60 Autumn Sonata

[Minkin]

DVD Beaver

[Matt]

Autumn Sonata desperately comes to life in your home theater!

Those colors, though. I want to assume they're correct, but I feel I can't assume anything anymore with Criterion. I've gotten so used to the, uh, autumnal color balance in the DVD transfer (which is the only way I've ever seen this film).

[Napier]

That third set of caps for the original Criterion DVD look all sorts of wrong to me.

[warren oates]

Without that warm yellow glaze over every shot, it's like a totally different film visually. The clarity of those CUs is pretty amazing. Anybody who remembers seeing original release prints care to chime in on the accuracy of the Blu-ray timing?

[hearthesilence]

Wow. I've only seen the Criterion DVD, and the dark, amberish (or yellowish) haze was always noticeable even if you had nothing to compare it to, it stuck out from the very beginning. At the time, I just assumed it was the way it was shot, but every single frame of that DVD is unnaturally warm, to the point where I didn't think of it as a great or effective look for the film.

Seeing it like this now, I wonder if it was just bad color timing? It's certainly possible.

[Moshrom]

There is apparently some Spanish blu-ray already out there (interlaced, wrong AR) with similar colour timing to this new disc.
Here's a capture close to one of the dvdbeaver frames

So I imagine this isn't just Criterion tinkering themselves...

Colour timing aside, the new restoration is really an astonishing improvement! :)

[domino harvey]

This is Do the Right Thing all over again. I can't believe I'll have to hold on to my old Tartan monstrosity even after buying this for the extras

[jsteffe]

I saw the film a couple decades ago--never one of my favorite Bergmans, though it's not bad and a number of the images have stuck with me over the years. That heavy amber haze over the old Criterion DVD just doesn't ring true for me. (I never bothered watching the old Criterion DVD, so I wasn't aware of how it looked until now.) The outdoor landscapes and the colors of the costumes in the restored version on Blu-ray seem much closer to what I remember.

Beyond that, I think it is a better representation of how Bergman and Nykvist typically used color in the 1970s. In fact, it makes me want to watch the film again.

[Paupau]

FWIW, my 9 year old R2 release looks like the blu, notably in the car screenshot arriving at the house. Cool colour timing. The end of the movie does have a more yellow-ish tint, but not nearly as much as the criterion dvd. Sorry if this adds to the confusion, but that dvd doesn't looks right to me.

[jindianajonz]

For what its worth, the stills from Taschen's Ingmar Bergman Archives seem to be closer in temperature to the blu-ray, especially when comparing the shot of Liv Ullman by a tree from the book to DVDBeaver's shot of her walking alongside the lake with her hand next to her head.

http://postimg.org/gallery/24p8f16g/f1e2f322/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Matt]

I didn't want to say more since I don't have any kind of definitive proof (though I looked for it), but the original color balance of the DVD looks very unlike the kind of work one would expect from Nykvist in the late 1970s/early 1980s. Soft, slightly golden lighting in interiors would be one thing (see Pretty Baby, Fanny & Alexander, The Serpent's Egg), but the heavily-filtered look of the original DVD is highly uncharacteristic (which is not to say it's not pretty). At the same time, the Blu-ray seems possibly over-corrected, a touch too blue and cool (the grass and the water in that cemetery scene screen cap look very unnatural, though the skin tones in the other caps look very good). I dunno.

[Donald Brown]

Actually, the skin tones on a calibrated monitor look quite blue. The transfer does look over-corrected and too cold.

[Dylan]

Also, unless he was specifically directed to do so, I really can't imagine Sven Nykvist using filters or post-processing effects so extensively (somebody like Vilmos Zsigmond, yes, but not Nykvist). If Nykvist was ever going for (or directed toward) photographing a scene that required a much more pronounced stylistic visual impact insofar as the colors go he would just light it accordingly on the set, like this (gorgeous-looking) scene from Bergman's Passion of Anna:







Then again...

A strange thought lapped in my mind just now... is it possible that the international release of Autumn Sonata was visually tinkered with? Like deliberately visually altered to give the film an "autumnal" glow for some reason? (to make the film 'warmer' or tie in with the title or to make it "more accessible" who knows what) If that's the case then what we have are two different visions: Bergman/Nykvist's original and the international distributor's, the latter being the source material for the past releases. That sounds like a crazy stretch, but it would make sense of the how previous DVD versions look at least. I suppose if one really wanted to do some sleuthing, you could track down some people who worked at New World Pictures in the late seventies who might have a good memory of how the film looked projected upon its release. Roger Corman himself would probably remember, actually...

[Moe Dickstein]

Actually - that would make sense as the old Criterion had the English title "Autumn Sonata" in the print where the new disc uses the Swedish "Hostsonaten"

[EddieLarkin]

There is precedent for the practice. International prints of Zulawski's Possesion added the well known blue tint, which was retained for home video until the new Blu-ray, when the director got a chance to remove it and restore his original look.

[FrauBlucher]

Dr. Svet gives the video 5 stars. Does look quite impressive.
blu-ray.com

[Donald Brown]

Those caps looks rather good. Perhaps a smidge cold, not excessively so. The color balance looks more natural than in caps posted elsewhere.

[Magic Hate Ball]

It's a little brisk, but I prefer it to the tomato-red of the original disk.

[movielocke]

A new Bergman is almost always a treat, and this one was as well.

Autumn Sonata is intensely dense, almost like a three person stage-bound chamber drama. Despite the density of the dialogue and high key of the emotions, Bergman pulls it all off without ever making those characteristics feel like drawbacks. No one could really direct this material as well as he could. It would all fall apart in other hands.

I feel its very similar to Cries and Whispers--a film I was probably too inexperienced in life to fully appreciate when I first watched it--but far more successful, in part because it's so purely about the relationship of mother and daughter. Although I need to re-watch Cries and Whispers, my impression at the time was that the symbolism was constantly competing with the chamber drama and neither worked for me as a result, not so with Autumn Sonata.

I feel like this is a Bergman film, like Wild Strawberries and Seventh Seal that I will return to and get more out of everytime I view it, it's just such a rich and insightful perspective on the frailties and failures of the human condition.

[FrauBlucher]

Movielocke... I'm in full agreement with you on this brilliant late Bergman. Having Ingrid Bergman in it makes it even more fascinating and interesting for the cinematic history it brings together.

I bought the blu but have not yet opened it. I am waiting for CC to release Persona so I can spend a week devouring these two masterpieces in 1080p splendor.

[cyan]

So this movie brings up an interesting question: How does Criterion determine what country they list the film as being from?
This one is listed as Sweden on Criterion.com, despite not having been filmed there or produced by a company from there. It is listed on IMDb as being French, West German and Norwegian. Yet Criterion mistakenly list it as Swedish. Simply because Bergman is from Sweden I assume, but I am surprised they overlooked the fact that this is not a Swedish film. So what is their process for determining a film's country?

[Gregory]

...Simply because Bergman is from Sweden I assume, but I am surprised they overlooked the fact that this is not a Swedish film.

And because most of the cast and crew were Swedish, the film was written in Swedish, and it premiered in Sweden. I hardly think it becomes a German film (except for bookkeeping purposes) just because of Bergman's tax troubles, or an example of Norwegian cinema because the studio where it was shot was located there—at least I wouldn't think so.

[hearthesilence]

I don't think you can't use strict, boilerplate guidelines. In this case, so much of it just defines it as Swedish to me. The production company/money and location of the production is irrelevant. (Think of how many Hollywood films are done in, say, Canada or Australia. Even if the financing turned out to be a loan from a Chinese bank, they'd still be nothing but Hollywood films to me.)

[Zot!]

I don't know if I would even call The Sacrifice Swedish.

[odino]

An interesting note on the difference to the newer Bergman Cinema restoration, as DVDBeaver states:

NOTE: I have not been able to find out why the 2013 Blu-ray running time is almost 50 seconds longer although it does start with different logos that are displayed for a longer time before the film title appears. If we investigate further and find anything - we will post it here.

The theory about different logos isn't correct because actually the new restoration has a lot of new inserts for the restoration as well. So basically the film ends without credits. The credits are already at the beginning of the movie so I can only assume they weren't originally supposed to be there? Anyone know for sure?