Artificial Eye / Curzon Film World

[rapta]

After my local Curzon branch in Knutsford wanted to "celebrate" the continuation of their almost blanket showing of Fifty Shades, I got in touch on twitter. Their aim on their website is "to become a valued cultural hub": link. Predictably they played the "supply and demand" card neatly forgetting that many cultural centres eschew maximum profit for a genuinely diverse, alternative range of programming.

I have similar frustrations with my local Picturehouse (Harbour Lights in Southampton) - a chain now owned by Cineworld as of last year - who consistently fail to programme new release independent films. For example, there are three films released this week in the UK that I am avid to see as soon as possible - The Duke of Burgundy, Kumiko the Treasure Hunter, and Blackhat - yet they are showing none of them in the near future. I contacted them and they gave no explanation - frustratingly, they're doing extended runs of Whiplash (which I already saw in December), and even films like Boyhood and Ida which both came out last Summer/Autumn! I dread to think what will happen next week when Catch Me Daddy is released too...

Absolute madness if you ask me...many of these awards films are available on blu-ray/DVD already and there's no need to keep showing them. They could at least schedule one or two showings of a new release - apparently they were planning on showing Blackhat, but have cancelled it now in favour of more awards contenders (pointless seeing as the Oscars are this coming Sunday)...and Kumiko the Treasure Hunter is getting one singular screening but I'll have to wait until late April!

I'm getting more and more sick of this tendency for independent cinemas outside of major cities (I've been to cinemas in London and Bristol and they literally get everything) of not programming new releases or having diverse lineups. I assure you Fifty Shades Of Grey or the next faux-arthouse moneygrabber will continue to flood the market to a point where the smaller films will only be seen by the few journalists who actually get to see them! Somebody needs to say something to these people.

[thirtyframesasecond]

Unfortunately Curzon will point to its "on demand" cinema offerings as a way of offering a diverse range of films. It's no substitute for seeing a film in a cinema, is it?

[thirtyframesasecond]

And speaking of Curzon, I used to love double bills at the Soho. Now it's basically a posh bar that shows films. And if you think that's bad, go to the new Victoria cinema which is so up its own arse it's not funny.

[TMDaines]

I was really excited when Knutsford's Curzon opened in early 2013, but it has become increasingly apparent that they are only remotely arthouse when it suits them and that there is money to be there through crossover appeal. I guess the writing was on the wall when within two months of opening they tried to increase ticket prices by more than 50%! They eventually partially backed down, and have reintroduced concessions since. I've still never seen the cinema more than a quarter full when I have ever been though. It's little wonder when there is little to distinguish it from multiplexes other than it having only a single screen and a posh bar area.

On the whole, the programming is really conservative and white middle-class (for lack of a more nuanced term) showing the likes of The Imitation Game, The Theory of Everything and Testament of Youth all day every day in the first week or two of their release. Next week, after two weeks of blanket Fifty Shades of Grey, it is the turn of The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. The big blockbusters such as Noah and The Hobbit got the same treatment. It is essentially programmed like a multiplex screen in terms of the films it shows, especially as opera and theatre screenings are now ubiquitous. For several months, they were in the habit of having one-off screenings on Mondays under the banner of Curzon Curates. We got the likes of Kraftidioten, What We Do in the Shadows, The Drop and Maps to the Stars. Fantastic and more of the same please! Having only a single screen does not mean you can only show one film a week, especially in the age of digital distribution.

I am lucky that we have the Cornerhouse in Manchester only 45 minutes away. Despite it not being in a purpose-built building and the viewing experience therefore not always being perfect, it's one of my favourite places to be. They're actually moving home this summer and will soon have five purpose-built screens, instead of the current three. Their programming is consistently excellent - I only wish we saw more of the repository stuff that pops up at the BFI Southbank - and the tickets are fantastic value too with deductions for members, concessions, online-bookings, off-peak shows and combinations thereof. I often see two films on a weekend afternoon for £6 total! This weekend it will likely be Duke of Burgundy and Kumiko... neither of which can oust Fifty Shades for a single screening at the Curzon due to "supply and demand". Surely the future of arthouse cinemas has to be non-profit charitable enterprises?

I've never been to the Picturehouse in Liverpool (primarily as I tend to go to Manchester, and their ticket prices are a lot more expensive too), but they generally seem to make an effort to show as many films as possible across the spectrum.

[MichaelB]

And speaking of Curzon, I used to love double bills at the Soho. Now it's basically a posh bar that shows films. And if you think that's bad, go to the new Victoria cinema which is so up its own arse it's not funny.

And the prices are staggering. I daresay to Londoners it's like the archetypal frog in boiling water, but my jaw dropped when I found out what the Curzon Soho was expecting for a normal 6pm screening on a weekday in one of the smaller auditoria. At least tonight's The Duke of Burgundy has the excuse of the filmmaker giving a Q&A afterwards, so I don't mind paying nearly thirty quid for just two tickets - but back home that would pay for the cinema and the meal out afterwards.

Once upon a time a cinema ticket cost around a third of the price of the VHS release. Now, you can sometimes buy the Blu-ray for less - and get a picture that in many cases is virtually the same resolution.

[TMDaines]

Once upon a time a cinema ticket cost around a third of the price of the VHS release. Now, you can sometimes buy the Blu-ray for less - and get a picture that in many cases is virtually the same resolution.

Exactly. You are far better off buying the DVD or Blu-ray, especially if the cinema screen is relatively small anyway in many smaller venues.

What's the best value arthouse/independent cinema in London nowadays then? I'm guessing nothing can get to close to the Cornerhouse in Manchester for value, as most cities don't seem to have an equivalent.

[GaryC]

I have a Curzon Cineaste membership, which for £40 a year gives me two free tickets, 15% off ticket prices thereafter and a free DVD from the Curzon Artificial Eye catalogue on renewal. Also discounts on food and drink and on DVD purchases should I wish to buy one at one of their cinemas. The next level of membership up is £300 a year (free single tickets for all non-event film showings) but I worked out I'd have to go to something like twenty-six showings a year (and train fares, as I don't live in London) for that to be worth my while.

Even outside London, here in Aldershot, top whack at my local Cineworld is £9.70 (though I have an Unlimited Card) and it's over £10 at the Vue Camberley, which was my regular local cinema before the Aldershot one opened. The Cineworld Dublin is €11.80 which converts to £8.72

I wonder if UK cinema prices are indeed among the highest in the world? Granted I don't have much to compare with, but the top price at the Max Linder Panorama in Paris (one of the largest non-IMAX screens in Europe and currently showing American Sniper in version originale) is €9 and you won't get in to anywhere in London's West End other than the Prince Charles for that amount of pounds sterling. I've looked at a cinema I've been in, the Event in George St, Sydney, and full adult price is A$20.00. Granted the exchange rate is more favourable now than when I went in 2010 (A$1.60 to the pound then, A$1.96 now) that converts to £10.18 which is about the equivalent of what I paid then, for a cinema screen in the CBD of the country's largest city.

Are there countries that charge more than the UK - Scandinavia, maybe?

[NABOB OF NOWHERE]

My two local arthouse-ish cinemas in SW France where I have seen Nightcrawler, Leviathan, Adieu au Language and Ida for example cost 5 or 6 Euros and that's weekend evenings as well.
At current rates that equates to about 35p.
BTW This week Force Majeure is in the listings....as 'Snow Therapy' !

[MichaelB]

I pay between £3.50 and £7 locally - usually around £5.

[thirtyframesasecond]

I have a Cineworld card so that caters for most films I see, and I go to the central London cinemas mostly so the choice is pretty varied. Anything 'artsy' and it's a pre-5pm showing every time (I'll duck out of work early) - you can usually get in a Curzon for under a tenner then.

Curzon took over the Renoir, which was a nice if a little grotty cinema, cheaper than their Soho/Mayfair cinemas at least. Last time I looked it's undergoing work and will become another Victoria, I reckon. In fact, it might become Curzon Bloomsbury if I am recalling correctly.

Their Home Cinema service is surprisingly OK though - you get some decent retrospectives for £2 a pop.

[GaryC]

Their Home Cinema service is surprisingly OK though - you get some decent retrospectives for £2 a pop.

Agreed, and I should have said above that Curzon membership gives you a 15% discount on Curzon Home Cinema as well, so that £2 becomes £1.70 and £10 for a new release becomes £8.50. Artificial Eye and Curzon Film World release their films on Curzon Home Cinema day and date with the cinema release. Given that it's uncertain if I can get to London to see them, I may well have to watch The Duke of Burgundy and Still Alice that way.

When they revamped the Home Cinema site last year, quite a few films disappeared and have never come back, I guess because Curzon are going by BBFC certificates and only hosting films with homeviewing certificates (possibly BBFC-exempted documentaries as well). Using one director as an example, Paul Cox's My First Wife (a 15 in the cinema but never submitted on video) has gone, but Man of Flowers and Vincent (18 and PG respectively, from video certifications in the 1990s) are still there.

[TMDaines]

Their Home Cinema service is surprisingly OK though - you get some decent retrospectives for £2 a pop.

Agreed, and I should have said above that Curzon membership gives you a 15% discount on Curzon Home Cinema as well, so that £2 becomes £1.70 and £10 for a new release becomes £8.50. Artificial Eye and Curzon Film World release their films on Curzon Home Cinema day and date with the cinema release. Given that it's uncertain if I can get to London to see them, I may well have to watch The Duke of Burgundy and Still Alice

I paid £4 to watch The Duke of Burgundy in a cinema during a weekend evening. It would have been £5.50 for non-concessions., and £7.50 is most you would have to pay as a non-member. How is £10 or even £8.50 a good deal for a one-off stream?! It's absurd that the prices of one-off streams, albeit for new releases, are comparable to a cinema ticket. More often than not, they are bit-rate starved and poorly encoded. The profit margins are surely far greater too. I cannot envision myself ever paying those sort of prices. In fairness, a lot of Curzon's back catalogue is more competitively priced, but the resolution is still only 720p at most.

While discs are available, I'll keep buying them, complementing them with cinema trips, a Mubi subscription and the backchannels. Although I've got Amazon Prime, Prime Instant Video is crap in terms of access (no Chromecast, no XBMC/Kodi, no HD on iOS) and so I never use it. I think streaming sites, as a whole, are in for a rude awakening if they believe people, such as myself, will pay DVD/Blu-ray prices for streams. I still hope that one day we will see a Spotify for film, but may of the big film distribution players (cinemas and streaming sites) seem more interested in squeezing the few willing to pay for as much as possible, while pushing others to alternate means.

[GaryC]

I have used Curzon Home Cinema because while I would rather see things in a cinema, it isn't always feasible, and the nearest cinemas to me playing these films would be in London, or maybe the HMVCurzon in Wimbledon, and in either case I'd have to pay train fares as well as the ticket price. I could of course wait for the Blu-ray or DVD, but in the case of the back-catalogue films on the site (as with MUBI's selections) there often isn't one in the UK.

Just to nitpick, it isn't a one-off stream. You have forty-eight hours to watch, but you can watch as many times as you like in that period.

(I do have Amazon Prime as well, and use it mainly for Blu-ray or DVD rentals by post.)

[copen]

Rien Ne Va Plus (the swindle) (claude chabrol)
Studio: Artificial Eye
DVD Release Date: 24 Sept. 2012

does anyone know if this has a better english translation that the 2006 "Second Sight" release.
the 2006 has a 'lazy' english translation (not complete).
thanks

[Calvin]

Roy Andersson's A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting Upon Existence will be released on Blu-Ray and DVD on July 13th. Dated for the same day is a Roy Andersson box set with that film, A Swedish Love Story, Songs from the Second Floor and You, The Living - DVD-only "at the moment" (according to the press note, via Dr. Svet at Blu-Ray.com) so I'd like to suggest that people email info@artificial-eye.com and politely lobby them to release it on Blu-Ray as well.

[Paul Moran]

I bought the Artificial Eye Truffaut Antoine Doniel set. It is great but there seems to be an error on the Antoine and Colette short, which can be found on the Bed and Board disc. The sound occasionally drops out and at the end there is silence when there should be the song. Has anyone else had this problem or is it just my disc?

Sorry, only just noticed your post. The good news is - it's not just your disc; the bad news is - AE don't seem in any hurry to explain the faults or to fix them.

Two of us, at least, bought this set from MovieMail recently, and spotted the same dropouts: 11:18 to 11:24; 23:07 to 24:01 (the record pressing scene); 29:16 to 30:14 (the stills at the end of film). It's possible to hear the missing soundtrack, at much reduced volume, during the optional audio commentary. And there are no dropouts in the version in Criterion's Antoine Doinel DVD box set.

There's an amazon.co.uk customer review of the Bed & Board BD which mentions the dropouts; the customer complained to AE back in January, but doesn't seem to have had a reply yet. My own complaint is more recent!

I also found a DigitalFix review of the DVD version of Bed & Board; the DVD seems to have the same Antoine & Colette dropouts as the BD. The reviewer noticed them, but thought they were intentional! Unfortunate, because a scathing review might have prompted AE to do something about them. The Blu-ray.com review of the BD doesn't mention the dropouts.

[Rupert Pupkin]

Roy Andersson's A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting Upon Existence will be released on Blu-Ray and DVD on July 13th. Dated for the same day is a Roy Andersson box set with that film, A Swedish Love Story, Songs from the Second Floor and You, The Living - DVD-only "at the moment" (according to the press note, via Dr. Svet at Blu-Ray.com) so I'd like to suggest that people email info@artificial-eye.com and politely lobby them to release it on Blu-Ray as well.

I've just emailed politely Artificial Eye about a blu-ray release of a "Swedish Love Story" - I'm waiting for a blu-ray releases since years.
I saw the it in 2008, in France when there was a theatrical release (the restoration was amazing). It hadn't been released before in France.
There is a DVD released in Sweden which I bought several years ago. The quality of the transfer was stunning for a SD DVD. No DVD has been released at that time in France, so I bought the Swedish DVD.
The only drawback is that they wanted to add a lot a lot a lot of extras and should have done a 2 DVD set instead of a DVD-9 (the "retrouvailles" when the 2 actors meets again is really moving) but the encoding of the extras had some problems : bitrate too low; with some pixels artefacts during the very nice casting footage.

I suppose that A.Eye probably used the same transfer for the DVD.

But... They've never released on Blu-Ray "A Swedish Love Story" in Sweden so far ????????

[Calvin]

But... They've never released on Blu-Ray "A Swedish Love Story" in Sweden so far ????????

No, but they said to me that they might after Pigeon is released

[GaryC]

I also found a DigitalFix review of the DVD version of Bed & Board; the DVD seems to have the same Antoine & Colette dropouts as the BD. The reviewer noticed them, but thought they were intentional! Unfortunate, because a scathing review might have prompted AE to do something about them. The Blu-ray.com review of the BD doesn't mention the dropouts.

That isn't what I actually said. There are scenes in Antoine et Colette which are clearly intentionally without direct sound, but those aren't where the sound drop-outs occurred. I've slightly re-edited that part of the review now, for clarity.

[Zot!]

Nuts...looks like I'm waiting for a prospective Criterion set after all.

[Paul Moran]

I also found a DigitalFix review of the DVD version of Bed & Board; the DVD seems to have the same Antoine & Colette dropouts as the BD. The reviewer noticed them, but thought they were intentional! Unfortunate, because a scathing review might have prompted AE to do something about them. The Blu-ray.com review of the BD doesn't mention the dropouts.

That isn't what I actually said. There are scenes in Antoine et Colette which are clearly intentionally without direct sound, but those aren't where the sound drop-outs occurred. I've slightly re-edited that part of the review now, for clarity.

Thanks for the clarification, GaryC. I had wrongly taken your original phrase "some sequences are intentionally shot without sound" to mean that some sequences in the finished film were intended to be silent, i.e. no audio at all. That was clearly not the case for the BD sequences at 23:07 to 24:01 (the record pressing sequence) and 29:16 to 30:14 (the stills at the end of the film). The AE commentary track, and the Criterion DVD, proved that these sequences - which are completely silent in the main AE audio track - were intended to have musical accompaniments (orchestral for the first sequence, a song for the second).

[criterionsnob]

The Roy Andersson Collection Blu-ray announced for July 13th.

Four blu-rays, containing:
A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting Upon Existence
You, the Living
Songs from the Second Floor
A Swedish Love Story

[swo17]

Many thanks to anyone that helped push them into deciding to upgrade!

[chatterjees]

That's really great news, but I surely hope that one day people will start pushing them into deciding to upgrade their Theo Angelopoulos and Béla Tarr Collections.

[Rupert Pupkin]

wow! that's great news! I've emailed this week-end Artificial Eye about "A Swedish Love Story" (which I had bought on DVD (the Swedish release- I hope that they will include the casting footage in the bonus) and I really wasn't expected that it could work (they replied that they will forward my email to their own department)
thanks to all who email A.Eye and A.Eye for this nice decision.

I will pre-order this blu-ray box right now...

I wonder now if Sweden will release his own Blu-Ray of "A Swedish Love Story" (sorry "En kärlekshistoria") now.

At least, someone from dvdclassik who is at the trousses of Fantomas will be happy... .... well perhaps...