Yet bizarrely when it came time to bring Perfect Sense out on home video it was only released on DVD.

Did anyone's The Conformist pre-order get dispatched early or even today? Mine hasn't even left Moviemail yet.

Received mine today from Moviemail. In France.

I admittedly only ordered early on Saturday but looks like I'll cancel now. I presumed they'd be quick to dispatch but maybe they work with low inventory levels ala The Book Despository, or don't have people there on Saturday.

Mine shipped from Amazon last Friday.

Same here.

Looks like I picked the wrong retailer. Still wasn't shipped so I just cancelled.

There's a mistake on the front of The Conformist. Berndardo Bertolucci.

On all four panels.

lol.

That's his name, you credtin

I wonder if it will be worth as much as Rubber Soul with "Norweigian Wood" on it.
Probably not.

I'd best not take the shrinkwrapping off mine, then.

If I remember rightly, the BFI got Pete Walker and Peter Watkins mixed up on one of the Flipside titles - which is a mistake so easy to make (especially if a template is recycled, as I suspect was the case given that Walker is 006 and Watkins is 007) that it's all too painfully clear how it happened.

Not content with the DVDBeaver preview, someone over at AVSForum has zipped together a few Conformist screencaps to compare with these.

Referring to conformist_new.rar, are the a's from Raro and the b's from Arrow ? [Guess I need to find a copy of Screencap Comparisons For Dummies. Can these websites be any more cryptic?]

Edit: Just to elaborate, the b's look similar to beaver's captures, but there seems to be a lot more grain in the a's. And the b's look way DNR'ed compared to the grainy a's.

The Arrow (which I've seen) should be noticeably grainier than the heavily DNRed Raro (which I haven't, but there seems to be unanimity about the look).

Incidentally, the notion that the Arrow is an upscale of the Paramount DVD is almost too ludicrous to be worth responding to, but I'd better make it absolutely clear that this is not the case! (I didn't work on the release myself, but I'm in close contact with two people who did). Quite aside from anything else, the credits are in different languages - English on the Paramount, Italian on the Arrow.

a - screenshots from the Cineteca Bologna website
b - the Arrow

I think the only Raro screencaps are here.

OK, I've just had a chat with someone who worked directly on the technical side of the Arrow release, and he has confirmed that the Arrow release was not sourced from Paramount's HD master at all, let alone upscaled from the DVD - as will become obvious almost immediately if you compare the two, even aside from the glaring credits discrepancy. I ran both side by side a few weeks ago, and it never occurred to me for a millisecond that the two could have come from a common source - so I was genuinely surprised when Blu-ray.com made that allegation.

Also for the record, Arrow's master was supplied from Bologna, and the reasonable working assumption is that it's the same one used to fuel the Raro DVD - although obviously without the excessive DNR scrubbing. Since these amateur sleuths are mainly working from framegrabs and haven't seen either disc in motion, I'd take most of their "conclusions" about picture definition with a truckload of salt.

On a more general note, I strongly suspect that there's a serious case of overly inflated expectations here. The visual reputation of The Conformist is so towering that people may well be expecting a perfect image, but I have to say that the grain and definition on the Arrow BD looks pretty much as I remember it from numerous 35mm outings (I'm very familiar with how this film looks on the big screen, having been involved with promoting a mid-1990s revival as well as seeing it several times over the years). And if Storaro himself signed off on the master, one presumes he's broadly happy with how it turned out, although I'm aware that that name opens up a whole 'nother can of worms (although not aspect-ratio-related ones for once!)

I don't like this new screencapture science that seems to have developed around DVD/Blu-Ray releases. While DVDBeaver's caps are a guide, the people over at AVSForum seem to have totally discounted the glowing review at the top of the page. It's baffling that some posters were questioning the superiority of the Arrow Blu over the Paramount DVD without even seeing it in motion.

I hate to keep referencing my years in audio in these recurring discussions, but there are definite similarities in the group discussing this BD at AVS Forums and a certain subset of audiophiles, namely those belonging to the "my system is so revealing it makes every recording sound like the s**t we all know it is." Nothing brought that group greater pleasure that ripping apart any recording and exposing its perceived flaws. It was so pervasive that one could wonder if they actually enjoyed listening to music in any context.

The discussion group at AVS applies these same traits to films. It's not that there aren't bad or inferior transfers out there. It's that the game seems to be to rip each and every effort to bring a film to DVD/BD, seeming without ever actually watching the film itself. One must wonder if these people enjoy cinema or have just developed enough technical expertise to delight in dismembering any effort at home reproduction and that such efforts are proof in the public square of their superior equipment selection ability.

The more arguments I see like this, the more I'm convinced that Blu-ray screen capturing does more harm than otherwise - not so much in terms of the framegrabs themselves but in the often wildly erroneous interpretations that people place on them.

Obviously, it's useful to know that the Raro BD has been DNRed to hell, as that clearly is important information - but one of the problems with presenting framegrabs of higher-resolution material is that because the grain structure is much more visible than it ever was on DVD (where the much lower resolution effectively smooths it out), a single framegrab of a grainy image may well appear to have less visible detail than is in fact the case. The detail becomes visible once you watch all the frames in motion at the rate in which they were intended to be seen.

And, as you say, most of the time people simply don't read the accompanying text, which often provides essential verbal clarification from someone who has seen the transfer in motion. Which the critics of the framegrabs usually haven't.


I completely agree. In fact, you've just reminded me of an anecdote in Charles Shaar Murray's biography of John Lee Hooker in which he (Murray) and an allegedly music-loving neighbour would play each other samples of their record collection - until it dawned on Murray that the neighbour really wasn't interested in music at all, only technique. The crunch point, unsurprisingly given the subject of the book, was when Murray exposed him to some John Lee Hooker, and the neighbour asked "Why are you playing me this? This man can barely play the guitar."

I have this thing about grain being removed, and the subsequent washing away of the detail that is often the result (e.g., Welt am Dreht a la Criterion vs Welt am Dreht a la Carlotta; or just about any Universal catalog title), but other than that... There's a lot to be said for those screenshots from the Cineteca Bologna website, would probably have preferred to see a disc that looked something more along those lines, but the Arrow still seems to be a contender. In the end I usually just end up watching the movie, and hope I don't get pulled out of the film by a crappy transfer, blu-ray or otherwise; when things get "blurry" when you know they shouldn't be, that's sometimes kind of hard to do.

I watched it twice (second time with the commentary), and it was absolutely fine.

As I almost certainly said above, my only two significant issues were the tiny patches of solarisation on the very deep blue window-panes of the ballet school and the venue hosting the big dance scene, and the tiny "jumps" that occasionally happen before cuts, revealing that the transfer was sourced from the cut camera negative instead of an interpos or interneg. Other than that, I was delighted, and it's easy enough to tune those out given the transfer's other manifest advantages.

Strangely, I think the Cineteca screenshots look better.

I think the problem these days is that people are spoiled in the quality department, you have older films that look really good in HD, and some look OK. Comparisons are made where they should not, wich leads to discussions like this one about The Conformist.
I have made several dvd's the last years from new short films that are shot in HD, but when converted to SD resolution you loose a lot of detail, the people who made the shorts, after editing and such in HD, can't accept the quality loss, wich leads to similar discussions I see here.

I agree that DNR is a big NO, but some people on some review sites really need to get a grip on their reviews, you can not create whats not there.

I am very happy that these days we get so many nice releases, but some of these negative reviews create ripple effects that are not good at all for future releases.

Could I ask which Blu-ray.com allegation you are referring to? I ask because from what you have written above it appears that there is some sort of an official statement in the Blu-ray.com review which links an old Paramount master to Arrow's release. The Blu-ray.com review certainly has not linked the two. The review also does not speculate that this is an upscale. Or are you addressing some random forum post?

As far as expectations are concerned, clearly anyone who has seen this release and understands what type of results modern restorations can produce should be underwhelmed. If you are unsure, take a look at Sony's Blu-ray release of Easy Rider, a film which was made a year before The Conformist and under vastly different conditions. Sony restored the film and struck a new high-definition transfer in 4K resolution from the original negative. You could see how well resolved grain looks there.

Let's have a different example with another 1970 film: the BFI's Blu-ray release of Jerzy Skolimowski's Deep End, which was scanned in 2K (not 4K) and a new high-definition transfer was struck. Even though some degraining has been performed and light noise is present, there is still plenty of grain. Compare these two releases with the high-definition transfer used for The Conformist Blu-ray release. There are fundamental differences - and no, the source has little do with them, because if a new scan was performed, and then a new high-definition transfer was struck from the new master, The Conformist would have looked very, very different on Blu-ray.

As I wrote elsewhere, I understand perfectly well why Arrow did what they did - it was the lesser evil they chose, because had they gone with the DNR-ed Italian high-definition transfer quite a few forums would have exploded again. I don't blame them, they did the right thing. And we can all agree on this.

But there are facts here that one has to recognize: there is very little, if any, grain on this release. What you see the majority of the time is pulsating noise and artifacts that create the illusion that there is grain, which is why definition is poor. This is in addition to the filtering that has been applied. Yes, the Arrow disc looks better than the R1 Paramount DVD, but primarily because the R1 DVD is extremely weak, practically unwatchable these days. A proper high-definition transfer struck from the recent restoration - and free of the denoising the Raro high-definition transfer suffers from - would produce a vastly different result.

Finally, as far as Mr. Storaro signing off the master is concerned, well, the one question that needs to be answered is this: When did he do it? In 2011, in 2012? The master that has been used to produce the high-definition transfer for this release is dated.