Ritrovata and Eclair Cinematic Universes

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

The Eclair restoration of Debord's Hurlements en faveur de Sade has popped up online and it's probably the most absurd example of this phenomenon to date. The film's visuals consist entirely of alternating black and white leader, and this is how the whites look:


In their defense, they appear to have nailed the blacks.

[Maltic]

That's chutzpah

[hearthesilence]

Jesus, this is getting really fucking ridiculous.

[jsteffe]

I don't see what the problem is. The LUT they used provides an accurate representation of European color film stocks of the period.

[Fred Holywell]

La femme et le pantin (1959). Restored by L’Image Retrouvée, the French branch of L'Immagine Ritrovata.

TestsBluray.com: (from French) ...the recognizable color signature of the laboratory is visible here... the good news is that the signature is less intense than we have seen on other films...

[jsteffe]

Nice to see that it has English subs, too. If the "recognizable color signature" is not too obtrusive I might be able to stomach it.

[tenia]

As discussed in The River's thread : Roberto Rossellini 2011 restoration of the Italian version of India Matri Bhumi (Ritrovata)
Also :
Betty and Madame Bovary (Chabrol / Eclair)

[tenia]

Kamikaze (Eclair / Didier Grousset) though it's a lighter touch than usual
The Damned (Bologna / Visconti)

I'll be covering Lyon's Festival Lumière this year again and have tried to setup a meeting with Eclair. It might be feasible (if we manage to find a time slot fitting everyone). And since they're now part of L'immagine Ritrovata, Davide Pozzi should be part of the discussion too.
I'm not sure yet who'll be present from Eclair and hope there'll be someone close to the technical steps of the process.

[mhofmann]

Betty and Madame Bovary (Chabrol / Eclair)

Don't have Betty yet but Madame Bovary has Hiventy in the credits and at the end of the film.
Another Chabrol, Une Affaire de femmes, was definitely handled by Eclair (complete with yellow-ish MK2 logo).

[tenia]

I received all 3 and indeed has no issue finding what's what (and what's not) without even looking at the credits.
Madame Bovary of course doesn't look a bit like the other 2 since it was done by Hiventy, and there was no doubt the other 2 were done by Eclair. I found afterwards the details on Carlotta's website (though not on the BDs product pages but the movies' ones and of course those 2 were done by Bruno Patin at Eclair).
What's interesting with Betty though is that most of the brighter daylight scenes are much more balanced than usual, but those darker scenes ? Not a single doubt. It's like I've seen those in 100 other movies before.

Fun fact : I don't recall which Eclair movie I was watching a few weeks ago but my GF popped up in the living room, saw it and asked me "Watching a French blue movie ?" I asked her why she was saying that, and she told me the French movies I was watching most of the time were blue, so this means Eclair's signature is so bad and they're grading so many movies that she now has associated French catalogue colour movies as being blue.
And mind you : she's not into these things like I am, she's just seeing those because I do.

[tenia]

Eclair :
Une journée bien remplie

Ritrovata :
Lucky Luciano
The Damned
Illustrious Corpses

[tenia]

Eclair :
L'appât

Ritrovata :
Que la fête commence
Il giardino dei Finzi Contini
Lo chiamavano Trinità...


I've updated the 1st post in order to fix the dead links since the end of Retro-HD. Most of the movies had other reviews with properly taken screencaps, mostly either blu-ray.com or DVD Classik.
Also : I had a chat with someone from Eclair at Lyon Film Festival 2 weeks ago, and since this person wasn't really from the technical side of things to begin with, this was a particularly frustrating discussion overall.

Update : review from DVD Classik for the De Sica : https://www.dvdclassik.com/test/blu-ray ... i-m6-video

[yoloswegmaster]

Did you get to talk to people at Lumiere festival who were able to see the Ritrovata restorations for the Infernal Affairs trilogy?

[tenia]

Unfortunately, I haven't. The only things I've heard through the grapevine is that it looked OK overall (including the grading) but these weren't the sharpest 4K restorations ever. My understanding is that it might have been grain managed to some extent, maybe à la Memories of Murder. Take this with a huge quantity of salt, though.

[tenia]

It's been quite some time I haven't updated this, since I instead manage an equivalent listing on Testsbluray.com, but I stumbled upon this, so we can add Flic Story to the Ritrovata'd movies, and I've taken the occasion to start updating the list. The current count roughly is 100 movies (+ the Varda set) for Ritrovata and 116 (+ the Varda set) for Eclair.

Since the last update, there's also been interesting developments in that some Ritrovata restorations have been color-corrected in Germany, such as 1900 and The Lover.

[senseabove]

An article from the latest issue of Filmmaker Magazine on color timing in restorations.

[soundchaser]

An article from the latest issue of Filmmaker Magazine on color timing in restorations.

Very interesting stuff — thanks for posting. I agree wholeheartedly with the author that color timing in restorations doesn’t get discussed enough even in preservation circles. That the present will always affect how we view the past is an issue I wish more moving image archivists would discuss/contend with.

[Matt]

An article from the latest issue of Filmmaker Magazine on color timing in restorations.

Okay, which one of you is Bingham Bryant?

[senseabove]

I mean, one of our regulars is extensively quoted in the article, but I don't think he was interviewing himself!

[tenia]

I've just watched Beyond The Infinite Two Minutes yesterday evening but this interview wasn't done with myself through a Time TV !
I can however confirm Bingham is at least a regular reader here, and possibly has an account (though I don't remember this precisely). That's, IIRC, how he stumbled on the restoration of the Guy Debord.

In any case, I'm quite happy to see this kind of researches being more formally compiled in the English world (and I'm particularly happy by how Bingham summarized the aim of my article and my current position on the overall issue). Hopefully, it will help feeding some thoughts within the industry, since it still doesn't seem to be of enough interest for professionnals to have the same deep reflexion people like Bingham, me and others are having despite not all of us even being from within the industry.rmed

[tenia]

DVD Classik published an extensive review of the French Dario Argento BD set released a few months by Les films du Camélia.

No surprise regarding the gradings : Cat O Nine Tails and The Bird with the Crystal Plumage are both released in obvious Ritrovata'd gradings, while the Cinecitta gradings look like Cinecitta gradings.

It is however interesting to note that Profondo Rosso gets yet ANOTHER color grading, meaning it's at least the 6th one : the one released on DVD by Anchor Bay (1), the one released on BD by Blue Underground (2), the one prepped up by Ritrovata in 2015 (3), which served as a basis but got corrected by them for Arrow for their 2016 BD (4), the one done by Silver Salt for the 2021 Arrow UHD based on a new scan (5), and now the one done by Cinecitta (seemingly based on the 2015 scan) (6).

[mhofmann]

DVD Classik published an extensive review of the French Dario Argento BD set released a few months by Les films du Camélia.

No surprise regarding the gradings : Cat O Nine Tails and The Bird with the Crystal Plumage are both released in obvious Ritrovata'd gradings, while the Cinecitta gradings look like Cinecitta gradings.

It is however interesting to note that Profondo Rosso gets yet ANOTHER color grading, meaning it's at least the 6th one : the one released on DVD by Anchor Bay (1), the one released on BD by Blue Underground (2), the one prepped up by Ritrovata in 2015 (3), which served as a basis but got corrected by them for Arrow for their 2016 BD (4), the one done by Silver Salt for the 2021 Arrow UHD based on a new scan (5), and now the one done by Cinecitta (seemingly based on the 2015 scan) (6).

It's interesting to read how they argue much more in favor of the Ritrovata gradings (or even the Cinecitta gradings except Profondo Rosso) as opposed to other gradings done on these films, e.g., on by Silver Salt behalf of Arrow.

[tenia]

They trust a lot works like those of Ritrovata and Eclair, perceived as "reproducing the native characteristics of film stocks". This means that, since all labs can't all be right since different labs yield different results in a structural fashion, they tend to reject works not having looks like what Eclair and Ritrovata are doing, such as Silver Salt's (and others) works. They also often tend to see those as being "typical from American-type philosophies", as opposed to "European philosophy", despite this not being that simple at all (for instance, it's clear that Ritrovata and Eclair are doing 2 very different things of their own, while here, it's clear that Cinecitta aren't doing what Ritrovata are). On this set though, they don't like at all the Cinecitta Profondo Rosso grading.

This also can be seen in their Carlotta Chabrol boxset review, but also in the Studio Canal Tavernier boxset one, whereas to me (and people aligned with this), these sets are actually precisely pointing out how the presence of these looks are so much more correlated to which lab did the grading than the movies themselves).

I had heated discussions with them about our divergence on this, but fortunately, things have since calmed down and even if we still clearly disagree on these, at least we can discuss technicals in a simple and fluid manner again.

To some extent, I can understand where they're coming from, and I don't think everything coming out from elsewhere than Ritrovata, Eclair (etc) is exempt from discussions, but I do think that the demonstration has sufficiently been made as to where the Ritrovata and Eclair (etc) looks are mostly (if not exclusively) coming from, and how this should be enough to prove these results should definitely be taken with more salt than Classik are doing. As I wrote there, plenty of older gradings were wrong, and we know that, but just because the newer ones are different doesn't mean they're right : they can still be wrong, albeit in a different shape.

[rrenault]

At least in French film culture, I sense a reluctance to surrender to what could be called "the Arrow/David M way of doing things", since it's perceived as a threat to the theatrical experience, so I suspect there's a sense of traditionalism and old guard-ism involved. Obviously Carlotta know better and that it's not a zero-sum game.

In France, a lot of influential people in the film world have a vested interest in keeping the theatrical model alive and feel threatened by those David M-authored 4K discs.

This traditionalism is all a bit ironic considering the extent to which television companies in France fund theatrical film production.

[tenia]

I have to say I'm not sure to understand what any of you're saying, especially in how it would relate to disc encodes by Fidelity in Motion.