684-690, 873-879, 1044-1050, 1142-1148, 1296 Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Project

[Never Cursed]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but is the Fall of Otrar restoration not missing material? There is a longer cut on back channels

The cut I saw was 177 minutes.

Where did you see that? Also, what was the PQ on that cut? Gonna be very frustrating if the choice is between a non-VHS-level image and the longer film

[domino harvey]

My write up from the Cannes list project. Contrary to my prediction, I see plenty of recent viewers have no problem rating a piece of shit movie highly because they like its politics

Chronique des années de braise (Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina 1975) I don’t need to consult the list of other films in contention for the top prize this year, because unless this was running against a Jess Franco retrospective, the worst film eligible surely won. I can appreciate the perversity of using France’s most visible global venue to spit in the country’s eye, but the Algerian film awarded here is so artless, so plainly worthless by any metric of filmic value, that the transparency of the political motivation behind it couldn’t be clearer or more pathetic. This historical journey through over a decade of pre-independence Algerian history is three hours of “epic” filmed like a home movie, with the most mundane camerawork imaginable (hope you like static panning of the camera) and ludicrous “acting” from the cast as no cliche goes unpresented. This film is so confused in its narrative that

Spoiler

it actually kills off the protagonist offhandedly and then continues for another 20+ minutes following its Shakespeare-style fool supporting character, who was never the focal point of the film and yet does get an emotional send-off! Gee, it couldn't be because the latter was played by the director, could it?!

I can only assume the reason this film isn’t first (last?) on every list of worst Cannes winners is due to its limited availability and low residual exposure. Truly film lovers everywhere won the war on that front, at least.

[Mr.DarjeelingLimited]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but is the Fall of Otrar restoration not missing material? There is a longer cut on back channels

The cut I saw was 177 minutes.

Where did you see that? Also, what was the PQ on that cut? Gonna be very frustrating if the choice is between a non-VHS-level image and the longer film

Edited I meant 171. It was on Youtube in low quality but there is definitely a full cut of Fall Of Otrar that is 171 minutes long.

[Mr.DarjeelingLimited]

Established by Martin Scorsese in 2007, the World Cinema Project has maintained a fierce commitment to preserving and presenting masterpieces from around the globe, with a growing roster of more than sixty restorations of works by essential filmmakers. This collector’s set gathers four groundbreaking and innovative films, ranging from the epic to the intimate, from Algeria (Chronicle of the Years of Fire), Burkina Faso (Yam Daabo), India (Kummatty), and Kazakhstan (The Fall of Otrar). Each title is a significant contribution to the art form and a window onto a cinematic tradition that international audiences previously had limited opportunities to experience.

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Film Info
Spine #1296
Films In This Set
Chronicle of the Years of Fire
Chronicle of the Years of Fire 1975
Burning with passion, poetry, and a nation’s fervent spirit of resistance, Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina’s stirring revolutionary epic vividly dramatizes the pivotal decades leading up to Algeria’s War of Independence through the harrowing saga of Ahmed (Yorgo Voyagis), a proud farmer seeking a dignified life, whose experience of brutal oppression and systemic injustice leads him, like so many others, to take a stand against the seemingly indomitable might of French colonialism. Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival, this awe-inspiring landmark of Arab cinema is an at once personal and expansive vision of a country awakening from despair to build an unbreakable movement of liberation.

Yam Daabo
Yam Daabo 1986
A family’s quest for self-determination mirrors a nation’s struggle in the sensitively observed feature debut by titan of Burkinabe cinema Idrissa Ouédraogo, who cast an ennobling gaze on ordinary Africans navigating the upheavals of the postcolonial era. Made amid revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara’s push to create a self-reliant Burkina Faso, Yam Daabo follows an impoverished family as they leave behind a life in the city reliant on Western aid to start anew in the more verdant countryside, quietly capturing the rhythms of everyday life as well as its devastating tragedies and intimate joys. Featuring music by the legendary Francis Bebey, Yam Daabo imbues an elemental human story with profound political weight.

Kummatty
Kummatty 1979
Beautifully photographed amid the lush pastoral landscapes of southern India’s Kerala region, this enchanting child’s-eye fable conjures a folkloric world in which the magical exists side by side with the everyday. When Kummatty, a kind of shamanic bogeyman, arrives in a small village, he captivates the children with his music and colorful masks—until he casts a spell that has unexpected consequences for one boy. Bursting with exuberant songs and children’s chants, this fantasy from G. Aravindan, a pioneer of India’s art-house “parallel cinema” movement, is a treasure of imagination and entrancing visual lyricism.

The Fall of Otrar
The Fall of Otrar 1991
Kazakh New Wave iconoclast Ardak Amirkulov’s hypnotic thirteenth-century epic is a feverish vision of one of history’s most decisive battles—Genghis Khan’s siege of the now-lost city of Otrar—engraved in images of stunning, hallucinatory power. When his warnings about an imminent invasion are taken for insolence, a former Mongol scout (Dokhdurbek Kydyraliyev) must escape imprisonment to stop an escalating diplomatic crisis and avert a clash of civilizations. With a panoramic scope that encompasses intimate palace intrigue and the merciless sweep of battlefield carnage, The Fall of Otrar is a monumental imagining of seismic historical upheaval—and a terrifying, electrifying feast for the senses.

THREE-BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
4K digital restorations of Chronicle of the Years of Fire, Yam Daabo, Kummatty, and The Fall of Otrar, overseen by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project in collaboration with the Cineteca di Bologna, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks
New introductions to the films by World Cinema Project founder Martin Scorsese
New interviews featuring film scholar and producer Ahmed Bedjaoui (on Chronicle of the Years of Fire); film and African-studies scholar Aboubakar Sanogo (on Yam Daabo); and photographer Ramu Aravindan, director G. Aravindan’s son, and film editor and festival programmer Bina Paul (on Kummatty)
The Making of “The Fall of Otrar,” a new program featuring interviews with director Ardak Amirkulov, actor Tungyshbai Dzhamankulov, art director Umirzak Shmanov, and film critic Gulnara Abikeyeva
Updated English subtitle translations
PLUS: Essays by critics and scholars Joseph Fahim, Chrystel Oloukoï, Ratik Asokan, and Kent Jones

Great lineup in this set. Only one I haven’t seen is Yam Daabo.

[Saturnome]

Idrissa Ouédraogo's Yaaba is one of my favorite films ever, yet I've never seen Yam Daabo, his debut. I could have expected Tilaï or Samba Traoré, but Yam Daabo ? I've never read much praise about it. Maybe going for a lesser known film mean I can hope for a Yaaba main release, so that it include Djibril Diop Mambéty's making-of documentary.

Anyway, they got me. I'll buy the set (as I always do, anyway), maybe Yam Daabo is forgotten top tier Ouédraogo.

[Stefan Andersson]

The cut I saw was 177 minutes.

Where did you see that? Also, what was the PQ on that cut? Gonna be very frustrating if the choice is between a non-VHS-level image and the longer film

Edited I meant 171. It was on Youtube in low quality but there is definitely a full cut of Fall Of Otrar that is 171 minutes long.

Fall of Otrar is listed at 176 minutes on the film´s Russian and Kazakh Wikipedia pages; also here:
https://archivefest.ru/2022/films/gibel-otrara
Dave Kehr in NY Times 2002 listed both 2 hr 56 min and 165 minutes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/23/movi ... otrar.html

The difference between 177 and 157 (according to the Janus films webpage) minutes seems like some sort of director´s cut. Scanned the internet but found no mention of such a cut.
The 171 min. cut on YT might be a 177 min. cut with PAL speedup.

From the Russian Wikipedia page:
"The restoration process was completed in 2024. The film was scanned in Almaty from the original negatives under the direction of Ardak Amirkulov. And already abroad, it was restored in 4K resolution[21]. The director of the film was not directly involved in the restoration process, but commented on the examples of restorers' work sent to him, and approved the final color correction of the film."
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%93%D0 ... 1%80%D0%B0

Some interesting facts:
https://serdar0024.wordpress.com/2017/0 ... el-otrara/

[eerik]

Bit disappointed that this only has 4 titles instead of the usual 6. Still glad to see this series coming back though after a hiatus.

Was it even a hiatus? Seems very much in line with the gap between previous volumes.

I did some calculations, and on paper this is the second quickest turnaround between volumes, with the fourth one being a clear outlier:
No. 1 - 10th December 2013
No. 2 - 30th May 2017 (1267 days)
No. 3 - 29th September 2020 (1218 days)
No. 4 - 27th September 2022 (728 days)
No. 5 - 20th January 2026 (1211 days)

No. 6 out in June or July 2029!

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

The difference between 177 and 157 (according to the Janus films webpage) minutes seems like some sort of director´s cut. Scanned the internet but found no mention of such a cut.
The 171 min. cut on YT might be a 177 min. cut with PAL speedup.

The long version on YouTube is about 172 minutes at 24fps, but there's also a similarly low-quality version that runs 150 minutes at 25fps (or ~156 minutes at 24fps) and presumably matches the restoration. It seems the long version was originally divided into two parts of 83 and 93 minutes respectively—maybe the four extra minutes are redundant title/credit sequences that were removed from the copy on YouTube? In any case the 156-minute cut isn't a new thing, so it might be that two versions were created for different markets and Amirkulov prefers the shorter one.

[yoloswegmaster]

Bit disappointed that this only has 4 titles instead of the usual 6. Still glad to see this series coming back though after a hiatus.

Was it even a hiatus? Seems very much in line with the gap between previous volumes.

I did some calculations, and on paper this is the second quickest turnaround between volumes, with the fourth one being a clear outlier:
No. 1 - 10th December 2013
No. 2 - 30th May 2017 (1267 days)
No. 3 - 29th September 2020 (1218 days)
No. 4 - 27th September 2022 (728 days)
No. 5 - 20th January 2026 (1211 days)

No. 6 out in June or July 2029!

Might not be a hiatus but those are still long lead times in-between sets. Here's hoping they can get volume 6 out by 2027.

Speaking of future installments, I'm curious to know if The Night of Counting the Years will ever get realeased. The restoration was completed a long time ago but it only opened with the Janus logo when it was streaming on the Criterion Channel before it ended up leaving. The only other WCP title that opened with only the Janus logo was The Phantom of the Monastery (which ended up being released by Indicator), so I wonder if a different label picked up the rights to it.

[Stefan Andersson]

The difference between 177 and 157 (according to the Janus films webpage) minutes seems like some sort of director´s cut. Scanned the internet but found no mention of such a cut.
The 171 min. cut on YT might be a 177 min. cut with PAL speedup.

The long version on YouTube is about 172 minutes at 24fps, but there's also a similarly low-quality version that runs 150 minutes at 25fps (or ~156 minutes at 24fps) and presumably matches the restoration. It seems the long version was originally divided into two parts of 83 and 93 minutes respectively—maybe the four extra minutes are redundant title/credit sequences that were removed from the copy on YouTube? In any case the 156-minute cut isn't a new thing, so it might be that two versions were created for different markets and Amirkulov prefers the shorter one.

Thank you for this information!



"the Russian dubbed DVD is cut by 22 min" - 22 mins. more or less equals the difference between the 156 and 172 min-versions on YT. Mayne the shorter version was intended for the Russian market.
https://serdar0024.wordpress.com/2017/0 ... el-otrara/
The same page has a long synopsis of Part 1 and "Part 2 – one year later"

Worldcat page for the 172-min. version on DVD "In Kazakh, Mandarin and Mongolian with English subtitles", "Publisher: Seagull Films [distributor], New York, NY, [2011]":
https://search.worldcat.org/title/fall- ... /733765816

[andyli]

Interesting move getting rid of the combo model for this series. I guess the reduction of titles per set has to do with the strategy of releasing some WCP as stand-alone like Touki Bouki or A Brighter Summer Day, though the former did appear in a set before going solo.

[MichaelB]

In any case the 156-minute cut isn't a new thing, so it might be that two versions were created for different markets and Amirkulov prefers the shorter one.

See also Jerzy Kawalerowicz's Pharaoh, Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev and many other examples.

(Although in both those cases the waters are muddied somewhat by the existence of drastically shorter international cuts that absolutely weren't approved by the filmmakers!)

[pistolwink]

I'd love to read something that discussed The Fall of Otrar in terms of its screenwriters, the married couple Aleksei German and Svetlana Karmalita. The film's mood, digressive approach to history, and even visual style has a ton in common with their other films, and its claustrophobic and (arguably) antihumanist intensity definitely foreshadows Khroustalyov, My Car and Hard to Be God. I've read that the director, Amir Amirkulov, was German's student at VGIK. This was his first feature, and he hasn't done anything since that's crossed the radar of international cinephilia (he did make a new film two years ago which bears a bit of a resemblance to Otrar in subject and visual style, if the trailer is anything to go by). Hard to imagine a first-time director having the opportunity to make something this ambitious without the participation of German and Karmalita, who were among the most celebrated contemporary Russian filmmakers at that time, German's My Friend Ivan Lapshin having been given a delayed and rapturous release in the USSR a few years prior. (Speaking of films that ought to be better known....)

Otrar belongs to such a strange moment--its production and release spanned the last years and then the breakup of the Soviet Union, and the independence of Kazakhstan (and of its film studio). A lot of Kazakh and Russian viewers and critics seem to take it as an allegory of independence but I don't think the film supports such a reading. It's much more cynical, and the historical specifics, which the film is keen on respecting, don't map comforably onto 20th-century Central Asia. If you know anything about German and Karmalita's work you'd know that straightforward nationalist allegory isn't really their thing.

I remember a discussion about the different versions of this film on a torrent site that will remain unnamed. Both 171 (or 176) minute and 150-something-minute versions exist on VHS, and the shorter version even has some scenes and shots that aren't in the longer version. (IIRC the longer version has a scene of masturbation, which isn't in the shorter cut that showed theatrically earlier this year and is being released on this set.) I'm curious to compare the two again but the VHS versions look so bad that it would be a real chore, especially now that we have this restoration.

[Never Cursed]

I was curious enough in spite of domino's warnings to watch Chronicle of the Years of Fire, and now in turn feel obliged to caution anyone reading: if you buy the upcoming set, the disc with this film on it might as well be blank. Chronicle... is one of the worst, most incompetent professionally-made movies I have ever seen. There aren't mistakes on the level of, like, overexposed film or ineptly-lit actors (see: any number of z-grade slashers or exploitation movies from this decade or the next one), and the filmmakers have access to things like dolly tracks and a crane, but on every other level this so completely resembles a product that one would expect from a complete novice that it astonished me to learn that not only were the heads of department not amateurs, but some of them had impressive résumés. The cinematographer for this film even shot The Battle of Algiers, a great film about the same milieu that has its own excellent and distinct look. Co-writer/co-star/director Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina is evidently incapable of managing a project of this size and makes constant Form 101 errors that congeal into a very confusing viewing experience. To a half-interested or charitable viewer some of these mistakes may just seem like clunky staging or bad editing (both errors with which the film is separately plagued), but a careful look at many of the more dialogue-intensive scenes (which is to say any of them that consist of more than just flat long takes with hilarious, Robert Altman-esque endless panning) reveal a bit more going on under the hood. Lakhdar-Hamina is very bad at placing his camera and establishing location and geography in these more static scenes; too often are there extremely disjointed cuts between too-close closeups of characters sitting in the same room talking to each other that give the false impression that distance or time is being traversed in a cut. These mistakes may manifest as confusingly-cut sequences with bizarre jumps between angles, but a savvy viewer can surely hear the editor swearing under his breath at the coverage given to him. Not only is there an enormous amount of footage in this exhausting and overlong movie, most of it repetitious and neither aesthetically nor narratively interesting, but most of it is the wrong footage in some way. Imagine a film made out of the stuff trimmed from a rough cut and it would look something like this.

Nor does the material of the script help salvage the project. While it would be difficult for most modern cinephiles to watch the film and disagree with its politics, there isn't anything noteworthy about the people we follow or most of the events we see within the film's milieu. The movie reduces some fascinating details about indigenous attitudes towards themselves and towards colonizers (knives has already pointed out the Algerian attitude towards Hitler and the early battle over water as points of interest, to which I'd add the initial reaction of the Algerians to a man they presume an informant) down to tropes and cultural scripts while minimizing the traits and emotive responses of most characters, presumably to take a load off of the already-overmatched cast. (Certainly there is a ton of SHOUT SHOUT SHOUTING in this movie; some actors only bellow their dialogue, even when they are in social settings that might demand otherwise). If this is the point, if the intent was to create a broad or Brechtian film that keeps you at a distance to create a certain emotional response to the real-life drama, it certainly doesn't work, especially with the material involving Lakhdar-Hamina's in-universe "mad" narrator. His endless scenes add nothing to the movie and demonstrate a pathetic sense of vanity on the part of the filmmaker who made sure they stayed in.

As a sidenote, the 1975 Cannes jury that awarded this film the Palme was completely bizarre: among others, Jeanne Moreau, Fernando Rey, George Roy Hill, Anthony Burgess, a Soviet filmmaker who also directed a separate Cannes-award-winning movie called Chronicle of the Years of Fire, and Pierre Salinger, a speechwriter-turned-U.S. Senator-turned-campaign-manager-turned-journalist with an insane Wikipedia page. The table of contents alone is promising:

Spoiled for size

Among his co-authors in his bibliography: Frank Mankiewicz, son of Herman and father of Ben; Muammar Gadaffi