Grasshopper Film

[Aunt Peg]

Grasshopper releasing Kleber Mondonca's Pictures of Ghosts (2023) on August 6: https://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=34688

[ando]

I see twelve Straub/Huillet films streaming here, six not on blu:

https://projectr.tv/films/category/the- ... 000171ed17

PROJECTR now has the The Complete Straub-Huillet Collection
streaming. Be interested to see which U.S. libraries aside from NYPL that provide the service to their patrons.

[Michael Kerpan]

I can't find any list on institutions that offer access to this service....

[hearthesilence]

I watched most of them when Metrograph streamed them last year. Would love a Blu-ray box set but I imagine that might be tough to pull off - I'm not sure how many copies they'd sell.

EDIT: Here's what I posted:

The quality is top-notch - I haven't watched all of them, but they appear to be derived from recent 2K restorations made from fresh scans of the original camera negative (with 4K scans for those that I know to be filmed on 35mm). When you get to the very end of the credits (after the music finishes), they will have restoration cards that will display all the relevant information in French.

FWIW, even though it says "complete," they clearly don't have everything they made. (They do have most of their work though.) As if to drive this point home, a bunch of them will no longer be available after tomorrow, including several of their best films that aren't available on Blu-ray either. Among those being pulled after tomorrow, I personally favor the features From the Cloud to the Resistance and Too Early, Too Late and the shorts Black Sin (worth it for the opening alone) and Cezanne, Conversation with Joachim Gaasquet.

[ando]

I can't find any list on institutions that offer access to this service....

I can't either, but I do see various university libraries (like USC) which offer it via a Google search.

[GrasshopperFilm]

Hello all, thanks for your interest in Projectr! The platform is available to anyone living in NY state via the New York Public Library (you can get an instant digital library card on the NYPL site). It's also available in universities and colleges around the country. But the platform is new, and we're hoping to add more libraries in the coming months. If you like, please do email your local public library and request the service.

There are over 1300 titles on Projectr, from many great distributors, and of course, the complete restored Straub-Huillet collection.

If you have any questions about the platform or anything else, don't hesitate to let us know.

Thanks!

[ando]

If you have any questions about the platform or anything else, don't hesitate to let us know.

Thanks!

Are there plans to develop a stand alone application? Currently, if I want to watch a feature on my large screen tv I have to cast it from the website. Thanks.

[GrasshopperFilm]

Are there plans to develop a stand alone application? Currently, if I want to watch a feature on my large screen tv I have to cast it from the website. Thanks.

Yes, definitely. We're hoping to have apps ready by early next year.

[ando]

We're hoping to have apps ready by early next year.

Good to hear. Thanks.

[Peacock]

Any hope for more Straub-Huillet films on disc dear Grasshopper?

[GrasshopperFilm]

Not at the moment. It's always something we're hoping to do. But it doesn't seem like a sustainable project unfortunately. We are happy though that we can at least make all the SH titles available for streaming on Projectr.

[Peacock]

Heartbreaking! A handful of major films not available on English-friendly disc yet, but I understand it from a business perspective, S-H just aren’t high profile enough figures these days sadly, not sure why that is.

Very grateful that you guys put out the films that you did on disc and I guess as a UK customer who doesn’t stream I’ll have to improve my French and purchase the French releases instead.

Thanks for answering.

[Calvin]

As Peacock said - heartbreaking!

If there's any way of getting these on disc - I'm thinking a crowd funded box set or something along those lines - then I'd certainly support it

[hearthesilence]

Black Friday sale is on. 40% off all Blu-rays, DVD's and vinyl LP's until Monday - no code needed.

[ryannichols7]

while we still wait on La Flor, O Sangue, or Straub-Huillet titles, they're evidently putting this out as an educational release

[What A Disgrace]

Woof.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

They put out tons of those institutional-priced educational DVDs—Afternoons of Solitude is another recent one. They've also done them for O Sangue and a bunch of Huillet-Straub titles. But as far as retail physical media goes they're in the same boat as Cinema Guild (which perhaps not coincidentally also has a robust educational arm) and may have abandoned it altogether. They haven't released anything at all in 2025 unless you count this Paravel/Castaing-Taylor boxset, which is actually just the region-free, English-friendly Potemkine set. I also notice the Nocturama Blu is sold out on their website and is either unavailable or listed for ludicrous prices elsewhere, so they might not be doing any further pressings of their existing releases either.

[John Cope]

So much for them releasing Vale Abraão then I guess. Maybe Criterion could pick it up after all.

[therewillbeblus]

So much for them releasing Vale Abraão then I guess. Maybe Criterion could pick it up after all.

I was so thrilled for that one, especially because I believe it was the uncut version

[zedz]

So much for them releasing Vale Abraão then I guess. Maybe Criterion could pick it up after all.

I was so thrilled for that one, especially because I believe it was the uncut version

The currently circulating restoration (which I saw a couple of months ago) is 203 minutes, which is 16 minutes longer than the running time listed on imdb. I have no idea where the extra footage appears because it's been years since I watched my old DVD.

[Calvin]

Grasshopper acquired Abraham's Valley??

[John Cope]

So much for them releasing Vale Abraão then I guess. Maybe Criterion could pick it up after all.

I was so thrilled for that one, especially because I believe it was the uncut version

The currently circulating restoration (which I saw a couple of months ago) is 203 minutes, which is 16 minutes longer than the running time listed on imdb. I have no idea where the extra footage appears because it's been years since I watched my old DVD.

The Portuguese DVD is the complete cut and it's easy to determine there where the extra footage is because it hasn't been restored and is notably lower quality than the rest of the film. Part of what I'm looking forward to with this new restoration is to see how smoothly integrated those additional scenes are. So far though there has only been a French release and I gather it has no English subs.

[GrasshopperFilm]

Hi everyone. We never acquired ABRAHAM'S VALLEY. Our next restoration/release will be Michael Almereyda's NADJA, in partnership with Arbelos Films. We will be doing a blu-ray release for this title. And we do hope to do more BD releases of upcoming titles.

[hearthesilence]

Hi everyone. We never acquired ABRAHAM'S VALLEY. Our next restoration/release will be Michael Almereyda's NADJA, in partnership with Arbelos Films. We will be doing a blu-ray release for this title. And we do hope to do more BD releases of upcoming titles.

I caught this tonight and it looks excellent. Per Josh Siegel, curator at MoMA, Almereyda donated his archives to them years ago, and that helped make this restoration possible to say the least. I'm guessing that meant both the original film negatives for this AND the tapes or hard drives that held the raw Pixelvision footage - the film footage had excellent grain texture all intact while the Pixelvision footage looked like it might've come from that raw footage and not some later film element it would've been burned on to. Also the opening superimposes one type of footage on to the other in a series of impressionistic dissolves, and given how incredibly clean those dissolves looked, I'm guessing they re-created this from the original elements rather than, say, transferring the completed superimposition from a later film element.

This was accompanied by a very warm reunion with Almereyda, crew members (like the composer Simon Fisher Turner and producers) and cast members, many of whom traveled from their homes outside of NYC (Vancouver, D.C., etc.) I'm not sure if Grasshopper was able to record this, but it would make a nice bonus feature. FWIW, I ran into Hal Hartley in the audience, which was pretty heartwarming given that he's worked with at least a few of the cast members. (Hartley was actually in the same theater just a few weeks ago to present his latest film.)

Almereyda dedicated the evening to both David Lynch and Derek Jarman, mentioning that Turner was hired right after he scored Jarman's final film, Blue. It was interesting to hear how Almereyda worked with the actors - apparently soft in demeanor, so much he'd find a gentle way of getting you to do something different if it wasn't right for the movie. The actors were given a lot of freedom - for example, the "butter" story wasn't fabricated, that was a real-life anecdote from Elina Löwensohn that was put into the film. Almereyda also recalls meeting Löwensohn when she was a waitress at a restaurant in St. Mark's - Löwensohn recalled he always came in for breakfast - and they first got to know each other when the Romanian revolution was happening, giving them something to talk about, and from there he eventually cast her in Another Girl, Another Planet. It's interesting to hear because one of the two "major" cuts restored in the director's cut involves a discussion on the election that followed the revolution. (The other one was a scene/shot with Peter Fonda staring at a wave machine - very '90s!) FYI, the director's cut isn't that much longer, but when they did a test screening after someone offered to buy or distribute the film, the results weren't as good as the reaction they got at TIFF, so in something of a panic, they ended up pruning the film, possibly to make it move faster, but honestly the director's cut doesn't feel slow at all. (In fairness, I've been watching a lot of slow cinema lately, so maybe in comparison it feels much faster.)

They had a few Lynch anecdotes, but they pointed out that he basically financed this film out of his own pocket, which is highly unusual for a filmmaker to do. He actually was supposed to get a deal that would've injected a lot more financing into the film, but when it fell apart on the eve of production, they decided to make do with what they had, and it was truly a low-budget indie in the classic sense. Lynch does make a cameo in the film - on the day they shot it, two people actually mistook him for a regular guy when he was in uniform and asked him where the bathroom was. Later he dropped in for the sound mix and gave them this priceless advice: never put paper in a scene because it'll sound awful. (I can't remember which scene that may have been.)

Siegel made it clear he was good friends with Almereyda, and the film really captured a New York they knew from the '90s that's already disappeared. The whole time, I kept thinking this was a real '90s nostalgia piece and in a good way.