The DVD-Laser Disc Newsletter October 2023
4K Eden
The sheer power of the human presence is the strongest attribute of every film, and so of all of a film’s components, acting is the most important. One of the greatest compounded utilizations of acting in a motion picture is the work of the ensemble cast under director Elia Kazan in the 1954 Warner Bros. melodrama, East of Eden. The film has been released as a 4K UltraHD Blu-ray by Warner (UPC#883929808335, $34), and the enhanced precision of the image and the sound contribute significantly to the impact that the acting has not just for the film to tell its story, but for the viewer to be captivated by the characters and their lives. The film’s performers make use of different acting styles or techniques, but they blend together anyway, so that their differences become affectations of the characters, signifying their differences in class or generation. They all live in the same world.
Based upon a much larger novel by John Steinbeck, the 117-minute film uses quite a bit of what Steinbeck wrote as backstory, thus enriching every moment within the film by underscoring the sense that the characters have a history and are human in every way. If there is a weak component to the presentation, it could be one aspect of the cinematography by Ted McCord, which goes overboard at times in presenting one of the stars, Julie Harris, in an unnecessary, dreamy haze, since her beauty and the emotional power of her presence lies in her ordinariness. Other times, however, film is actually set in the fogbound mornings of the California coast of Monterey, a blurriness that is more acceptable, blending with the sharper, more strongly lit shots like star James Dean’s ‘method’ acting blends with the more traditional but just as valid performances of Raymond Massey and Jo Van Fleet, or even the actor playing his straightlaced brother, Richard Davalos. Additionally, McCord’s utilization of the widescreen framing, which is letterboxed with an aspect ratio of about 2.5:1, is wholly captivating, always finding the perfect balance between the characters and their surroundings. The Dolby Atmos sound transcribes the film’s old-fashioned directional stereo mix with aplomb, embellishes it with a subtle but compelling bass, and presents Leonard Rosenman lovely, comforting musical score with an enveloping and seemingly maternal dimensionality. In that the 4K presentation removes nearly every impediment there is that might prevent the viewer from entering the film’s world, visually and aurally, the Blu-ray is gripping emotional escapism and a worthy replication of the film’s exceptional achievement.
Set before and at the beginning of World War I, Dean’s character comes of age and seeks to understand his place in the world. The film’s depiction of the inner lives of its characters is both vivid and remarkable, and the only reason we can think of that the movie failed to win the Best Picture Oscar it so heartily deserved was the backlash against Kazan’s political posturing. Dean made just three films, but his screen presence and performances are so compelling, especially in East of Eden, that he became one of a handful of definitive movie star icons. Presented with an Overture, the film is not just another movie—it is, instead, exemplary of how stunningly magnificent a motion picture drama can be even when it is simply about the lives of people who are struggling to get by and get along. Thanks to the 4K rendering, the film’s beauty and the thrill of its humanity are sustained for eternity.
We reviewed a pretty good-looking DVD in Jun 05, although of course the solidity of the image and the strength of the audio are substantially improved on the 4K presentation. The film’s original theatrical stereo is offered as an alternative to the Atmos track, and it provides a good excuse to watch the film another time. While not as encompassing as the Atmos mix, it is in some ways crisper, and the separations are more distinctive. In any case, it is a great deal of fun. Also available are French, Spanish, Italian and German audio tracks, and eleven subtitling options, including English. There is also a passable commentary track from film critic Richard Schickel. He’s a little cranky, but shares a great deal of valuable background information about artists who made the film.
The evolution of cinema
Home video doesn’t care about the history of movies. Your favorite films sit together on the shelf regardless of when they were made or who made them. The arrangement of those titles is emotional, and would be so whether you just packed them on the shelf randomly or organized them by a specific set of criteria. But as a topic for a home video program, the background of how movies were created and then advanced can be fascinating. Unfortunately, that topic has only been available in piecemeal. There are grand collections of the earliest silent films, accompanied by copious notes that concentrate on one creator or one general idea. There are further programs about individual studios, directors, actors, genres and so on, although the majority of those pieces are presented as supplements to other programming. You watch enough of it and you get the general idea of how motion picture technology advanced and how the marketplace developed, or even how, as an artform, one exploration led to another. But if you are interested in how film arose from the muck, found its legs and spread across the seven continents, you were out of luck, something that Mark Cousins and Music Box Films now hope to change.
In 2011, Cousins made a fifteen-episode documentary series, The Story of Film: An Odyssey, and then in 2021 he added a two-episode epilog, The Story of Film: A New Generation, which Music Box has combined in a captivating four-platter Blu-ray set running a total of 1124 minutes, The Complete Story of Film (UPC#751778951840, $120). Despite its general chronological organization, it is not so much a history as a survey of the art of motion pictures and the innovations that contributed to that art’s advancement. In a literal sense, film only lasted 100 years before it was supplanted by digital video, and frankly, we don’t know how much longer a typical 2-hour or so movie will continue to be a sought-after artform, as its own spawn, from computer games to virtual reality, continue to make inroads on its feeding grounds. But whether the movies survive or not in the future, with every passing year at present it becomes harder and harder to summarize their development and milestones in any kind of succinct or compendious manner that still captures the breadth of the medium’s beauty and joy.
Conceived and constructed by Cousins, who also narrates with a pronounced Irish brogue, Odyssey appears on the first three platters, with each platter running more than 5 hours. For any movie lover, however, the time spent watching it just flies by. The episodes have no closing credit sequences and open with an overlapping spread of years for a title—1965-1969, 1967-1979 and so on—which Cousins, who also wrote a book the program is based upon, refers to as ‘chapters.’ End credits do not appear until the final episodes of the series and of the epilog. Each platter has a ‘Play All’ option, so it is very easy to just let the show unfold and get lost in it while somewhere beyond your screen, morning becomes night.
The program itself is less beholden to the chronological design than those episode titles imply. The time frames serve only as a base for each essay, presenting the probable seeds of trends that then blossomed across years and continents. A clip from The Great Train Robbery, for example, does not appear until the episode addressing the Nineties. During the course of the show, the grammar of film is explained in detail, with plenty of examples, while the shifts in the development and popularity of films are readily linked to world events. For all of the wonderful clips that are included—all of which are impeccably transferred, properly letterboxed and drawn from the best source material available at the time; and when the film is stereophonic, the clip is, as well (and even a few films that weren’t originally stereophonic, such as Easy Rider)—Cousins has also shot a lot of new material (on digital video, which is also vivid and spotless, letterboxed with an aspect ratio of about 1.78:1), including journeys around the world to the places where filmmakers were born or lived, the studios where films were made and even the locations where some were shot. He interviews many movie legends who were still alive at the time he was putting the initial program together, such as Stanley Donen, Norman Lloyd, Youssef Chahine, Kyōko Kagawa, Buck Henry and a number of others, also including archival interviews with other great filmmakers and fresh interviews with younger filmmakers (Paul Schrader is still ‘young,’ right?).
And as much as the show is an informative documentary, it is also a poetic work itself. Before diving into the birth of film noir, for example, Cousins opens with a seductive L.A. Woman-style montage of Los Angeles at night, which he accompanies with what can only be called narration that sets the scene, “After a long day in the sunshine in L.A., nighttime falls. There are few streetlights, so it’s really dark. Hardly anyone walks, so those that do can hear their own footsteps. The eucalyptus and orange blossom smell almost sickly sweet. The grills on windows cast shadows like prisons.” The production is so long and grand that it has room to genuinely breathe, which allows the viewer to savor, all the more, every moment within. A nice little booklet is included that lists every filmmaker and every film clip that appears, so have a highlighter handy because you will inevitably want to watch or re-watch certain movies or works of a filmmaker after the show is over.
What we found most surprising, though perhaps it shouldn’t be, is how much of Cousin’s survey is available on DVD and even Blu-ray (well, not Xala or The Spider’s Stratagem, at least, not yet). Cousins is less accommodating of what he refers to as ‘romantic’ films—not romances per se, but movies that prioritize commercial appeasement over artistry—and we would quibble with his offhand dismissal of such beloved features. But he sees the engine that turned motion pictures into works of art as being the rebel filmmakers, the ones who felt more compelled to make a movie the way they wanted to than the way others wanted them to, and this happened not only across the first century of film, but in every corner of the world. He includes acknowledgements and even lengthier deconstructions of some very obscure favorites, such as Cairo Station (Jan 10) and Kaagaz Ke Phool (Apr 03), but just as readily includes heart-quickening clips from movies everyone has seen, such as the match-to-sunrise edit in Lawrence of Arabia and the bone-to-satellite cut in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The Odyssey set has two subtitling options listed on the menu, ‘English’ and ‘English for the deaf and hard of hearing.’ The default setting is ‘English,’ which only provides translations for foreign language interviews and movie clips. If you want to know what the narrator is saying, you have to choose the second option, and if you want to suppress all of the subtitles, including the translations, you have to select the third option, ‘Off.’ However, there is a fascinating flaw on the second platter that we have never seen before. In a couple of episodes on the second platter, the ‘English’ subtitles appear correctly in one episode, but then those same subtitles appear at the same relative time codes in the next episode, so that, for example, subtitles from The Fireman’s Ball appear randomly on clips from Catch-22. The mistake can only be corrected by choosing the ‘English for the deaf and hard of hearing’ option. Unfortunately, it gets even worse. The final episode on the platter has an emphasis on non-English films and at the default setting, the film clips are not subtitled, nor are interviews with directors, such as a lengthy talk with Japanese documentary maker Kazuo Hara, in which he talks about shooting one of his films. Again, accessing the ‘English for the deaf and hard of hearing’ option enables the subtitles for the episode.
Film clips are identified by an information box in the corner of the screen that lists the title, director, year and production company, but a few have an incorrect year, off by multiple decades, and the production company identifications feel haphazard. The fourth platter, which contains the New Generation episodes and a trailer, has just two subtitling options, as the default ‘off’ position still provides subtitling for the foreign language clips, while the ‘English for the deaf and hard of hearing’ option supports everything. The platter also has an audio track that describes the action, not that it can squeeze much in between Cousins’ narration (“Characters in extravagant costumes. Beyoncé standing on a police car roof in a flood.”).
Whatever shortcomings one encounters, however, when it comes to the content of the series, nothing spoils the validity or appeal of the program as a whole. Of course, it can’t be perfect, since it is a personal interpretation, confined by the restraints of preference and, even as long as it is, time. Cousins never really explores the history and value of Argentine filmmaking, but that is a movie culture that is only now being discovered. Generally, Latin America, Southeast Asia and Iran get less attention than they ought to, and his coverage of Italian cinema is woeful. While he studiously acknowledges female filmmakers, he nevertheless gives them the short shift. In one of his later episodes, for example, he does a segment on Jane Campion, but he follows with a piece on Baz Luhrmann that is lengthier, more elaborate and more involved. He says that the Twenties were probably the best decade when it came to film production, but he nevertheless passes through those years much more quickly (they get two overlapping episodes) than he passes through the Sixties and Seventies (which get five episodes and seem to serve as a central reference point for all of the other decades), when the artform truly ignited throughout the world. His New Generation follow up (he reuses some of the connecting images that he shot for the previous series) is even more focused on movies that are forging new possibilities in filmmaking, but many such films are fairly bleak, which can be emotionally trying when it is coming at the end of a binge that contained so many uplifting cinematic moments. His greatest error, however, may be his inability to notice his own contribution to cinema’s advancement. Since he pays little attention to television, Cousins never acknowledges the innovative development that Erich von Stroheim would have loved—the adaptation of a novel as an 8-to-12-hour streaming program—even though, by adapting his own book, he is doing precisely that himself.
K. in 4K
Only a handful of filmmakers, dead or alive, could make a successful motion picture adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, but one who could was Orson Welles, whose 1962 feature, starring Anthony Perkins as the story’s protagonist, ‘Joseph K.,’ has been released on a 4K Blu-ray by The Criterion Collection (UPC#715515286916, $50). And even Welles’ film is a challenge. Running 119 minutes, the film captures the tone of Kafka’s writing precisely, but that becomes its central problem, because the story is dreamlike and Welles captures that quality so perfectly that one’s concentration is undermined. The basic premise is that Perkins’ character is told he is under arrest, so he seeks to learn what the charge is and to find a lawyer. Shot in black and white, which is letterboxed with an aspect ratio of about 1.66:1 and looks absolutely gorgeous from beginning to end, the film’s dialog deliberately talks around issues. The conversations are vague, as they would be in a dream, and the harder one tries to concentrate on what is being discussed while being mesmerized by the images, the closer one comes to a dream state oneself. We’ve seen the movie a number of times over the years (most recently in Jul 00), and although we find the movie’s artistry gripping, the effect of its construction is always the same, now amplified by the 4K delivery.
Jeanne Moreau, Akim Tamiroff, Elsa Martinelli, Michel Lonsdale and Romy Schneider are among the co-stars, and Welles, along with doing the voices for a character or two, plays the lawyer. Shot in various locations around Europe (much of it was shot in Zagreb) to convey the sort of unidentified totalitarian bureaucratic state where the hero resides, amid buildings and interiors that regularly dwarf the characters, Welles also uses the tale surreptitiously to depict the quagmire that was, for him at least, the film financing and filmmaking process. There are suggestions of sprockets, consecutive frames and flickering light everywhere. The film is also a satire and has in some ways the structure of a comedy, although it is never directly humorous (it does, however, look like the cast is having a great time on the set). From an intellectual standpoint, the film is a brilliant accomplishment. From an entertainment perspective, well, you might want to put a mound of sharp pebbles on your chair before you sit down to watch it.
A standard Blu-ray platter is included along with the 4K platter. Not only are the shades of black and grey more vivid on the 4K presentation, but the image is noticeably smoother compared to the standard BD platter. (In both cases, the presentation is a substantial improvement over all previous releases.) Still, since the improvements, obvious and subliminal, to the 4K version enhance one’s concentration and therefore lead more readily to a drowsy submersion into semi-consciousness, then perhaps the standard BD is advisable. The monophonic sound is a little edgy at times, bumping into the limitations of the recording equipment Welles was utilizing in his post-production work, but is otherwise reasonably clean. There are optional English subtitles. On both platters, a commentary is included from Welles historian Joseph McBride (he finishes it about 5 minutes before the film’s end). He talks not only about Welles, who had plenty of Kafkaesque run-ins with authorities during the Red Scare era, but goes over Kafka’s own history and background, and differentiates the aspects of the book that Welles responded to from the aspects that he was less interested in. He also compares the film quite favorably to other adaptations (and movies with the same premise, such as Alfred Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man), even though Welles moved a little further from the source than others have, and he speaks extensively about the film’s exploration of guilt and how that translates quite readily onto many of Welles’ films.
Along with the trailer, the standard BD platter has two additional supplements and another fantastic feature-length program. It should be noted that although the movie itself picks up where it left off when payback is terminated, the supplemental programs do not. One supplement is a very good 23-minute talk by cinematographer Edmond Richard about the different shooting strategies that were employed and how he collaborated with Welles. In the other supplement, Welles sits with Moreau in a hotel restaurant for a 29-minute conversation that was shot in 1972 for the French TV series, Vive le cinéma!. He talks in what is essentially high school French about his parents, his childhood, his earliest adventures on the stage and several projects that weren’t finished (he very much wanted to make Out of Africa with Moreau). He also offers a number of engaging anecdotes about how he continued to shoot Othello (Nov 17) after the money ran out. You don’t really know how much of what he as to say is true, but it is a very charming and totally captivating interlude.
Finally, there is a spellbinding 84-minute question-and-answer session Welles conducted at USC after a screening of The Trial in 1981 that was compiled in 2001 as Filming The Trial. Technically, it qualifies as a film he directed. Without a moderator, he sits on the stage and responds to very thoughtful and intelligent questions about the film and about filmmaking. His answers are witty, insightful and riveting. (McBride quotes from it extensively in his commentary.) The footage is primarily from the event, but there is also an interesting 3-minute deleted scene from the film that plays silently with subtitled dialog as Welles explains to the audience why he sensibly removed the sequence. Even if you’ve never seen The Trial or have no interest in it, the program is so entertaining as a portrait of Welles in the final stage of his career that it makes obtaining the entire set worthwhile.
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