Kino

[vogler]

I suggest putting on some Edgard Verèse or Karlheinz Stockhausen while watching a silent, I find it haunting and disturbing... but after that you'll never, ever, take advice from me again (not that anybody has ever taken my advice to begin with)

I'm going to try Seventh Heaven with Hymnen and Sunrise with Deserts and Poeme Electronique- should be perfect.

[miless]

I'm going to try Seventh Heaven with Hymnen and Sunrise with Deserts and Poeme Electronique- should be perfect.

it should work magically

[HerrSchreck]

WARNING SHADOWS is Sosin at his least annoying.. just straight piano voicing, a la his work on Ozu's Fl WEEDS, or some of Neal Kurz' work on Dreyer (i e his nice tracks for MIKAEL & PARSON'S WIDOW).

Personally I'd a loved to hear some haunting orchestral figures on this film, but it's certainly better than Sosin's 1984-style analog faux string patches, or-- using the films avant visual style as permission-- some quacky absurdity by the Alloy "Don't Tell ME I Don't Know How To Lean On A Swish Cymbal" Orchestra.

Buy the disc-- I never thought the film would ever look this nice on disc before. Condition of the print via the Bologna resto is about on a par with their work on Paul Leni's sublime WACHSFIGURENKABINETT... another film that was almost unwatchable on awful 16mm vhs' and resurrected by FWMS/Bologna and brought out by Kino in a very nice disc.

[vogler]

WARNING SHADOWS is Sosin at his least annoying.. just straight piano voicing, a la his work on Ozu's Fl WEEDS, or some of Neal Kurz' work on Dreyer (i e his nice tracks for MIKAEL & PARSON'S WIDOW).

Thankyou - this is exactly what I wanted to hear. The piano I can handle, it's just all that other Tangerine Dream gone horribly wrong stuff that deeply bothers me. Maybe he has come across some of the many negative comments about his hideous synth scores on the internet and changed his ways. That would be wonderful but is probably very unlikely.

I love this film and I'm going to buy the disc asap.

I also meant to ask about the colour tints - are they original authentic tints or the modern digital variety and how do they look?

[seferad]

This may have been covered by other posts, but I read that Kino may be releasing silent German Lubitsch films, including The Oyster Princess. Can anyone confirm this?

[justeleblanc]

They will be releasing the same Lubitsch films that Transit/Murnow will release. Kino confirmed this for me in an email, but they didn't say when.

[HerrSchreck]

From Barrie Maxwell:

Kino has also scheduled the release of four Ernst Lubitsch German silents for early December. The titles are: The Oyster Princess (with the short I Don't Want to Be a Man), Sumurun (aka One Arabian Night), Anna Bolyen (aka Deception), and The Wildcat. These may well lead to further such Lubitsch releases.

For you Vogler.

[zedz]

I seem to remember some less than perfect digital tints on the older releases and I'm glad things seem to have changed. It seems to me that sometimes with digital tints we never really get to see true blacks, they seem to turn the colour of the tint. With proper tinting, however, only the exposed parts of the film are tinted and blacks remain black. Would this be correct?

Don't forget there's a difference between tinting and toning - two different colour processes that were applied to silent film. Tinting overlaid a blanket colour on B&W footage, but toning altered the colour of the emulsion so that what would normally appear as black would appear coloured. So an absence of true blacks could be entirely authentic. And sometimes the two processes could be combined, so that instead of a black and white image, you could have blue and rose, for example.

[vogler]

I don't know as much as I would like about these processes. In some cases the image appears to look very digital to me but I can't be sure. Can I ask you to have a look at these screen captures from Waxworks and I'd be interested to hear if you (and others) think these tints are digital or authentic. Those thick blue areas just don't look right to me.





So what do you reckon? Incidentally does anyone have links to any good articles which explain the tinting and toning processes?

From Barrie Maxwell:

Kino has also scheduled the release of four Ernst Lubitsch German silents for early December. The titles are: The Oyster Princess (with the short I Don't Want to Be a Man), Sumurun (aka One Arabian Night), Anna Bolyen (aka Deception), and The Wildcat. These may well lead to further such Lubitsch releases.

Excellent news. I actually haven't seen much Lubitsch but I look forward to getting these. Any thoughts on these particular films? I saw some very negative comments on IMDB but that site contains some of the most moronic comments I have ever read so I won't pay much attention to that.

After a slow period Kino seem to be really stepping up their releases of great silent films lately. I'm going to say something controversial now but if I were to make a list of my favourite dvd companies Kino would be third with Criterion behind them in fourth. I know the quality of their dvds is not always as perfect at is could be but they provide far more releases for me to get excited about.

[justeleblanc]

I'm with you vogler, but I'm not sure I'd place them above Criterion.

Bill Paul, who did the essay for the Heaven Can Wait disc, would claim that any film starring Lubitsch was an absolute gem, so I guess that makes One Arabian Night a gem. But who knows.

[zedz]

I don't know as much as I would like about these processes. In some cases the image appears to look very digital to me but I can't be sure. Can I ask you to have a look at these screen captures from Waxworks and I'd be interested to hear if you (and others) think these tints are digital or authentic. Those thick blue areas just don't look right to me.

My first-hand experience with original tints and tones is that they're generally pretty rough. I assume that these processes (especially toning?) don't survive the ravages of time very well, so I'd strongly suspect that the clean image you posted has been artificially created. However, that's not to say that it's an inaccurate representation of how the film would have looked. As I understand it, toning was a chemical process that changed the colour of the blacks in the image, so if an image was quite dark in its orthochromatic original, the toned version would probably have had a dominant blue shade like this.

I think most tinting and toning that we see on modern prints of silent films have been added or enhanced to reproduce the original effect - it's rare that these effects are well preserved, so the issue of originality of colours is less important than the care and sensitivity with which they're researched and applied.

Incidentally does anyone have links to any good articles which explain the tinting and toning processes?

Wikipedia is OK on tinting (but a bit vague on toning).

Here's some info from alt.movies.silent

2. Were any silents made in colour?

Yes. When you look at listings of VHS and DVD versions of silent
films for sale and see that some of them are listed as being in
colour, don't panic: Ted Turner isn't doing anything that the
original artists didn't want. Many silent filmmakers used tinting,
toning, and even early Technicolor to create moods and enhance the
narrative. Blue film stock indicated night scenes; orange indicated
heat. Some filmmakers even hired artists to paint each frame of
each print by hand.

Here is some information from Bob Birchard:

Tinting colors the film stock, giving the overall image a color tint.

Toning replaces the silver image with a color dye.

It is possible to both tint and tone an image--a common combination
in the silent era that I've seen in several original prints is a
blue or purple tone combined with a pink tint. One can achieve a
similar effect on a scanned B&W photo in Photoshop by shifting the
color balance in the shadows only to the blue, and then shifting
the color balance in the highlights only to the pink. The effect
can be quite striking.

The Chaney PHANTOM scene [...] was accomplished with the Handschiegel
(sp?) process, which was a stencil color process. This was used to
color the coins in GREED, add color to the fire by the Red Sea in
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS and to color the runaway canoe down the rapids
in the forest fire scene in THE MICHIGAN KID.

There were a wide range of colors available in the silent era, and
mostly the work was done in the laboratory--adding color to B&W
prints by dipping them in chemical solutions--rather than in the
pre-tinted stock (although there were some pre-tinted stocks
available).

Sound brought an end to hand dipping--because the variations in
dyes wreaked havoc on sound reproduction. Kodak did develop about
a half dozen pre-tinted print stocks in the early 1930's, but they
didn't see wide use.

Several studios (notably M-G-M and 20th-Fox) resumed toning in the
late 1930's for many of their "A" pictures. These were usually
sepia tone effects.

Bruce Calvert notes,

Two good sources of information are THE HISTORY OF MOVIE
PHOTOGRAPHY (pp. 112-116) by Brian Coe and BURNING PASSIONS: AN
INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF SILENT CInema by Paolo Cherchi Usai.
Both books have color examples of hand-colored, tinted and toned
film.

Chester M. Franklin's THE TOLL OF THE SEA (1922), starring Anna
May Wong, is widely regarded as the first American feature to use
the two-color Technicolor process, although the Technicolor company
made their first film, THE GULF BETWEEN, in 1916.

There is some information about colour in silent film on the Web:

"Recreating the Experience of Tinted and Toned Black and White
Prints: An Alternative Method", from the FIAF Journal of Film
Preservation
http://www.cinema.ucla.edu/fiaf/journal ... creat.html

Early Color Motion Picture Processes
http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/oldcolor/index.htm

[HerrSchreck]

I'm with you vogler, but I'm not sure I'd place them above Criterion..

Anyone whose primary love is silent film HAS to place them above the cojones free Criterion DVD line (distinguished from their LD line which was far more ballsy). Kino in my opinion, quality issues on some of their talkies notwithstanding has the most mind-blowing catalog in all home video-dom. Any hopeless devotee of super-rare silent, early sound, and avant garde cinema has no choice but adore them.

[Ledos]

Can I ask you to have a look at these screen captures from Waxworks and I'd be interested to hear if you (and others) think these tints are digital or authentic. Those thick blue areas just don't look right to me.

I don't think they're authentic. All four releases in the German Horror Classics has the same overdone, thick colours which indicates they were added later. For Nosferatu, for example, the tints have not survived (although the colour scheme used could be detected from one of the existing prints) and the tinting looks exactly the same as the other films in the set. The tints were probably not added by Kino but by the Murnau Stiftung (or whoever) as some releases of the same titles by other companies have the same tints.

[HerrSchreck]

Ledos-- remember just because they're not there on the original(s) from which a composite archive print is made doesn't mean that the tinting is not "authentic" tinting in the manner asked by vogler. If there's no tinting on a neg, for example (i e any neg in the silent era, i e the neg used for the PHANTOM resto), tinting instructions are followed today-- a b&w image is created today from the neg on top of filmstrips which have been pre-exposed to color. Sometimes if the source print is faded, a modern application of fullstrength tint will seem to overwhelm it a bit, as the tint is not generationally degraded whereas the b&w image is. That's what is visible on the WAXWORKS dvd which was restored by Bologna/LImagine Ritrovata.

You're crossing the idea of "original" tints (i e thru the 20's) with "authentic celluloid tinting or toning process". Vogler is asking if the tints are 1) post telecine, electronically added tints, or 2) authentic tints that are there on the actual celluloid.

[vogler]

OK - I think I'm convinced now that the tints are authentic ("authentic celluloid tinting or toning process"), and I'm happy to be convinced because now I can watch the DVD without whinging about those nasty digital tints. It does seem that the tints may have been rather too strong though, with some of the details being lost. Thanks for that information zedz and Schreck for your information earlier on.

Incidentally I have a copy of Marcel L'Herbiers L'Inhumaine on DVD-R which I think is from a VHS source. The quality of the digital files that I used to make the DVD are absolutely appalling (very low quality WMV) but the film has some very complex tinting. If the tinting from that VHS copy is authentic or if it at least copies the original scheme then the film has the most elaborate and complex tinting that I have ever seen. In the end portion of the film when the editing accelerates to a very rapid rate there are sometimes different tints every few frames. However if this isn't authentic then they have taken some major liberties with the restoration. I have no idea how I could find this out though. Unless Kino decide to release the film, hint, hint. Has anyone seen a tinted print of this film?

Anyone whose primary love is silent film HAS to place them above the cojones free Criterion DVD line (distinguished from their LD line which was far more ballsy). Kino in my opinion, quality issues on some of their talkies notwithstanding has the most mind-blowing catalog in all home video-dom. Any hopeless devotee of super-rare silent, early sound, and avant garde cinema has no choice but adore them.

This is exactly my reason for placing Kino above Criterion. My primary cinematic loves are Silent and Avant garde film and there are few other companies who even begin to approach Kino's catalogue in these areas. I also place the BFI and MOC above Criterion for the same reasons and in addition MOC are also catering wonderfully for one of my other main cinematic obsessions which is Japanese cinema (I also love Czech cinema and Second Run deseve a mention for that). The last new Criterion I bought was Viridiana which I love but previous to that I can't even remember what the last Criterion I bought was.

What I really want to see now is a release of the magnificent film that combines all three of my main cinematic loves - Kurutta Ippeji (A Page of Madness).

[Tommaso]

What I really want to see now is a release of the magnificent film that combines all three of my main cinematic loves - Kurutta Ippeji (A Page of Madness).

Yep, me too. I never had any chance to see it, but by all accounts this seems to be THE masterwork of Japanese silent cinema. I really wonder why it has escaped MOC's radar yet. Perhaps there is no good print available anywhere?
But incidentally, it must have been shown not too long ago in the UK, as there is a 2004 soundtrack cd around by In The Nursery (you know, these Sheffield guys who also provided those wonderful soundtracks for "Electric Edwardians" and "Man with a movie camera") , so I guess this must have been specially commissioned by some institution for screenings of the film.

[vogler]

Yep, me too. I never had any chance to see it, but by all accounts this seems to be THE masterwork of Japanese silent cinema.

Kurutta Ippeji is another film that I have an absolutely horrible quality copy of but I can confirm that it is a total masterpiece. It has to be one of the most audacious visual creations in the whole of silent cinema featuring stunning examples of just about every technique you can imagine.
There is a great article about it here for anyone that hasn't already found it. It also features an excellent interview with Mariann Lewinsky and the introduction to the interview states the following about her 'Swiss film historian and specialist of Japanese Silent Cinema has spent twenty years researching the film, and her book on the subject, "Eine verrückte Seite - Stummfilm und filmische Avantgarde in Japan" (Chronos Zürich), was published in 1997'.

But incidentally, it must have been shown not too long ago in the UK, as there is a 2004 soundtrack cd around by In The Nursery (you know, these Sheffield guys who also provided those wonderful soundtracks for "Electric Edwardians" and "Man with a movie camera") , so I guess this must have been specially commissioned by some institution for screenings of the film.

There is quite a lot of information about music for this film in the interview. I really like the music that Kinugasa produced for the 1972 re-release and I would like to see that included on any dvd release but there is a problem as stated by Mariann Lewinsky - 'Kinugasa produced a sound version for the re-release in 1972. The music is fine, but this version has one major problem: wrong projection speed. The film should be projected at 20 frames/second. Sound speed at 24 f/s destroys the rhythm and flattens movements and facial expressions in an all-over hastiness'. I wonder if it would be possible to time-stretch the music track to fit the correct running time of the film projected at the correct speed.

I fear I may be wondering off the Kino topic again here except to say that I would rather like Kino to consider trying to release this film (or even better, MOC).

[justeleblanc]

Anyone whose primary love is silent film HAS to place them above the cojones free Criterion DVD line (distinguished from their LD line which was far more ballsy). Kino in my opinion, quality issues on some of their talkies notwithstanding has the most mind-blowing catalog in all home video-dom. Any hopeless devotee of super-rare silent, early sound, and avant garde cinema has no choice but adore them.

True true true, but Kino's success is partly due to Criterion's. Without Criterion, I doubt a company like Kino would have been willing to take the chances to release these rare silent films -- probably assuming they would not have an audience.

Though you're right, recently, Kino is exciting me more than Criterion.

[HerrSchreck]

Not by much, though. Sure in 84, CC laserD were putting out stuff like Kane, Blade Runner, King Kong, Close Encounters, etc... it got a bit heavier as they went along... Red Shoes, Sweet Sweetback & some silents (more than now, and remember it was Kino that was the distributor of the janus line back in the old days), eventually working into Ozu & more obscure material, but--

they were always hardcore (Kino) versus midcore (CC)

(Last updated in 04)

Unable to find existing video distributors interested in purchasing small art films, Kino established its own label, Kino On Video, in 1987. Our first release, Mark Whitney's tapestry-like documentary on C.J. Jung, Matter Of Heart, was an immediate success, and set our new venture into video distribution off and running.

Kino on Video has grown substantially since that first release. It not only disseminates contemporary world cinema to communities and institutions which might not otherwise have access to those films, but also provides new life to many classic films which were not previously available to the public outside of a few big cities. Kino on Video has contributed significantly to the resurrection and distribution of films from the silent era, which are often prohibitively expensive to restore on film, but can be economically and beautifully preserved with new video and digital technologies.

Kino on Video issued its first series of silent films, "They Had Faces Then", in 1989. This ten title series included Erich Von Stroheim's Queen Kelly, The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari and The Phantom Of The Opera. It was a smashing success, and filled a void by providing quality restorations of films from the silent period to the home and institutional collector. Since then we have released over 130 silent films on video, many through our rewarding association with Film Preservation Associates, headed by film historian David Shepard.

Among the highlights of Kino's silent catalogue are the five-part series "The Movies Begin", consisting of 122 films made between 1894 and 1914, the ten-part series "The Art Of Buster Keaton", released in 1995 and winner of Entertainment Weekly Magazine's "Best Video of the Year" award, "The Slapstick Encyclopedia", and more recently, the 1924 version of Peter Pan.

In 1999, Kino issued its first DVD release and today has more than two hundred and fifty titles available in that popular format. Some notable Kino DVD releases include: "The Art of Buster Keaton" collection, the restored version of METROPOLIS, and the complete 14-film "American Film Theatre" series. One hundred additional titles are available on VHS only.

Kino now boasts a catalog of one of the most important libraries of classic and contemporary world cinema titles available to the home video collector -- and the critics agree! In 2002 and in 2003 Kino on Video won the prestigious Heritage Award from the National Society of Film Critics for its work in film preservation.

Our 2004 release slate contains a number of important films which we will be introducing in the coming months. We anticipate these new films, like all films carrying the Kino logo, will bring to the screen imaginative and compelling cinema experiences.

[Doug Cummings]

"Kino International is proud to release for the first time on DVD four fully restored feature films, and one short film, directed by Ernst Lubitsch (To Be or Not to Be, Ninotchka) during the period he rose to prominence as one of Germany's top filmmakers – and before he left his mark in Hollywood. The LUBITSCH IN BERLIN series includes ANNA BOLEYN (1920), SUMURUN (1920), THE WILDCAT (1921), and THE OYSTER PRINCESS (1919), together with the 45-minute short I DON'T WANT TO BE A MAN (1920). All films in this series were fully restored, in 35mm, by Germany's F. W. Murnau Foundation.

The four-DVD LUBITSCH IN BERLIN series will be available to the general public on December 5, 2006, each with a SRP of $ 29.95."

[mmacklem]

I noticed that amazon.ca has Kino as releasing a Russian film called Harvest Time. Does anyone know anything about this film?

[Doug Cummings]

This is a contemporary film from 2004 and one I enjoyed quite a bit; gorgeously shot in crisp amber tones, it details a woman's memories of growing up on a farm. Not necessarily a major work of cinema, but evocative and memorable.

[HerrSchreck]

Lubitsch's ANNA BOLEYN in hand-- looks amazingly good considering it's age. They definitely went lighter on the tints than usual... nice. Could perchance even be original tints. Simple sepia for day & blue for nights. Could have grabbed other 3 discs but also picked up FORBIDDEN PLANET & CC's VERONICA this week, so going slow on these silents as they're not my deepest passion in the silent zone, though very collectable of course and historically important. Quality on a par with the Stillers.

Kudo's to FWMS & Kino for getting it out. Wish there was a genuinely discounted box for all these.

[Ashirg]

Kino is releasing soon Ruscico's The Commissar and Quiet Flows the Don

[tryavna]

Kino is releasing soon Ruscico's The Commissar and Quiet Flows the Don

Are you quite sure that their release of The Commissar will be a port of the Ruscico? I believe they released on VHS years ago, and I'd hate to see such a short film split over two discs.