64 / BD 70 Nosferatu

[Roger Ryan]

...Last time I checked (my cable service has never offered TCM!) all silents were still pretty much confined to the Sunday Night ghetto with an occasional breakout on certain occasions (like Halloween)...

This is no longer true, I'm happy to say. For the past year, TCM has shown silent films throughout the week and often at prime time (8 p.m., 9 p.m.). This morning, four silent Lillian Gish features were shown consecutively. I'm sorry you don't have access to this cable channel because it is the only non-premium channel that has improved with age.

While I don't have an opinion on how well-known the Albin Grau contribution to NOSFERATU has been in the past, I appreciated Kalat's succinct summary on something I hadn't paid attention to before.

[Sandman]

As Roger wrote, TCM is showing more silents at hours other than midnight. I do wish they would add more "foreign films," which are typically scheduled after the Sunday midnight silent films, to the daytime/prime time schedule. One huge benefit of the Mark Cousins Story of Film series is that more foreign films are being shown, and I hope this trend continues after the series concludes.

[Gregor Samsa]

Updated extras:

Special Features


SPECIAL BLU-RAY, DVD, AND DUAL FORMAT STEELBOOK EDITIONS

• Brand new 1080p high-definition restoration by Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung

• Stereo and 5.1 scores

• Two audio commentaries: one newly recorded by film historian David Kalat; the second by historian R. Dixon Smith and critic Brad Stevens

• The Language of Shadows, a 53-minute documentary on Murnau’s early years and the filming of Nosferatu

• New video interview with BFI Film Classics: Nosferatu author Kevin Jackson

• Exclusive video piece taped by and featuring filmmaker Abel Ferrara

• Newly translated optional English subtitles with original German intertitles

• 56-PAGE BOOKLET featuring writing by Gilberto Perez, Albin Grau, Enno Patalas, and Craig Keller; notes on the restoration; and rare archival imagery

They even kept the right essay from the DVD booklet.

[FrauBlucher]

Beaver

[HerrSchreck]

Droolworthy.

[ashleyco]

I can't believe how good that screencap looks.

[AlexHansen]

Good lord this is a beautiful transfer. After JOAN and this, I hope this kind of release becomes a year-end tradition.

[What A Disgrace]

I hope next year is The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari year.

[manicsounds]

With the older DVD of "Nosferatu" being 2 DVDs, and the DF being 1 BD + 1 DVD, does the dual format edition lose out on the bonus features? Or are the contents now crammed onto a single DVD?

[Gregory]

The previous features are still there. I never understood why the previous release had to be a 2-DVD set, when a 93-minute film, a commentary, and a 53-minute documentary should have fit on one disc.

[tenia]

I never understood why the previous release had to be a 2-DVD set, when a 93-minute film, a commentary, and a 53-minute documentary should have fit on one disc.

I think the 2 DVDs were DVD-5.

[MichaelB]

I'd be surprised if disc one was a DVD-5 - the bitrate was very high (close to the maximum DVD can handle, in fact), and with a 5.1 soundtrack and commentary on top.

And with that in mind, I can certainly see why they decided to stick a 53-minute documentary onto disc two - especially since we now know that they originally intended to include the Abel Ferrara piece that finally made its debut on the reissue.

[manicsounds]

bluraydefinition review

[zedz]

Well, the Kalat commentary is exactly as good as you'd expect, but the Ferrara interview is completely worthless. He talks about the film only in the vaguest of terms and spends much of the time apparently reading from the wikipedia page on 'Vampires' that he printed out. I can see why it was left off the previous release!

The Jackson piece is decent, but he's pretty much gazumped by Kalat, who leaves few stones unturned.

[FrauBlucher]

I watched both last night and I agree on all points. Kalat (oh man can he talk) was excellent. The Ferrara piece will never be watched ever again.

[swo17]

Let's not forget about the doc. I kind of want to see Murnau's earlier lost films more than 4 Devils. 8-[

[FrauBlucher]

It is such a shame that those films are lost. We can only hope that miraculously something shows up somewhere.

[L.A.]

Let's not forget about the doc. I kind of want to see Murnau's earlier lost films more than 4 Devils. 8-[

If by some magical powers I could choose which lost Murnau film would resurface, then my choice is Der Januskopf (1920).

[Jonathan S]

Der Januskopf has long been a holy grail for film collectors. My late friend Leslie Shepard, who'd seen other Murnaus on their first run (and later knew Carl Mayer personally), was persuaded in old age to hand over a significant amount of cash for a copy.... which of course never materialised.

[Props55]

I've often wondered if JANUSKOPF didn't suffer a fate similar to NOSFERATU (perhaps as a result of Florence Stoker's sucessful legal vendetta) in being suppressed by Stevenson's heirs. It's well known that his wife and stepchildren were very cautious and conservative curators of his literary legacy (i.e. the revisionist version of the origins of JEKYLL, the memorial plaque revised to feature a quill pen rather than his ubiquitous cigarette, the promotion of the poems and the most "child friendly" of the adventure stories and novels) so it's not difficult to imagine their pursuit of any "unauthorized" adaptations.

On the other hand surely someone would have discovered evidence of such suppression by now.

I too have long wanted to see this film ever since reading about it in Famous Monsters fifty years ago. Connie Veidt as Jekyll/Hyde (and Lugosi as Poole!) as directed by Murnau! I'd much rather this be found than LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT!

[tenia]

I'd be surprised if disc one was a DVD-5 - the bitrate was very high (close to the maximum DVD can handle, in fact), and with a 5.1 soundtrack and commentary on top.

And with that in mind, I can certainly see why they decided to stick a 53-minute documentary onto disc two - especially since we now know that they originally intended to include the Abel Ferrara piece that finally made its debut on the reissue.

Probably nobody cares, but I've checked, and indeed, it was a DVD-9 for the movie and a DVD-5 for the extras. Both together accounted for about 9.6 Gb (first disc : 6.15 Gb; 2nd disc : 3.26 Gb).

[EddieLarkin]

I'm unsure if this has already been mentioned here or in the Kino thread, but I felt it was worth posting. According to the admin of caps-a-holic, whilst taking grabs from both Nosferatu discs he found that Kino appear to have deleted two frames from every second of the movie. Essentially they messed up the frame interpolation, explained here:

The missing frame on both US Blu-ray is not a mistake. I checked again and again and Kino Lorber pretty much messed up the 18 to 24 fps conversion. There seems to be frames missing in every second of the movie, instead they just copied the frame before that three times. That makes the whole thing extremely choppy.

Here is pulldown from the UK BD:

112 112 112 112 112 112

1 second of film = 24 frames. the source is 18 fps, so every 3rd frame has to be doubled to make it to 24.

The US pulldown is quite different:

1212123 1212123

after the 3 repeated frames. there is one frame missing that was actually on the 18fps source and can be found on the UK Blu.

If I've got that right then the Kino disc has about 11% of the film excised, and the interpolation is messed up as well (going some way to explain the derision of the progressive encode over at Nitrateville). Figured anyone who went for it over the MoC disc might want to know.

[Drucker]

This thread at NitrateVille shows that unfortunately the Kino disc isn't alone.

[EddieLarkin]

That's a different issue to frames actually being deleted from the movie, which I do not know to be the case in any of those examples. Though this issue with Nosferatu does demonstrate that Kino might not be very good at this interpolation lark. I'd like those guys to see The Passion of Joan of Arc or Battleship Potemkin from MoC and BFI respectively, which I've never noticed any problems on.

[markhax]

I recently watched the Kino Nosferatu Blu-ray at my college after watching the MOC blu-ray at home and thought it seemed choppy. Now I see why.