Quick question, does Amazon UK pre-charge credit cards for pre-orders, or charge at shipping?

At shipping...

The MoC La notte page has now gone live.

Booklet bumped to 56-pages. Fantastic Antonioni Q&A in there.

Quick questions the link says 1.66 - didn't you settle on 1.75?

Also I think the "uncut first time on video" is wrong, unless you mean the UK given the Oz disc has the same running time (also taking account of PAL speedup.)

Finally when does this hit Amazon. Tapping my fingers here.

We settled on 1.66:1 pillarboxed anamorphic, as per my previous post with screengrabs.

Is La Notte actually confirmed to be coming from Criterion at some point or just speculation?

Pretty much. A producer I met was under the impression they had already released it, and that was a year ago.

I've just watched the checkdisc - Nick et al have really excelled themselves.

1.66:1 looks absolutely correct as far as I can see - the helicopter shot near the beginning being the clincher for me. And aside from some very faint tramlining right at the end, the source print was virtually flawless.

But the thing that really impressed me was the way the subtitles had been carefully positioned to avoid obscuring people's faces when they speak - Antonioni occasionally composes them so that they're near the bottom of the frame, so the subtitle moves to the middle or top as appropriate. Very simple, but very effective - and just shows what difference attention to detail can make.

DVD Times

Just to say I have it on the screen, and MoC's LA NOTTE is a really beautiful thing to behold (light years ahead of Fox Lorber's nasty version) - clean, properly contrasted, and correct AR, a great transfer of very nice materials indeed, lots of detail and decent grain to the picture ("photographed in rapturous black and white by the great Gianni di Venanzo", with matchless Antonioni composition and framing)... What also stands out is the quality of audio on the disc - really crisp, and crystal clear, capturing all the subtlety, depth and dimension of Antonioni's sound design (with no muffling, or excessive compression)... Booklet contains relevant essay, interview and a scrapbook of quotes... Nick and MoC should be pretty proud of this release - IMHO one of their finest!....

Does anyone know if this new release contains any scenes that aren't in the Fox Lorber version?

The Fox Lorber version (NTSC) runs 115 minutes - with 4% PAL speedup MoC runs 117 minutes, adjusted from a normal film running time of 122 minutes (see discussion above). So there's something like 7 minutes extra material in the MoC - apparent from the first frame where there are several new shots preceding the titles against the shot descending the face of the Pirelli building... 'Previously censored sequences restored for the first time' includes footage of Moreau in and out of the bath, giving glimpses of her naked breasts, I suppose surprising and controversial for the time... All in all there is a sharper, less blunted, dramatic edge to the MoC version...

Not much more to add other than that this looks positively glorious and the Antonioni Q&A is indispensable. Sterling work (again).

Just compared MoC's transfer of LA NOTTE with the VHS tape I made from an ITV broadcast way back in 1983. Surprisingly, the two versions are virtually identical in terms of content. Aside from shots that were truncated at the point of each advert break, the only shot missing from ITV's print is the final shot of the swimming pool scene, which can be found between 84m 9s and 84m 15s on the MoC disc. So it seems that ITV had a version substantially more complete than either the Fox Lorber DVD or the various transfers circulating in Italy (which, I am informed, shorten all the sex scenes).

The nudity was in the Lorber

The same decade, ITV inadvertently staged the British premiere of the 144-minute cut of Kubrick's The Shining, presumably because they went straight to their US source without realising that there were different versions in circulation.

These would have been eclectic Leslie Halliwell purchases, and the films would have come in on 35mm to what was called 'Film Makeup' department in film cans from the distributor, they would be put on reels, viewed for technical quality and then broken up into parts with new leaders and ad breaks created... Sometimes there would be cuts to fit the scheduled slot, and these were sometimes legendarily arbitary (even excising key scenes)... All the work would be performed by a Film Makeup Editor, who was basically performing a technical not an editorial operation, bar spotting obvious sexual or violent transgressions, so I'm not surprised these slipped through, especially as they would have been transmitted after the 2100 watershed... Those were the days!... And of course they would have been rolled live on air from telecine, so no videotape copies would be made for monitoring... There were even instances where pan and scan was done live also by the Telecine operator... All changed with the advent of computerised transmission control systems when everything was then transmitted from tape...

I watched this last night and I was delighted with the package. I did spot an error with one of the subtitles, where a word had been omitted, but the quality of the image was first class.

Like others have said, it's a shame that there aren't more extras with the disk, but I'll enjoy reading the booklet as soon as I get the chance.

Beaver


Yes. But I'll wait till I see it in motion.

First thing to note: the MoC is either stretched horizontally or the Fox Lorber was narrowed. Don't know why Gary overlooked that. I assume the MoC is correct... Monica Vitti certainly looks a bit too gaunt in the Fox Lorber.

That aside, the MoC is less sharp. Peerpee, did you guys make a non-anamorphic source anamorphic? That may explain that lackof sharpness, something that is probably also the reason for Second Run's too-soft Cremator.

Then there's the brightness: there's much more detail in the Fox Lorber due to the more defined black levels.

That said, I await the DVD (in the post) and am sure the image will look better in motion. Even if it's not the best this film will look on DVD, I applaud MoC for releasing it with a nice thick booklet.

Denti, the Fox Lorber is horrible on a large screen, lots of artifacts, crap detail, feels really artificial... The MoC really is lovely on my setup... While MoC clearly had some problems with materials for ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS, leading to a soft image and lack of fine detail, I see none of that on LA NOTTE... To the contrary - the Beaver's screen grabs do not really do justice to the quantum difference between the MoC & Fox Lorber, although Gary clearly states so in his review...

I've just cut and pasted a Fox Lorber and MoC grab of the same image into Photoshop. After cropping to eliminate black borders, the aspect ratio of each is a perfect 1.66:1. Feel free to try it for yourself.

So what was there for Gary to overlook?

The issue (if you take this as such) that other one here is stretched? (Though Gary usually points out these horizontal/vertical stretching issues.) It's clearly evident in every picture where you see a human head a bit closer. And IMO it's the FL that is wrong, vertically stretched. Thus we have more picture information on the top or/and bottom of the MoC image, spite the aspect ratio of the image is the same.

Yes, you're right - I've just resized the images so they're identical, and saved them as two layers so I can flip between them. It's pretty clear that the MoC has slightly more information at the top and bottom and the Fox Lorber is slightly squished to compensate - but since no-one's likely to buy the Fox Lorber at this juncture, it's a tad academic.

I'm also in the "the MoC picture looks better than the Beaver screencaps suggest" camp, by the way.

I take ellipsis and Michael's word that this will look very nice once I get it in hand. The Beaver caps don't look all that impressive, but caps can be misleading.

The squished Lorber image is, I think, a crucial point of difference. Wonder how/why that happened. Clearly the MoC has this right. But ultimately Michael's right: the Lorber is not really an option anymore, anyway. Once the Criterion comes out that will change, of course.

MoC La Notte looks better in motion. Little soft but not bad at all, very good actually.