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Perkins Cobb wrote:Are you taking a chance on the I Am Twenty DVD? If you don't, I might.

mteller wrote:I have I Am Twenty... my collection is it's a passable but flawed transfer. Sorry I can't be more specific, maybe I'll pop it in later.

Perkins Cobb wrote:It seems like, five years ago, a lot of these obscure titles would get reviewed someplace ... but nowadays any time I run an import title thru DVD Basen, I get nada. I guess a lot of the sites and individual reviewers who pursued this stuff have given up the ghost.

Perkins Cobb wrote:It seems like, five years ago, a lot of these obscure titles would get reviewed someplace ... but nowadays any time I run an import title thru DVD Basen, I get nada. I guess a lot of the sites and individual reviewers who pursued this stuff have given up the ghost.

Ashirg wrote:I Am Twenty review (in Russian, but with captures. Ruscico disc has English subtitles) Also comments say that this is edited version by about 20 minutesю Uncut version should be titled Zastava Ilijcha

jsteffe wrote:Good news, RUSCICO is in fact working to get their site back up and running. They've already started to repopulate the online catalog. So it seems that your friend was correct.

Gropius wrote:

jsteffe wrote:Good news, RUSCICO is in fact working to get their site back up and running. They've already started to repopulate the online catalog. So it seems that your friend was correct.

Has anyone else tried ordering via the RUSCICO site lately? Having navigated their eccentric order form (mandatory fax number; won't accept postcodes with letters in), I still keep getting an error message at the payment screen.

Quite frustrating, as Google throws up no other retailers, at least for the title I'm after. Presumably they don't accept orders via email?

By a sad coincidence, the Russian Cinema Council released the first batch of DVDs in its new scholarly Academia strand shortly after the death of Martin Gardner, author of 'The Annotated Alice', a work that perfectly parallels what Ruscico is attempting here. Indeed, a good subtitle for either of these releases would be 'The Annotated Eisenstein', as each consists of two discs, one containing a conventional presentation of the main feature (in the original Russian with multiple subtitle options), the other the same version but augmented by the Hyperkino process.

In practice, this means that numbers resembling TV channel indicators regularly pop up in the top right-hand corner, indicating the presence of scene-specific contextual material (presented in Russian or English) that the viewer can dip into while watching the film. Typically, this consists of a short essay (often running to several pages) occasionally illustrated further with enlargeable stills and playable video and audio clips. For instance, note 16 on Strike expands on the intertitle quoting the lyric reading "Everything that holds up their thrones is the making of the worker's hand" by identifying the song, giving its history, and linking to a 1947 recording of a complete performance with onscreen translation. 28 such footnotes accompany Strike, while October gets 44 - and also a markedly richer multimedia augmentation, with numerous short clips from other Soviet silents by Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Vertov and even Fernand Léger's Ballet Mécanique pressed into the service of illustrating and paralleling Eisenstein's ideas.

The Hyperkino annotations are these discs' main selling points, but the presentation of the main features is also a marked improvement on earlier releases. Both films run longer than on the Eureka and Tartan DVDs, suggesting a more accurate framerate, and the surprisingly clean images have clearly been digitally restored. The orchestral scores work reasonably well, though they don't appear to have been specifically composed for the films (Strike, for instance, opens with Shostakovich's second piano concerto). There are no non-Hyperkino extras or any printed supplements, though the various 'chapters' of the Hyperkino commentary can be accessed separately via their own menu.

TMDaines wrote:Wasn't sure where to post this but Hyperkino editions are now available from Moviemail in the UK.

Finch wrote:Shame they haven't got The House on Trubnaya Square (not sure I want to splash on the Flicker Alley set just for that one film).

MichaelB wrote:Well, it's probably good to highlight that they have legitimate UK distribution.