World of Wong Kar Wai

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tenia
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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#1026 Post by tenia » Mon Oct 04, 2021 12:49 pm

The Fanciful Norwegian wrote:
Mon Oct 04, 2021 12:06 pm
I can't find any mention of One Cool working on the King Hu restorations, most of which were done before Ritrovata started the Hong Kong branch. Legend of the Mountain was the only one done afterwards and the restoration notes say it was done in Bologna.
In case I wasn't clear : I meant the movie was claimed solely to have been restored and graded by the TFI, but definitely looked like a Ritrovata job.
mhofmann wrote:
Mon Oct 04, 2021 11:50 am
This is the case for In the Mood for Love, but the restoration notes for Days of Being Wild (and As Tears Go By) don't mention Wong. Most of the transfers in the set were "supervised and approved by Wong Kar Wai," but that language is missing for those two; instead it just says "This 4K digital restoration was undertaken from the 35mm original camera negative by the Criterion Collection in collaboration with L’Immagine Ritrovata and One Cool." Now it is possible they were graded in line with what they assumed Wong wanted based on the other transfers, or Wong provided some general notes but wasn't involved to the same degree as the others. But as tenia says we'll soon have a good idea whether this is actually a signature of One Cool.
There's also the fact that Ritrovata's color signature can be found in many restorations that had external guidance (whether it was the director, the DoP and whoever was deemed related enough to offer so), ie the signature is intense enough and structural enough to overpass whatever human approval or supervision there is.
yoloswegmaster wrote:
Mon Oct 04, 2021 12:28 pm
I honestly don't believe that the films scanned by the Hong Kong branch apply the usual colour grade that their parent company is infamously known for, though I'm only basing this off screengrabs from the Throw Down release as it's the only film that I know for sure was restored by them.
I believe the Asian branch did A Better Tomorrow, and it definitely looks like a Ritrovata job.
Ritrovata has also been operating a French branch fore some years and honestly, I don't even bother differenciating if the work was done in Italy or France because it's interchangeable.
yoloswegmaster wrote:
Mon Oct 04, 2021 12:28 pm
all of the recent Fortune Star releases from Eureka/88 Films don't seem to have the typical Ritrovata grade to them.
AFAIK, that's because they're not done by Ritrovata (or at least not the grading).
yoloswegmaster wrote:
Mon Oct 04, 2021 12:28 pm
the usual colour grade that their parent company is infamously known for
I'll check next week what the current consensus is there but they're not having the workload they have for no reason : AFAIK in the industry, people challenging their color signature like I do are the extremely negligible minority. Even worse than this : in some cases, we're perceived as people trying willingly to wrong Ritrovata and Eclair, not as people merely worried for the Magenta Push to come back though through new shapes.
Also, if, at some point, it turns out we're able to factually demonstrate once and for all that those color signatures are so intense that they're covering the original colors in extremely improper ways, how do you think right-holders, cinephiles, archives, etc etc, will react since pretty much none of them did much to change that for (for the moment) at least a decade ? That they let so many movies being AGAIN structurally wrongly restored and preserved, that the magenta push lesson hasn't been learned ?

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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#1027 Post by tenia » Mon Oct 04, 2021 2:09 pm

yoloswegmaster wrote:
Mon Oct 04, 2021 12:28 pm
Woah, I didn't know that Infernal Affairs was getting a restoration. That's fantastic news! Do you know where you heard this news since I can't seem to find anything about it.
The whole trilogy was announced as being restored in 4K by its new French distributor, La Rabbia, in an interview in november 2020. They're being shown at Lyon Lumière Film Festival next week. La Rabbia are planning to then release them theatrically (ie not just in festivals) in march 2022 and then follow it up by a video release (BD at least, UHD I don't know). All 3 are stated to have been "restored in 4K by L'immagine Ritrovata, grading by One Cool Production, from the 35mm OCN scanned and restored in 4K".

Interestingly, they'll also be showing Audition from a 4K restoration (the Arrow one was only 2K), and Dark Water too

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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#1028 Post by jegharfangetmigenmyg » Mon Oct 04, 2021 4:53 pm

Just for the heck of it, I took some screenshot of the worst examples from the epilogue. First is the original Criterion blu-ray which actually struck me as a very fine and neutral looking release when I popped it in after the new release. I still believe that these screenshots are more Ritrovata-yellow than they are WKW/Matrix-green. Also, check out the first example where every detail in the sky has just disappeared. But the worst is of course the loss of dynamic and the almost monochromatic look of some of these stills. And these are only stills. The feeling I got from watching this scene -- which is supposed to be cathartic -- was extremely flat.

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jsteffe
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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#1029 Post by jsteffe » Mon Oct 04, 2021 4:56 pm

tenia wrote:
Mon Oct 04, 2021 12:49 pm
I'll check next week what the current consensus is there but they're not having the workload they have for no reason : AFAIK in the industry, people challenging their color signature like I do are the extremely negligible minority. Even worse than this : in some cases, we're perceived as people trying willingly to wrong Ritrovata and Eclair, not as people merely worried for the Magenta Push to come back though through new shapes.
Also, if, at some point, it turns out we're able to factually demonstrate once and for all that those color signatures are so intense that they're covering the original colors in extremely improper ways, how do you think right-holders, cinephiles, archives, etc etc, will react since pretty much none of them did much to change that for (for the moment) at least a decade ? That they let so many movies being AGAIN structurally wrongly restored and preserved, that the magenta push lesson hasn't been learned ?
As I have suggested earlier, based on the conversations I have had many people in the home video industry and archival community are well aware of these questions around color grading. However, home video companies have to make practical business decisions about what titles to release. They make judgement calls all the time about releasing titles that are available in less-than-ideal restorations or video masters, and this is no different. For instance, they might have to weigh great improvements in detail and image stability against possibly problematic color. They can either release the restoration or nothing at all for that particular title. Only in limited cases are distributors able to do something different on their own end. Similarly, archivists work with colleagues at these facilities and collaborate in projects all the time, so they are very unlikely to criticize their work publicly because it would damage long-term relationships.

Personally, I doubt that there will ever be any "big revelation." I do not expect anything to change in the foreseeable future until the labs themselves decide on their own to revisit their practices. The only thing we can do is to be vigilant and make our own decisions about what to watch and what to avoid. That is why I am grateful for your reviews and other review websites. The world will go on if I never watch the new Wong Kar Wai box set (which I won't). I did order it for my library, however, because I feel that it should be available for people who want to see it alongside the older versions.

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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#1030 Post by _shadow_ » Tue Oct 05, 2021 1:20 am

I don't know whether to laugh or cry that after moving through 40 years of home video technology improvements, from cropped and blurry analog VHS to pristine 4K UHD, we have to accept the new normal of Rittrovata et al. effectively pissing on world cinema.

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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#1031 Post by vsski » Tue Oct 05, 2021 1:38 am

Has there been any clear statement by Rittrovata or Eclair as to their main reason(s) for doing this? It may have been stated on this forum, so if I missed it, please direct me to the right thread.

I can’t understand why two organizations that are heavily involved in film preservation and restoration and that do research on their work, would arbitrarily decide to make every movie look the same when even a novice filmgoer knows that not all movies look alike - they never have and they never will, given that the look of a movie and thereby the color scheme is one of the key aspects directors and cinematographers decide upon.

I can understand that existing elements don’t always allow a movie to be shown as intended or originally made, I can also understand (although don’t like) if personnel involved with making a film decide to alter its look after the fact (whether for creative, technology or other reasons), I can also understand that sometimes documentation doesn’t exist to make a definitive call on how a movie looked - and memory isn’t always a good measurement, if some can really remember what they saw decades ago - but none of this seems to apply in most cases here.

So what drives the decisions for these color schemes?

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Walter Kurtz
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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#1032 Post by Walter Kurtz » Tue Oct 05, 2021 2:31 am


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tenia
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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#1033 Post by tenia » Tue Oct 05, 2021 5:34 am

About the "all movies looking the same even when novices would know they shouldn't", I'm now at the point that me watching many movies restored by Eclair has my novice GF telling me a few weeks earlier "oh you're watching another Blue movie ? It's a French one, right ?"
Yes it was...
vsski wrote: So what drives the decisions for these color schemes?
We have yet to have an understanding of what fuels Eclair's Blue Madness, but for Ritrovata, it seems they're pretty much attempting at reproducing what a viewer would have gotten with a vintage print in theaters, while the other labs could be described at color correcting the OCN. The issue with Ritrovata lies with how they're trying to reproduce that, both in how it doesn't really match what a vintage print would yield (I've seen one of La classe operaia va in paradiso, it looks yellow but it doesn't look Ritrovata'd) and how they're seemingly applying the same method from movie to movie hence uniformising them together.

The issue also is that if they're the ones actually doing the right thing (ie their method is the most faithful to the original colors), then every other lab isn't, and that's including Eclair. And even if we theorise that original photochemical gradings weren't perfectly clean and had lots of limitations, then it can't explain why Ritrovata and Eclair's works are so distinct from each other, and it certainly goes the opposite way of them managing to reproduce from movie to movie precisely the same uniformity of colors (since we just said it was variable and complicated, but suddenly they now all have the same colors ?).

But really, it's just extremely likely their gradings truly is the addition of the original colors plus their method color signature, which explains why some video labels have started to re-grade their stuff, not as a whole as in "I don't like it" but solely in order to substract this signature as much as possible, because if these signatures were subtle enough, their gradings just wouldn't stand aside so intensely.

In any case, all labs can't be all right with such differences, meaning hundreds of gradings have been structurally wrongly generated, whether they come from one "side" or the other.

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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#1034 Post by jegharfangetmigenmyg » Tue Oct 05, 2021 7:16 am

tenia wrote:
Tue Oct 05, 2021 5:34 am
some video labels have started to re-grade their stuff, not as a whole as in "I don't like it" but solely in order to substract this signature as much as possible, because if these signatures were subtle enough, their gradings just wouldn't stand aside so intensely.
Is this what Arrow did with their impressive release of Tree of Wooden Clogs? http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film6/blu-ray_ ... lu-ray.htm

If it is, and if labels can easily (easily, I guess, since Arrow probably didn't allocate a big budget for regrading such a title?) un-Ritrovata the masters, then why doesn't this happen more often?

If the answer to why they are yellowing the masters is truly to try to create a vintage theatrical look, then that doesn't make sense to me as long as they're not adding cuts between reel changes, etc. Also, the transfers of course have no analogue noise. They look very digital, so it will never look like a theatrical reproduction anyways.

I can understand the attraction of seeing an old 35mm print in all its ragged glory, but for me it certainly depends on the movie. There's nothing worse than seeing a full on magenta'ed Technicolor film, so, obviously, why don't go for the most neutral look possible if there is no substantial evidence that it should be graded in a certain way?

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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#1035 Post by yoloswegmaster » Tue Oct 05, 2021 7:27 am

Regrading a film is a very time-consuming process, and I would assume that it would cost a lot of money. I believe that the someone from the French label that regraded the Eclair restoration of 'Fantastic Planet' said that it wasn't worth doing it since it was a very time-consuming process.
tenia wrote:
Mon Oct 04, 2021 2:09 pm
yoloswegmaster wrote:
Mon Oct 04, 2021 12:28 pm
Woah, I didn't know that Infernal Affairs was getting a restoration. That's fantastic news! Do you know where you heard this news since I can't seem to find anything about it.
The whole trilogy was announced as being restored in 4K by its new French distributor, La Rabbia, in an interview in november 2020. They're being shown at Lyon Lumière Film Festival next week. La Rabbia are planning to then release them theatrically (ie not just in festivals) in march 2022 and then follow it up by a video release (BD at least, UHD I don't know). All 3 are stated to have been "restored in 4K by L'immagine Ritrovata, grading by One Cool Production, from the 35mm OCN scanned and restored in 4K".

Interestingly, they'll also be showing Audition from a 4K restoration (the Arrow one was only 2K), and Dark Water too
Are you going to the Lumiere festival? If so, are you going to watch any of the Infernal Affairs films, or even the restorations of the J-horror titles?

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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#1036 Post by tenia » Tue Oct 05, 2021 7:53 am

It also means undoing what has done one of the most prominent restoration house. It's not just time consuming but explicitly telling "it was wrong somehow".

Also, grading movies in a very neutral way... is kind of a structural uniformisation too, as a specific look (a lack of signature, in some sort) is a signature in itself.

I will be at the Festival Lumière but won't see any of those movies. I wanted to see at least the 1st Infernal Affairs, but the showings were just not fitting with my agenda so I'll have to skip them unfortunately.

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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#1037 Post by jsteffe » Tue Oct 05, 2021 10:28 am

I don't think re-grading masters is a realistic solution most of the time. Distributors are often contractually prohibited from altering the masters supplied from them, and in any case they may not want to risk damaging their relationship to the labs or the licensors. Also, by the time a master is graded there are limits to what you can do with it. Color information that was lost in the process cannot be recovered. For instance, if master is suffering from black crush, that means one or more of the color channels is cut off at the bottom and information was lost. (You can see a lot of this in Death in Venice.) Finally, unless you have a reference print or someone associated with the production to guide the grading,it's just guesswork.

In the case of the Wong Kar Wai box set, the filmmaker signed off on the restorations. Personally I don't think the color looks appealing and I won't bother watching them, but there is nothing to be done. This is the way these films look now.

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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#1038 Post by jegharfangetmigenmyg » Tue Oct 05, 2021 12:00 pm

Makes sense. However, Arrow's Tree of Wooden Clogs that I mentioned earlier just looks miraculous compared to the Criterion. I don't really understand how they recovered the details in the darker scenes. Shouldn't there, at the very least, be some black crush? Again, regarding Ritrovata and WKW, it's just so sad that they do this to all those classic films, even when now new technologies serve them so well. On a personal level, I just find it very frustrating that I have a perfectly calibrated display which should give me reference looking material, and then, instead, I get to see too dark deep yellow and green filtered versions of WKW's films...

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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#1039 Post by Monkey Ballz » Tue Oct 05, 2021 12:11 pm

Here's what I don't understand: The color spectrum is quantifiable, yes? It is used, for example, to determine the elemental composition of stars and planets millions of light years away, and there are color standards for all sorts of other industries, from the medical field to brand identity... there are devices which actually measure colors, right? What's the problem here? Is this yet another egregious example of the "Well that's just like your opinion, man" illness that is increasingly corrupting centuries of growth since the Renaissance? I thought the bums lost? It seems they're actually in charge now!

Seriously, though, WTF?

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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#1040 Post by mhofmann » Tue Oct 05, 2021 1:07 pm

Monkey Ballz wrote:
Tue Oct 05, 2021 12:11 pm
Is this yet another egregious example of the "Well that's just like your opinion, man" illness that is increasingly corrupting centuries of growth since the Renaissance? I thought the bums lost?
:lol: :lol:

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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#1041 Post by Maltic » Tue Oct 05, 2021 1:26 pm

jegharfangetmigenmyg wrote:
Tue Oct 05, 2021 12:00 pm
Makes sense. However, Arrow's Tree of Wooden Clogs that I mentioned earlier just looks miraculous compared to the Criterion. I don't really understand how they recovered the details in the darker scenes. Shouldn't there, at the very least, be some black crush? Again, regarding Ritrovata and WKW, it's just so sad that they do this to all those classic films, even when now new technologies serve them so well. On a personal level, I just find it very frustrating that I have a perfectly calibrated display which should give me reference looking material, and then, instead, I get to see too dark deep yellow and green filtered versions of WKW's films...
IIRC, Lee Kline on his podcast asked the Davide Pozzi of Ritrovata about the Ritrovata'ing, using The Tree of Wooden Clogs as an example, and Pozzi pointed out this restoration would be a bad example since it had been supervised by Olmi. The discussion didn't get very specific at all, though, unfortunately. I would've liked Tenia to interview him instead...

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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#1042 Post by dwk » Tue Oct 05, 2021 2:18 pm

I think that is an issue with someone like Lee Kline hosting that type of show, he can't really offer much pushback to stuff his guests say because he has to work with them.

Anyone know if any Ritrovata restorations have been released on UHD with HDR? (I know The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in on UHD but it is SDR.)

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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#1043 Post by The Fanciful Norwegian » Tue Oct 05, 2021 2:23 pm

dwk wrote:
Tue Oct 05, 2021 2:18 pm
Anyone know if any Ritrovata restorations have been released on UHD with HDR? (I know The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in on UHD but it is SDR.)
Arrow's Cinema Paradiso and Argentos (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, The Cat o' Nine Tails, the upcoming Deep Red), though at least for the Argentos the HDR pass was done afterwards by an outfit in the UK.

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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#1044 Post by yoloswegmaster » Tue Oct 05, 2021 2:26 pm

The Bruce Lee films were released on UHD in France, though I don't believe they had HDR and were using the Ritrovata grade.

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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#1045 Post by dwk » Tue Oct 05, 2021 2:41 pm

Thanks. I'm pretty sure Cat's color timing was done in he UK, not at Ritrovata.

I am curious what the German and French UHDs of In the Mood for Love are going to look like. Especially since the Korean UHDs were cancelled because they felt there wasn't enough improvement to justify the extra cost.

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tenia
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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#1046 Post by tenia » Tue Oct 05, 2021 2:54 pm

The Fanciful Norwegian wrote:
Tue Oct 05, 2021 2:23 pm
Arrow's Cinema Paradiso and Argentos (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, The Cat o' Nine Tails, the upcoming Deep Red), though at least for the Argentos the HDR pass was done afterwards by an outfit in the UK.
Also : Deep Red was pretty much totally redone for the UHD release, while the BD was color-corrected from what Ritrovata originally yielded (which I saw in theaters in 2015 and was bearing the usual Ritrovata color signature). I'm actually particularly disappointed about this not getting a remastered BD, as I'd love to compare the 2 BD versions since I also happen to have seen the original Ritrovata grading, especially considering how different it was from the Arrow 2016 BD and how this 2016 BD was received.

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Maltic
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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#1047 Post by Maltic » Tue Oct 05, 2021 3:28 pm

dwk wrote:
Tue Oct 05, 2021 2:18 pm
I think that is an issue with someone like Lee Kline hosting that type of show, he can't really offer much pushback to stuff his guests say because he has to work with them.
Indeed, and they had worked together on that very film/release.

Still, you'd think it would've been possible to ask, like, "people say the Eclairs are blue.. do you see a difference compared to yours? Are they doing it wrong or is there a good reason?"

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Walter Kurtz
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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#1048 Post by Walter Kurtz » Tue Oct 05, 2021 5:26 pm

I've enjoyed the tens of thousands of posts about Ritrovata's grading and Wong's revisionism and all the bitching and moaning about why the damn graders or timers or grader/timers don't correct/grade/time the colors just the way everyone wants for everyone's individual solipsistic pleasure. Most enjoyable are the comments that express how someone just can't understand how somebody can see color any differently than you can because it's goddamn objective!

As in---
Monkey Ballz wrote:
Tue Oct 05, 2021 12:11 pm
Here's what I don't understand: The color spectrum is quantifiable, yes? It is used, for example, to determine the elemental composition of stars and planets millions of light years away, and there are color standards for all sorts of other industries, from the medical field to brand identity... there are devices which actually measure colors, right? What's the problem here? ... ... Seriously, though, WTF?

Um. Here's WTF.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog ... ame-colors

Here's a brief excerpt:

We sometimes think of colors as objective properties of objects, much like shape or volume. But research has found that we experience colors differently, depending on gender, national origin, ethnicity, geographical location, and what language we speak. In other words, there is nothing objective about colors.

It would be rather surprising if there were no variation in how we experience colors. The number of cones (photoreceptors) in the human retina is not constant. Sometimes cones are present in large numbers, and sometimes they are barely present. And this difference has been observed in so-called normal individuals who react in the same way to color stimuli.

The fact that the number of cones in our eyes varies considerably suggests that the brain must be able to automatically adjust the input from the retina. So, individual variations in color perception may not purely be a matter of the nature and number of the cones (or photoreceptors) in the retina. It can also be a result of the fact that people with different numbers of cones calibrate the input from the retina in different ways.

One approach to test for variation in color vision is to test for variations in color judgments and color discrimination abilities. Such tests have demonstrated vast variation across perceivers exposed to the same color stimulus. Malkoc and colleagues, for example, found that what some people pick as their best example of red is what others pick as their best example of orange. The researchers only tested for individual differences, not for differences in gender, national origin, ethnicity, geographical location, or native language spoken. But other research points to variations of this kind.

For those interested, here's a handy little link to Malkoc's (et.al.) paper-----

https://openaccess.dogus.edu.tr/xmlui/b ... sAllowed=y

But hey, carry on with all the solipsistic tirades that ignore science. They are a source of daily mirth. But then again, what do I know about color? From 2017 through 2020 whenever I saw the President of the United States I saw the color orange.

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soundchaser
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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#1049 Post by soundchaser » Tue Oct 05, 2021 5:47 pm

I suspect you're missing the forest for the trees here, in those two color timings posted above are drastically different from each other objectively and *for most people* subjectively as well. Full disclosure: my solipsistic eyes are also color blind and can see that as plain as day.

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Walter Kurtz
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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#1050 Post by Walter Kurtz » Tue Oct 05, 2021 6:00 pm

soundchaser wrote:
Tue Oct 05, 2021 5:47 pm
my solipsistic eyes are also color blind and can see that as plain as day.
Well if you can see that Trump was orange and I and everyone I know could see that Trump was orange... why couldn't Trump see that Trump was orange? This just proves not everyone perceives color the same!

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