Kino

[Ben Cheshire]

I care about the transfer insofar as I want it to preserve the integrity of the original film as accurately as possible. Granted, I'll watch a fuzzy, decayed VHS if that's all that's available and I want to attack people who complain about grain or blown-out windows or the family reunion scene from Bonnie and Clyde. But I definitely prefer the best available quality (which is why I go to as many 35-mm screenings as possible), so long as no one changed the color palette or the AR or something.

Or the projector's lenses aren't out of alignment. My friend's a projectionist and we went to see a screening of The Leopard (1963), and it was virtually ruined from a massive blurry patch in the centre because of the aforementioned problem. And its one that apparently can't be repaired; you just have to replace the whole lens-tower.

[MichaelB]

I just assumed that while some of the shoddy transfers are watchable on a normal TV, they'd look pretty bad on a big HD screen.

If this is a major concern to you, my advice is to splash out on a top-notch upscaling DVD player - it's well worth the extra investment.

I have a strong professional interest in central and eastern European film, where mediocre-to-terrible DVD transfers are sadly the norm. There's no point fantasising about better-quality copies turning up, as they probably won't (the same, of course, goes for the rarer silents) - so the most sensible thing to do is make sure that the side-effects of encoding problems are minimised as much as is realistically feasible. Obviously, you can't do anything about poor source prints, cropping, etc. - but my Oppo 983 does an astounding job of getting round interlacing and other nasties.

As far as I understand the technology, it basically analyses the DVD video image in real time and applies different algorithms depending on whether it's PAL or NTSC, progressive or interlaced, anamorphic or letterboxed - and uses that information to construct an 1080p signal that it squirts into my 42" plasma via HDMI. The result is several orders of magnitude better than what I'd get if I just plugged a bog-standard DVD player into the SCART socket and expected the TV to do all the upscaling.

[HarryLong]

Is it SORROWS OF SATAN or 7 FOOTPRINTS TO SATAN that only exists in an Italian print?.

7 FOOTPRINTS TO SATAN - at least that's the only way I've ever seen it. TCM scheduled it a year or two ago then replaced it with another film long before the date, and I don't think it was ever broadcast.

Thank you (I log on at work & can't check such things before I post).
That bait & switch on the schedule is the second time TCM was done that with 7 FOOTPRINTS, btw...
I (& I assume others) had a blank DVDR in the machine all ready to go, figuring whatever TCM showed would be better than my smeary graymarket version.

[HerrSchreck]

Is it SORROWS OF SATAN or 7 FOOTPRINTS TO SATAN that only exists in an Italian print?.

7 FOOTPRINTS TO SATAN - at least that's the only way I've ever seen it. TCM scheduled it a year or two ago then replaced it with another film long before the date, and I don't think it was ever broadcast.

I have Sorrows of Satan-- it's a Griffith, in an American print. Used to have 7 Ftprints, which is indeed in Italian.

[Sloper]

I guess I'm missing some subtle point but given that during the silent era all exported films had new intertitles made for each country they were shipped to, Kin's substituting translated ones for the US market strikes me as silly hair-splitting. Isn't there something important about Kino's business practices that can be discussed?

On this issue of "home language" cards being the 'official' edition, with all others being pale imitations, I think this is somehwat an exaggeration to play a bit of the purist. We're not talking about Shakespeare here-- except for some truly literary intertitles, most cards were not pieces of high art-- intertitles were written to be flexible and easily translated, to boil action and verbiage down to simplistic summation, these were films that were meant to play around the world, and for which each edition was intended to be every bit as legitimate as the home market release... especially when you're talking about an export to America, where the director really wanted to kick ass. Something like Gab. D'Annunz.'s cards for Cabiria, very literary and verbose, are the extreme exception.

I mentioned Michael earlier: take the line, 'Now I can die in peace, for I have seen true love', as translated in both the English intertitles on the Shepard edition, and the subtitles on the European one. In German, that last phrase is 'eine grosse liebe'. Trond Trondsen translates this as 'great passion', Tom Milne as 'great love'. The 'eine' seems to indicate that Zoret's final words refer to something more specific than the abstract and rather sentimental concept 'true love'. Indeed, 'true love' is just plain puzzling: really? His feelings for Michael represent true love? No, this is a great, transcendent love, precisely because it persists even to the point of being fatal, despite the fact that it remains unrequited. Harry Long can tell me I'm splitting hairs if he wants to, but actually I'm not: this is the epigraph of the film, and the dying line of its main character. It's not Shakespeare, I'm not even sure if it's Hermann Bang (who was Norwegian), but I don't think you can begin to make sense of what that film is about until you get to grips with this phrase. And I'm sorry, but 'true love' just doesn't cut it.

Schreck, I'm sure you're right that in the majority of cases replacing intertitles isn't such a big issue, but then again how would you know if you can't see the originals? I said this before, but think about some home-grown examples: look no further than D.W. Griffith himself. The half-baked poetry and often totally non-functional sentiment of his intertitles ('By way of love valley'...euch...) would require a pretty good translator to surivive into another language. That's fine if you get a good translator. But, for instance, the intertitles on A Man There Was seem annoyingly faux-archaic to me; I think I read somewhere (maybe on this forum?) that they might be based on a 1919 showing from America, whose intertitles actually received bad reviews even at the time... (Here, by the way, is an online translation of Terje Vigen, though I'm not sure it's much better).

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not really knocking Kino here - for the record, I wasn't even that pissed off at the state of the much-vilified Liliom, because it's a great film and I'm glad to be able to see it. And if most people think the intertitle thing isn't an issue, even on this forum, then I guess Kino's policy isn't so much the 'lapse in taste' I said it was. But personally, I'd rather be able to make my own mind up about whether or not a film's intertitles are mundane and functional, and whether or not it's important to be able to see them in the original language.

Take a release like Sunrise. What's the "official" language of those intertitles? Since Carl Mayer's script was in German, as was the director, is the "official" US release of the film a compromise? Should Fox be slammed for not releasing a German edition of the film so that the script's intertitles don't have to be translated for the "authoritative edition"? What about Paul Leni's films made in America? One could go on and on with emigrant directors.

I don't know whether those intertitles were worked on by an American writer, but I'm sure someone was there to make sure they didn't sound too dumb, just as directors like Antonioni, Polanski and Woody Allen have needed a bit of linguistic guidance when working in a foreign country.

Do DVD producers take so much care over their translations? Specifically, do Kino? Sunrise was designed and tailored in an American context, for an American market, just as Michael was tailored for a German one. Primarily I'd want to see the intertitles in the 'intended' language, but if Mayer's German ones were available then why not? They might be better. A film like Repulsion probably wouldn't suffer too much from being dubbed, and I actually think The Passenger is a bit better with the French soundtrack turned on, as it masks the bad acting (and the terrible dialogue by Mark Peploe, which Antonioni doesn't seem to know how to handle).

I know I'm banging on, not for the first time, about something that clearly seems like a non-issue to a lot of people here. But then I glaze over when people start talking about edge enhancement...

[Gregory]

I think it's a mistake to consider intertitles as a straightforward pragmatic device, At the same time I don't think the main question is whether they were high art, although the filmmaking industry increasingly saw them as that in the 1920s.
The original titles are unique in that they don't bear the cultural and ideological imprint that the process of translation imposed back in the silent era. It's not just a matter of the subtlety of phrasing but the basic content itself. Censorship routinely played a part, but I believe the more universal issue was distributors' and exhibitors' use of translation to achieve some kind of cultural synthesis or simply to present the film in whatever way they wanted. Distributors often completely rewrote or just discarded intertitles in the translation process. Thus it doesn't make sense to me to say that all versions were intended to be equally "legitimate." I assume our standards of legitimacy involve some measure of fidelity to the original, whereas the important thing for translators at the time was that the film would go across well and be entertaining. The process of translation generally was aimed at producing the clearest, simplest, and even tamest version of the original. If things had to be changed, added, or eliminated to achieve this, then that's what was done. (There are some good examples of this in the chapter on silent film translation in Abé Mark Nornes's book Cinema Babel, which I found not only instructive but fascinating.)
Anyway, for those wanting a presentation as close to the original as possible, it seems the best way would be to create a new or recent translation from the original intertitles, perferably by someone familiar with the film's history and perhaps even the many kinds of cultural issues that factored into previous translations who can thus achieve a higher standard of fidelity to the original.

Once you have a new translation, it's more a matter of personal preference whether one wants to see the original intertitles with subtitles or new subtitles designed to match the appearance of the old, to some degree. If a company goes to great lengths to make new intertitles fit with the aesthetic, then I think that's admirable. Reading pixilated* digital-looking subtitles under original intertitles can potentially be just as jarring in terms of being absorbed in the time period of the film.
* Personally, I watch almost everything projected fairly large, so at that size all subtitles end up looking jagged/pixilated. And speaking of edge enhancement, that looks terrible with such a big projected picture, too. You can see big white lines going around the perimeter of all kinds of things throughout most of the film. However, with most DVDs it's well worth it to have it set up that way in order to be immersed in such a large field of visuals.

[HerrSchreck]

I don't know whether those intertitles were worked on by an American writer, but I'm sure someone was there to make sure they didn't sound too dumb, just as directors like Antonioni, Polanski and Woody Allen have needed a bit of linguistic guidance when working in a foreign country.

Well, "Couldn't She Get Drowned?" was always a calling card for the English-as-a-second-language thing as far as the creative team on Sunrise was concerned. Every here and there you get a clunker, translated with the air of some northern European tourist in NYC hitting you up for directions to Buildink Em-poy-a Schtadt.

[swo17]

"Couldn't She Get Drowned?"

Actually, I can't think of a more creepily effective way to say this.

[Sloper]

That one never bothered me - it's that gap between 'get' and 'drowned', and the lovely special effect on the last word. Now that you mention it, it seems awkward, but Sunrise is a good example of a film where the intertitles just meld perfectly into the pictorial effects of the film, and the words never really seem to matter.

[HarryLong]

I mentioned Michael earlier: take the line, 'Now I can die in peace, for I have seen true love', as translated in both the English intertitles on the Shepard edition, and the subtitles on the European one. In German, that last phrase is 'eine grosse liebe'. Trond Trondsen translates this as 'great passion', Tom Milne as 'great love'. The 'eine' seems to indicate that Zoret's final words refer to something more specific than the abstract and rather sentimental concept 'true love'. Indeed, 'true love' is just plain puzzling: really? His feelings for Michael represent true love? No, this is a great, transcendent love, precisely because it persists even to the point of being fatal, despite the fact that it remains unrequited. Harry Long can tell me I'm splitting hairs if he wants to

A very good point but the hair I was referring to was why dump on Kino about this when this translation of titles for the market exported to has been going on for 90 years or so?
Another thing to consider is that, unless I'm very much mistaken, in the case of Michael - and other German titles - Kino builds their releases from the materials provided by Transit/Murnau Stiftung (I recall being told that on that "ultimate" restoration of Metropolis of some years back that Kino was trying to determine if the market would bear a 2 disc presentation or if they'd have to be selective about the extras provided & go with a single disc). So again, why dump on Kino when the translated titles are provided to them not created by them?

[Tommaso]

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not really knocking Kino here - for the record, I wasn't even that pissed off at the state of the much-vilified Liliom, because it's a great film and I'm glad to be able to see it.

Just as a reminder: Lang's "Liliom" is also available as a freebie on the 50th Anniversary Edition of "Carousel". It looks excellent, and the current price for that 2-disc-set is probably less than that for Kino's stand-alone disc. No need to watch the Kino, then, even if you don't give a damn for that musical version.

[Jonathan S]

Just as a reminder: Lang's "Liliom" is also available as a freebie on the 50th Anniversary Edition of "Carousel".

Thanks for that - anybody know if it's on the UK 50th anniversary edition? None of the UK sites I've checked mention it so maybe R1 only?

[Sloper]

A very good point but the hair I was referring to was why dump on Kino about this when this translation of titles for the market exported to has been going on for 90 years or so?
Another thing to consider is that, unless I'm very much mistaken, in the case of Michael - and other German titles - Kino builds their releases from the materials provided by Transit/Murnau Stiftung

Fair enough, Harry - sorry for the misunderstanding. I don't like the policy, but I understand that Kino's hands are tied. It's a shame because, however snobbish this sounds, part of the caché of companies like Criterion and MoC is tied up in that old 'film school in a box' quote - their commitment to presenting the original materials, as far as possible, is targeted not only at would-be purists, but also at students and scholars who really need access to those original materials. But yes, since Kino take so many more risks than Criterion in their choice of titles, it is certainly unfair to blame them for having to compromise (or put up with the compromises imposed on them) in small matters like this.

Lang's "Liliom" is also available as a freebie on the 50th Anniversary Edition of "Carousel".

Blimey - that one passed me by... Do you have the Region 2 release? I know sometimes these lovely extras are only included on Region 1 (as is the case with Gaslight, which only in America comes with Thorold Dickinson's brilliant 1940 original, featuring Anton Walbrook on fine psychotic form).

[Tommaso]

Jonathan and Sloper: AFAIK, "Liliom" is NOT included on the UK set of "Carousel", but I can guarantee that it is on the German 2-disc-set, as I have it myself; and yes, the German disc has French audio and optional white English subs. It looks as if that double-discer is OOP, though, but you can easily get it via amazon.de marketplace.

Two small-size caps, randomly selected:





Not pristine, but surely much better than the Kino. Looks better and sharper in motion.

[Sloper]

Thanks a million, Tommaso! (And sorry, Jonathan, for repeating your question.)

[HarryLong]

Blimey - that one passed me by... Do you have the Region 2 release? I know sometimes these lovely extras are only included on Region 1 (as is the case with Gaslight, which only in America comes with Thorold Dickinson's brilliant 1940 original, featuring Anton Walbrook on fine psychotic form).

Blimey, indeed. BOTH passed me by as I wasn't particularly keen on acquiring the "top of the bill" features.

[HerrSchreck]

"Couldn't She Get Drowned?"

Actually, I can't think of a more creepily effective way to say this.

Why? You find halting imperfect English creepy?

Lol Utah. I guess it never was a big immigration state.

[nsps]

"Couldn't She Get Drowned?"

Actually, I can't think of a more creepily effective way to say this.

Why? You find halting imperfect English creepy?

Lol Utah. I guess it never was a big immigration state.

Well, I suppose my geographic location renders my agreement with swo17 moot. But it works so well because the "Couldn't she get…" sets up syntactical and textual expectations, and then "drowned" throws them off kilter precisely because it doesn't fit.

[tojoed]

I know sometimes these lovely extras are only included on Region 1 (as is the case with Gaslight, which only in America comes with Thorold Dickinson's brilliant 1940 original, featuring Anton Walbrook on fine psychotic form).

Thanks for that info, Sloper. I've been trying to get the Dickinson for ages and didn't know it was on there. Now I can.

[Props55]

The real problem with the Kino LILIOM is that it wasn't sourced from Fox but from some outfit calling itself the National Film Museum. Not actually a museum, much less national, or even dealing in celluloid rather than dupey tape transfers, these bozos are nothing more than pirates. How they managed to somehow bamboozle Kino is beyond me. Perhaps is was the rush to get another Lang title out to support the Epic Boxset (they were released simulaneously) but I seriously doubt these characters ever had even a short window on R1 DVD rights to any Fox product.

[Sloper]

Thanks for that info, Sloper. I've been trying to get the Dickinson for ages and didn't know it was on there. Now I can.

Gaslight also seems to be available in this edition, which looks cheap and nasty - but I don't own either DVD. Unless my old VHS copy gives out, I'll wait for this film to get the release it deserves. I like the remake, but Dickinson's film is in a league of its own.

[swo17]

"Couldn't She Get Drowned?"

Actually, I can't think of a more creepily effective way to say this.

Why? You find halting imperfect English creepy?

Yes, it's imperfect English, but not the same kind as a spelling mistake or saying "could of." Maybe I'm just so used to seeing it this way, but I think this particular exchange would lose a lot of its bite if she had only said, for example, "Why don't you drown her?" There's a certain newness and otherness to the line as it is in the film that I find downright chilling, as though it were the first time in history that a woman had ever asked a man to murder his wife, and she was just discovering the words as quickly as she was discovering the emotions.

[Props55]

Re: "Couldn't she get drowned?" I too find it creepily effective. It recalled an essay on language by Raymond Chandler in which he relates the case of a real gangster who would tell underlings and others to "be missing."

[HerrSchreck]

Well let's be perfectly frank. If the two characters faced one another squarely, with no nightmarish superimpositions of the boat-- which is so strangely assembled, this effect, that I have no doubt that a goodly portion of this 'otherness' is coming from here (a boat was suspended from the studio ceiling, over the edge of which OBrien pushed a strangely stiff dummy onto the floor, and this image is superimposed over an image of dark water with a stone sperlunking into it to create the splash impression)-- without the 'drowing' effect of those beautifully rendered brushstroke-words which sink into the lake along with the Gaynor dummy, the effect would be quite silly. Imagine a simple scene with the two characters speaking, with no hallucinated murder in the haze, with a simple title card with a simple font "Couldn't she get drowned," the card would earn more chuckles than it does now. The scene is indeed chilling, but the stunted english of the card (from a well dressed, urbane, jazzy "Woman From The City" no less) is, I daresay-- speaking entirely for myself of course-- not the source of the gooseflesh.

I don't think it's any great impediment to the film, or even a substantive gaffe (my obsession with FW is well known around here), but it is generally regarded as one of the few very slight imperfections in the film, or at least a byproduct of the 1) complete control excercised by Murnau combined with 2) his and Mayer's non-English-as-first-language pedigree, and the fact that the script for the film was in german, and, after translation, had final cut rights from a non-english speaker. I haven't listened to the commentary in a great while, but I believe this issue was touched on, with the drowning card and perhaps another card or two are singled out as 'weak' or 'unfortunate' cards.

[MichaelB]

Yes, it's imperfect English, but not the same kind as a spelling mistake or saying "could of."

Or indeed writing "caché" when you meant "cachet"...