38, 136-139 / BD 100-104 Shoah and 4 Films After Shoah

[tomN245]

Artificial Eye owns Fanny and Alexander in the UK.

I thought it was Tartan as well (the AE DVD is OOP). Tartan are assholes holding onto the rights to all of those Bergman films, and then not upgrading any. I don't think they've released anything new in five years, just a couple of combo-packs and annoyingly reprinting the titles so they have different logos to the older versions.

It'll be interesting to revisit Shoah again. Last time I gave up at the 7 hour mark.

[swo17]

(January 2015) to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz...
SHOAH, Claude Lanzmann’s landmark documentary meditation on the Holocaust will be release in the UK on Blu-ray for the first time on 26 Jan
The “4 FILMS AFTER SHOAH” also released on 26 Jan in a standalone DVD set to complement the existing Shoah DVD set
Both sets feature Claude Lanzmann’s new film THE LAST OF THE UNJUST released theatrically on 9 Jan

That comment isn't clear about the other four films being on Blu-ray, but the accompanying cover art suggests that this set is taking up five slots on the Blu-ray line.

Note that Amazon says this is a 4-disc set, compared to Criterion's 3 (although granted, this one contains an additional 3-1/2 hour film). Also, the illustrious David Mackenzie reportedly worked on the encode.

[Red Screamer]

Will include a 300 page book (presumably to spite Criterion)

[MichaelB]

Also, the illustrious David Mackenzie reportedly worked on the encode.

Reportedly and indeed factually.

[tenia]

That comment isn't clear about the other four films being on Blu-ray, but the accompanying cover art suggests that this set is taking up five slots on the Blu-ray line.

That's my biggest concern with this announcement, because it would mean that to get The Last of the Unjust on BD, you need to buy it through the Shoah boxset. Otherwise, it's a DVD-only boxset which is something I don't want to buy at all.

Also, remembering how the 3 other movies are presented on the Criterion boxset, I'm wondering how they will be incorporated in the MoC boxset.

My best guest is my worst fear : the "stand alone" boxset of the 4 movies is DVD-only because the 3 movies are only available through SD material, so either I have to buy for the third time Shoah to get access to The Last of the Unjust on BD or I'm stuck with 3 movies on DVD to get it at least on DVD.

It's really a lose-lose situation for me, and since the stand alone boxset is supposed to provide an alternative to the people already having Shoah, it'd be a shame if it's actually preventing the same people to only get The Last of the Unjust on BD.

A solution would either a BD stand alone boxset of the 4 movies, or a BD release of The Last of the Unjust, all by itself.

[David M.]

I'm looking forward to the time you can see the encode, I'm very proud of the end result. This was so insanely difficult, there's a huge amount of content on each disc (by necessity) which would be hard in the best circumstances. On top of that, it's 16mm footage with sharp grain. Oh, and it's an excellent 4K scan from the OCN with all of that grain being preserved at very high frequency.

It's a perfect example of how seemingly impossible stuff can happen when you're faced with no other option. Anyway, no expense was spared to make sure this didn't turn into MPEG soup, and the end result is better than I could have hoped for.

[EddieLarkin]

Sounds great David. Can you confirm how the content is divided among the discs?

[David M.]

That's up to Eureka, sorry!

[Ashirg]

Cohen divided The Last of the Unjust on 2 discs.

[tenia]

As I wrote already in the past, I already own the DVD MoC boxset and also the Criterion BD boxset of Shoah.

I don't buy DVDs anymore, am very interested to get The Last of the Unjust on BD and a bump over the upscaled presentation of the 3 other Lanzmann movies would certainly be interesting.

This being said, do we now have more information concerning the presentations of the 4 extra movies in the set ? I certainly have no interest in the DVD-only set, but paying £50 just to get TLOTU in HD would be a ludicrous triple-dip...

[David M.]

SOBIBOR is also presented in real HD on the MoC version. The other two short films are upscaled using a high quality progressive scaling algorithm (although one of them is presented in 1080i for technical reasons - it was the optimal way to present it).

On the Criterion BD, all 3 short films are SD upconverts to 1080i (I assume an HD SOBIBOR was not ready at the time this version was prepared) and have been processed with an interlaced scaling algorithm, so have vertical resolution loss (jaggies).

Regarding the picture quality of SHOAH itself, I'll let you look at the screen captures once those appear online. I think you will be very happy with what you see.

Disclosure: I did the UK set.

[EddieLarkin]

Sobibor is by far the best of the 3 short films, so to have it in proper HD is a pretty big coup! There's nothing impressive about how it looks on the Criterion set. So I'm definitely in, maybe sooner than I originally planned.

[MichaelB]

To add to David's post, Sobibór (which is a 102-minute feature, so only "short" in comparison with the main one!) also has a lossless 5.1 soundtrack, which makes more of a difference to an interview-based film than you might expect. Lanzmann's ever-present trains are a natural fit with full surround sound and the famous shock cut to the gaggle of honking geese has far more impact.

The 1080i film is The Karski Report, which consists of a single talking-head interview. Obviously, the picture is inferior to that of the Karski interview in Shoah itself, but given the lack of any cutaways or other compelling visual material it's not really an issue - the soundtrack is the important thing here, and it's fine.

And The Last of the Unjust is the best-looking (and sounding) film in the set by some distance, but since it's a brand new film created well into the HD video era that's hardly surprising. It's also more visually varied than Lanzmann's other films - for once, he drops his usual rule about no archive footage, because the Nazi propaganda films about Theresienstadt are such an obviously important part of the overall story.

Disclosure: I QCed the UK set.

[EddieLarkin]

Is Sobibor on the Criterion set in lossy, or an entirely different format (stereo, mono etc.?)

[David M.]

I believe it's lossy stereo.

[tenia]

Thanks to both of you, Michael & David, for your answers. It answers most of my current wonders concerning whether I will triple dip or not. I'll still wait a bit, though, because one can understand how triple dipping on something such as Shoah can be a bit overkill.

[EddieLarkin]

Though triple dipping isn't so bad when your second dip can still fetch on the second hand market most of what your third dip is going to cost!

[MichaelB]

Is Sobibor on the Criterion set in lossy, or an entirely different format (stereo, mono etc.?)

All three of the supplementary films on the Criterion set are in lossy Dolby Digital 2.0, at a bitrate of 192 KBps.

By contrast, Eureka presents A Visitor from the Living and The Karski Report in lossless LPCM 1.0 with a bitrate of 1,152 KBps (equivalent to 2,304 KBps if it was a 2.0 track), while Sobibór gets a sonically spectacular DTS-MA 5.1 track whose variable bitrate generally exceeded 3,000 KBps whenever I dipped in to check. I'm assuming that mono is the correct format for the other two, since they consist mostly (A Visitor) or entirely (Karski) of a single talking-head interview that would certainly originally have been recorded in mono. Sobibór is the only one of the films where there's any real scope for a complex multichannel sound mix.

[EddieLarkin]

Though for anyone concerned, this doesn't appear to be a case of the original getting a big 5.1 remix. IMDB lists "DTS" (a 5.1 format) as its original soundtrack, which makes sense for a theatrical release in 2001. Nice to find that whoever has carried out the new HD transfer has retained the original digital track as well.

[TMDaines]

I certainly have no interest in the DVD-only set, but paying £50 just to get TLOTU in HD would be a ludicrous triple-dip...

Unless money is no problem for you, why would you pay £50 and not just wait for a better price?

[tenia]

I certainly have no interest in the DVD-only set, but paying £50 just to get TLOTU in HD would be a ludicrous triple-dip...

Unless money is no problem for you, why would you pay £50 and not just wait for a better price?

This isn't only a price issue but a content issue. Even if the price drops (it certainly will), I'm not interested in buying Shoah anymore, but am only eager to get The Last of the Unjust. Then, the upgrade of the 3 other extra movies is a nice thing to have.

Anyway. I don't want to be the party-pooper I've been in the past about things like this and I'm quite sure I'll bite the bullet anyway at some point. I only wish MoC would have given the 4 extra movies a stand alone BD set. Including them within the Shoah set and then only having a DVD option for those who already own Shoah has never seemed a fitting solution to me. The point is : if you only want the extra movies on BD, you're stuck with buying Shoah.

[EddieLarkin]

UK labels never seem to take into account customers who import Region A locked stuff, which is probably sensible. The 4 Films After Shoah DVD is clearly only aimed at people who already have Shoah on DVD and don't care about upgrading it. For people who want the 4 Films After Shoah on BD, Eureka figure those same people will want to upgrade Shoah to HD as well, which is probably true in all cases outside of people like you and me. But sure enough, we've both said we either will or likely will buy the Eureka set despite already having Shoah in HD. So if a 4 Films After Shoah BD was available, Eureka would be getting less money from us, and be stuck with an SKU that would probably sell very poorly. In other words, if I was making decisions at Eureka, I'd have decided on the same method of releasing that they have for these titles.

[tenia]

Oh I totally get that MoC don't have to take care about people importing stuff. It's only logical that they look at domestic customers and I'm fine with this and you're certainly right about the analysis you're making of it.

But I thought at least The Last of the Unjust would get a proper single BD-release like it is the case in the US for instance (though in the US, one can thanks for Shoah and TLOTU having different labels releasing them).

[swo17]

Then, the upgrade of the 3 other extra movies is a nice thing to have.

But Shoah is reportedly getting an upgrade too, in the form of an improved encode. (In fact, you were one of the people complaining about the Criterion release in this regard.) Let's just be grateful that MoC strove to make this package at least as good as the Criterion in every significant way, so that you needn't hesitate to unload it (for close to what the new version will cost you).

[MichaelB]

I'm greatly looking forward to the comparative reviews of Shoah, because I did an A-B comparison myself and was really startled to see that it's not even close - throughout, there's a very very clear winner, and it's not the one with the wacky C.

Although all the main Shoah discs are crammed pretty much to bursting regardless of label, meaning that filesizes and bitrates are unavoidably similar, it seems that David has used a codec that's much more comfortable with lower-than-average bitrates, with the result that the grain generally looks far more filmlike and natural.

Clearly, it could be improved upon, but only by adding at least one more disc and splitting up the film in ways not intended by Lanzmann - and since the improvement really would be absolutely minuscule as far as most people are concerned, I think Eureka made the right call. To my mind, being able to watch each part of Shoah in one go outweighs the tiny number of compression issues - and I was specifically looking for them, which won't be the case with most viewers!