Best opening of any film this millennium as far as I'm concerned, and a near-perfect short in its own right. It was my first Tarr, and I was utterly enthralled.

And I'm so glad I saw it in a cinema, as I've had to put up with DVD for the others - big-screen airings are few and far between.

Agreed. I was stunned.

So...the new DVDs of the other Tarr films are the same as the old ones?

I would be stunned if they weren't - the repackaging is (most likely) just a marketing push to tie in with The Man from London.

Sux for you!

Doubly agreed. I actually didn't watch the rest of the film for a few more days after I watched that first scene -- I loved it so much that I was afraid the rest of the film wouldn't be able to live up to it, so I wanted to savor it on its own. Of course I felt very silly after I saw the rest of the film, which not only lives up to the opening scene but actually surpasses it a few times.

I should add that (as I recall) the opening was the best part of the film. A film I had an extremely negative reaction to within a very short while! ( I can't quite recall, but I believe I endured the bulk of the film. I do remember reasoning that no ending, however profound, could make up for what (didn't) come before it.)

To each their own. The extremes of opinion just go to show the power of cinema on individuals.

Tarkovsky, found Ozu's An Autumn Afternoon 'dreadfully boring'. I found it a great last work from a master filmmaker.

Edit: On a postive note, I do think Bela Tarr chooses some wonderful music to accompany his cinematic offerings. Well, the Vig Mihaly tracks I've heard on a compilation cd, at least.

I think you discovered why it does no good on this board to voice dissent on Tarr, as you'll just get drowned out in hyperbolic defenses. I'm with you, but it's really not worth the effort

For what it's worth, I had a similarly extreme reaction to Celine and Julie Go Boating - I just found their witterings profoundly irritating and exited the cinema well before the halfway mark. But I rediscovered it a few years later, and now think it's a masterpiece.

Which Werckmeister Harmonies certainly is too, but unless it grabbed you from the start I can readily see how you could have found it baffling and boring. Russian Ark (another Artificial Eye title!) gets similarly polarised reactions, though in that case one's prior knowledge of Russian history is a fairly crucial element in the mix.

Good to hear that, because I only heard unaninimous praise for it and then found it pretty disappointing when I finally saw it. I guess I'm a bit averse to what appears as a technical tour de force for its own sake (I have the same problem with Hitchcock's "Rope"). But I admit of not knowing too much about Russian history and will surely give it a try again at a later date, because at least the visuals were pretty amazing for the most part.

I loved "Celine and Julie" from the beginning, though. Like always in Rivette, the (t)wittering had a special charme because it appeared to be so effortless, and at the time I had never seen anything quite as 'far out' as that film, thematically (this was before I got around to "Noroit"...). "Out 1" is a far, far harder nut to crack. But if you make it through the first four hours or so, which seem completely disjointed, the whole thing slowly begins to make sense.

As already said by foggy eyes, yes, they most probably are. P.S. Why is it so difficult to produce an anamorphic version of a film with an OAR 1.66:1?

Well, I'd disagree that it's "a technical tour de force for its own sake", because Sokurov's ambition had rather greater justification than Hitchcock's - he wanted to capture the sweep of Russian history in a single shot (or "a single breath", as he put it). So while you could have shot Rope in the usual way, and it would doubtless have worked perfectly well, the one-take nature of Russian Ark was the wellspring from which the entire film flowed, along with its unique and unmatchable location.



I was incredibly lucky when I saw it - it was early 2003, and I'd spent a ten-day leg of my honeymoon in St Petersburg in November 2002, during which I read two hefty books on Russian history from the city's perspective.

Which didn't exactly make me an expert, but it did turn out to equip me very well for the film, not least because I quickly recognised that Sokurov was deliberately mocking the less-informed viewer by having the unseen commentator mention historical figures fractionally too late - "Was that Pushkin?", after Pushkin has already disappeared. Those who know their Russian history and culture would of course have recognised Pushkin from the off.

So the bottom line is that the less you know about Russian history, the less you're going to get out of it - Sokurov clearly made the film primarily for highly-educated Russians like himself.
Apparently one of the DVDs has a commentary, though I don't know how helpful it is (I've heard it's largely technical), and the Artificial Eye disc is commentary-free.

I'm guessing that it's often because an existing letterboxed master already exists, and therefore it may be hard to justify the cost of doing it all over again, given that the differences between anamorphic and non-anamorphic 1.66:1 in terms of visible detail are relatively slight.

And with Hungarian films anamorphic transfers seem to be in the minority anyway - I've bought dics of very recent films that have turned out to be letterboxed.

Thanks MichaelB for clarifying that!

A very thoughtful and well-written commentary (and not a "hyperbolic defense") on The man from London here.

The Werckmeister Harmonies and Damnation discs are identicial to their previous editions. And, while the Man From London transfer is very nice, it is also a 1.66:1 image locked into 16:9, with black bars on the left and right side. Makes no difference on a 16:9 display, but will give the image a thick black border on a 4:3 display, and a laptop.

well, at least it's 16x9!
I now must find a way to import The Man From London

It'd be about $15 American to get it shipped from Amazon.co.uk

Cancelling my pre-order with the Tarr collection. Recreating my order with Man From London and some Nuri Bilge Ceylan films.

DVD Times on The Man from London

Quick update on the Waltz With Bashir Blu-ray - it's a two-disc edition, the first a Blu-ray disc containing the film and the trailer (both in HD), the second a DVD containing the extras.

So provided you're able to handle PAL DVDs, you should have no problem playing everything regardless of where you're based.

As for the transfer of the main feature, I've only watched the first five minutes or so, but it looks absolutely state of the art - and clearly far superior to anything that SD video could resolve.

I've watched the whole main feature on the first blu-ray dvd and I agree with the aforementioned, it looks and sounds (!) fabulous. By the way and most important, a fascinating and multi layered 'film'.

I got the DVD edition of Waltz With Bashir. The deleted scenes and documentary are not included, which is a shame, especially because on the interview, he talks about the deleted scenes being on the dvd....

Curzon Artificial Eye are to expand their cinema operations into... HMV stores!

I'm guessing a decision was made at the marketing stage to make the DVD a single-disc edition and encourage more take-up of the Blu-ray - because there's no logical reason why the DVD edition couldn't have been a double-discer, including the second disc (a DVD) that's part of the Blu-ray package.

Mind you, you could always get hold of that extras DVD by buying the Blu-ray edition, but that seems a fairly expensive way of going about it!

And now, the Sony US disc has been announced, with all the extras on the AE plus a commentary