process of left-edge compensation, to produce those 1.19 images we love so much. But remember, even in some of our beloved classics like SUNRISE & MAN WHO LAUGHS-- and possibly VAMPYR, when we view pillarboxed, we are watching what the director considered to be, in visual terms, a second best version of his work. Silent houses got the better image but no soundtrack, and wired houses got a slightly atrophied 1.19 image, but the whistles & bells of the synch soundtrack. Whether or not Dreyer and Mate considered the silent version of VAMP to be the complete visual record of their compositional intentions--- or simply one with a lopsided bit of extra visual data on the left because they shot it giving the sonorized version priority and therefore advance-compensated the framing to 1.19 in the viewfinder-- I simply don't know. I do know that in spirit and technique (and his last prior experience, ie JOAN) he most resembled those Germanic filmmakers still clinging to the painterly, hypervisual qualities of their style, downplaying sonorization & dialog as a passing trend which sucked the "art" out of their Art. The sonic technique of VAMPYR does of course seem to reflect this sensibility, as well. (As does the desire to ideally not even want a score on JOAN... i e completely silent theater). It would be another decade before he created a dialog driven feature. Yet, whether or not one can construe from this that the fullframe nonsonorized prints of VAMP are the "true" ones reflecting his visual intention a la SUNRISE & MAN WHO..., that's a leap I just can't make. Where this leaves us today, in attempting a "definitive" resto of this already-problematic film (what language, etc?.. not to mention a limited number of workable elements to create a composite from).... I just don't know.
But doing what MK2 did and zooming in the transfer "gate" and removing image from a pillarboxed print... that's about as bad as it gets, in this day & age for sure. Kudos to you Nick. Keep up the fantastic work.
Dent, I'm traveling this upcoming week, but we'll hang in Sept for sure.
PS: yes,
that insert from CC about VAMP is old, before the snag was hit. It's from the old VHS/HVe days.