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J Adams wrote:It can be kaufened here.

Tack!

As promised, here's some YouTube links to a few of the scenes missing from the UK DVD of THE HUNTERS: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5

Ishmael wrote:What happened in the scene that was cut? I have the Anchor Bay disc, and I've never noticed anything suspicious about it, but then again, I've never seen the film in any other way.

The cut occurs 40m 26s in. It's the scene in which Oberlus introduces himself to Carmen. In the film, Carmen and Diego, the man who accompanied her to the island, are knocked unconscious by Oberlus, and wake up to find themselves in a cave. Diego disappears from the DVD version at this point. In the missing scene, Diego wander off into the darkness and is killed by Oberlus, who then tells Carmen "Diego is gone, Carmen. You have no one to turn to but me. My name is Oberlus, and I'm king of Hood Island. Those who obey me live, and those who don't die. And death is not the worst punishment I can inflict. If you keep our home clean and open your legs when I order you to, I guarantee you a life of peace for as long as you please me. Now it's time for you to receive your husband and king. Lie down and spread your legs".

J Adams wrote:In addition, I would argue that the AE "print damage" argument is a lie, just based on the shortening of the blackout scene.

Being charitable, a possible explanation is that there were two prints available, of different edits, but the longer print had some damage, so they went with the shorter, undamaged, edit. Of course, the best - and most costly - solution would have been to use the shorter edit and augment it with whatever scenes were recoverable from the longer print. But for that I guess we're going to have to wait (a very long time) for a proper restoration.

Thanks, Brad, for facilitating the upload of those missing scenes!

IMDB says this film is 168 minutes and it didn't appear to be that hard to find the missing footage (which all looks quite good on youtube). AE presumably didn't even try.

Still glad they put these sets out, of course.

James43: thanks for verifying the length of the Trigon edition.

J Adams: does the Chinese DVD of The Hunters look worse than the YouTube excerpts? If it is watchable, then it´s an affordable alternative to the Swiss DVD box.

The French DVD of The Hunters (available in a box set from Potemkine) is listed at 144 mins. in a PDF press kit available through their website. The DVD is not English-friendly. This is a fairly new release, supported by Agnès B. (who also contributed to the Lola Montès resto), and released by a quality-minded company. Seems they timed their master but didn´t research the running time.

I'm much more likely to trust a DVD review site that gives the running time as a reassuringly precise 143:22 than I am a Swiss distributor's blurb that may well have been written by someone who's never even seen the film.

Anyway, it sounds as though this is identical to the version on the Artificial Eye disc, and presumably came from the same master.

I agree.

BTW, the Swiss and French boxes contain "Ekpombi", a short film by A.

bios wrote:Lucky i speak Greek so i have no problem watching the full cut without subtitles.

I'm trying to put together an English subtitle file for the long version. Would it be possible for you to translate the (minimal) dialogue in the first and third You Tube clips?

BradStevens wrote:The cut occurs 40m 26s in...

Thank you, Brad!

Just received Angelopoulos Vol 2, and will be checking the films for cuts over the next few days. THE BEEKEEPER is identical to Artificial Eye's previous release; it contains a trailer and an alternate French soundtrack, though these are not mentioned on the box set packaging. The packaging incorrectly claims that the film is in 16:9, whereas it's actually framed at 4:3. Apparently, the version shown at festivals ran 20 minutes longer, but was cut at the request of the producer. The version shown on Channel 4 is identical to the AE release.

The claimed running time of 112 minutes for LANDSCAPE IN THE MIST is worrying, as that would make the film 7 minutes shorter than it should be. I'll take a closer look later.

BradStevens wrote:The claimed running time of 112 minutes for LANDSCAPE IN THE MIST is worrying, as that would make the film 7 minutes shorter than it should be. I'll take a closer look later.

As I'm sure you've already worked out, it should be 119:29 on PAL video, based on the footage length submitted to the BBFC.

The Chinese "full version" of The Hunters looks much worse than the youtube excerpts. It's not worth getting. It was worth it years ago simply due to ridiculous cheapness and the unavailability of most of the films.

To my eyes the youtubes are of sufficiently quality for AE to have inserted them into their transfer, but I'm no specialist.

In any event, the "print damage" argument does not fly for the blackout scene. How did it just so happen that the blackout part was "damaged" then miraculously became undamaged the instant the lights go on. No--someone presumably cut it for the shorter DVD because they thought it was an error.

J Adams wrote:In any event, the "print damage" argument does not fly for the blackout scene. How did it just so happen that the blackout part was "damaged" then miraculously became undamaged the instant the lights go on. No--someone presumably cut it for the shorter DVD because they thought it was an error.

It's very clear that all of the cuts were made simply in order to reduce the running time. The cutting has been carried out quite smoothly, and is obviously not the result of damage to the negative.

Good news. I can confirm that LANDSCAPE IN THE MIST does indeed run 119m 29s, and is uncut.

Thanks for the update on the Chinese DVD, J Adams!

THE SUSPENDED STEP OF THE STORK is pretty much uncut, missing only a few seconds at the end of three shots. Curiously, the French prints have a slightly different order of scenes (Alexandre's first encounter with Eleni appears a little earlier), while the Greek prints have an additional voiceover at one point. But what a superb film! I'm haunted by this closing image, which, like so much else in Angelopoulos' oeuvre, moves me deeply in ways that I'm unable to account for intellectually.

I still can't believe Angelopolous died in the middle of making a movie. What a tragic loss. At this point, all of the few last films he's made have gone OOP in R1 land. I'm surprised his films haven't found proper releases in the States yet, as he's a giant in Greek cinema.

BradStevens wrote: Thu Feb 02, 2012 11:07 pm THE SUSPENDED STEP OF THE STORK is pretty much uncut, missing only a few seconds at the end of three shots. Curiously, the French prints have a slightly different order of scenes (Alexandre's first encounter with Eleni appears a little earlier), while the Greek prints have an additional voiceover at one point. But what a superb film! I'm haunted by this closing image, which, like so much else in Angelopoulos' oeuvre, moves me deeply in ways that I'm unable to account for intellectually.

That's funny. I found it to be one of his lesser films. Of course it has the amazingly haunting closing scene that you're linking to, but overall, I was very distracted by Jeanne Moreau in this one. Weird, because I'm a fan of all her other work, but her acting in the one is very clunky, she seems totally out of place in every scene she's in, like she wasn't able to adapt to Angelopoulos' style of filmmaking. There's still 5 of Theo's films that I haven't watched, but of those I've watched, this is by far the one I remember the least.

The Hunters is one of the films I have yet to watch, so it truly saddens me to read all the reports on the apparently severely cut version by AE that I just bought. I want to watch the whole thing, so I guess I will have to wait for a fan cut with the cut scenes edited in. I'm on the fence here, because I think it's important to watch his movies in the best visual quality as possible, so a subtitled version of the washed out Chinese edition isn't an option for me, but I also do not want to watch the film with 20 minutes of footage cut. Damn...

jegharfangetmigenmyg wrote:Weird, because I'm a fan of all her other work, but her acting in the one is very clunky, she seems totally out of place in every scene she's in, like she wasn't able to adapt to Angelopoulos' style of filmmaking.

Yes, but surely her out of place quality is intentional, since the character herself is out of place - she can't even speak the same language as the people around her, and has to resort to English, which is the first language of none of the characters.

I just compared Artificial Eye's transfer of VOYAGE TO CYTHERA with my VHS recording of a version screened on Channel 4 in the late 80s. The print used for the DVD has 11 brief cuts as the beginnings and ends of shots, each of which eliminates from 5 to 15 seconds of footage, reducing the overall running time of the film by approximately 2 minutes. The largest cut appears at 34m 5s, eliminating 21s from the end of a shot. The last of these cuts appears at 80m 37s, and eliminates the whole of a brief shot of wax dummies. Inexplicably, the shot of two old men meeting in the street and discussing their experiences on opposite sides in the war (which can be found between 64m 14s and 67m 5s) is an alternate take.

And that's at least three films that have confirmed cuts, ranging from the very minor all the way up to the catastrophic. So basically the whole Artificial Eye Angelopoulos project can be binned. Appalling.

It seems a little strange though as AE aren't really the type of company to make these kind of fuck ups.

Perkins Cobb wrote:And that's at least three films that have confirmed cuts, ranging from the very minor all the way up to the catastrophic. So basically the whole Artificial Eye Angelopoulos project can be binned. Appalling.

That seems like a drastic over-reaction, and it's not as if there are persuasive alternatives.

From the descriptions Brad has so diligently and helpfully provided, it seems like these are authentic alternative edits, not lab accidents or instances of wilful butchery - unless you believe the folk at Artificial Eye went through the masters provided by Angelopoulos' producers maliciously and expensively trimming random seconds here and there just to mess with you. In most cases I don't think we even have enough evidence to conclude which of the variants would have been the director's preferred one - tiny trims like those described actually sound more like 'final touches' than 'early drafts'.

The Hunters is the only case where the variation is drastic and unfortunate, but even then, the nature of the cuts suggests that this too was an authentic alternative edit rather than a random botch. If only the full-length version were available elsewhere, this would be a valuable resource. As it is, at least we have a kind of work-around now that the 'deleted scenes' have been posted.

If cinephilia means a hysterical refusal to support releases of marginal films because they're less than perfect, then include me out. If you want to boycott the Artificial Eye sets out of misguided purism, that's your prerogative, but if you think this is going to encourage somebody else to put out a superior edition, you're crazy. It'll just be another nail in the coffin of challenging cinema getting released at all.

zedz wrote: In most cases I don't think we even have enough evidence to conclude which of the variants would have been the director's preferred one - tiny trims like those described actually sound more like 'final touches' than 'early drafts'.

The missing material from VOYAGE TO CYTHERA is clearly the result of damage to the print or negative. Obviously the materials had been damaged since the film was shown on Channel 4 more than 20 years ago. The missing sections from THE HUNTERS seems to be the result of somebody other than Angelopoulos (who claimed never to watch his films after they had been finished) deciding to shorten the film.

There's a discrepancy between the DVD running time of Alexander the Great (199:35 or 208 mins without PAL speed-up) and the usually-given time of 210 minutes. I don't have another copy to compare the DVD checkdisc to, and I did guess that that two-minute gap may be a built-in intermission that was missing from the DVD. (I've found that the running time of many films of this sort of length includes intermissions.)

However, I will be interested to see what Brad finds.

I don't yet have checkdiscs for Volume 3, so will report on that when I do.

zedz wrote:

Perkins Cobb wrote:And that's at least three films that have confirmed cuts, ranging from the very minor all the way up to the catastrophic. So basically the whole Artificial Eye Angelopoulos project can be binned. Appalling.

That seems like a drastic over-reaction

Drastic over-reaction is something of a Perkins Cobb trademark.

You can call it overreaction if you want, Michael, but I stand by my view that these releases are unacceptable (certainly in the case of Marketa; provisionally in the case of Angelopoulos, since we haven't had reports on all the films yet). If UK law prohibited an unexpurgated release of Marketa, it certainly did not compel Second Run to re-edit the film without disclosure of that fact -- something that Second Run has still, to my knowledge, never commented upon or defended.

As for Angelopoulos, I'm not clear: if Brad Stevens can get his hands on the original cuts of these films, why couldn't Artificial Eye? If there are no acceptable elements for them, at least this could be acknowledged, and the missing bits taken from lesser sources and included as extras? Yes, I'll probably end up buying the AE releases and supplementing them with the Youtube clips Brad is helpfully providing, or some other bootleg source, rather than staging some self-defeating one-man boycott. That doesn't mean I have to be happy about it, or that "appalling" is an overheated adjective.

As long as we're making this about me, Michael also neglected to link to my overreaction to the BFI's bungled release of The Devils ... to which I still say, do it right or don't bother. I may be disagreeable, but at least I'm consistent!