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The Colour of Pomegranates reviewed @ DVD Compare.

DVDBeaver review of The Colour of Pomegranates

And cue the colour-timing debate.

Apperson wrote:DVDBeaver review of The Colour of Pomegranates

And cue the colour-timing debate.

It's nice to see the review up already, thanks!

The question of color timing is very complicated with this film, I think due in part to its release history.

The only thing I can say, if it is helpful at all, is that the vintage (but not too badly faded) print of the original Armenian version that I saw on a few occasions years ago had a different look compared to the Yutkevich version. I saw the Armenian version first and was immediately struck by the difference in color when I saw a newer print of the Yutkevich version not long afterwards. I wouldn't necessarily expect the two versions to look the same.

One of the challenges associated with this film has always been the poor quality film stock available to Parajanov and his cinematographer, Suren Shahbazyan. Parajanov complained about this both in telegrams and to individuals while he was working on the film. I suspect that must have an impact on what anyone is able to do with the film, restoration-wise. That said, as I have noted elsewhere, the World Cinema Project restoration has brought out colors and textures that I have not seen before.

Amazon has sent an e-mail that the release will be delayed. The site shows the release date as 19 February. Amazon tells me to expect the delivery (in US) in early March.

The Arrow Blu-ray versions of The Colour of Pomegranates offer linear PCM 2.0 channel mono tracks (16-bit) for both cuts.

Glad I'm not the only one to copy-paste base-text from older reviews.

dshooker wrote:

The Arrow Blu-ray versions of The Colour of Pomegranates offer linear PCM 2.0 channel mono tracks (16-bit) for both cuts.

Glad I'm not the only one to copy-paste base-text from older reviews.

It's already corrected, though.

L'Immagine Ritrovata based their restoration on an early release print in Orwo color, which certainly seems logical and methodologically sound.

... and then simply graded the movie using their usual LUT table, like they always do.

The tealness of some of these screenshots will always be heavily apparent when put right next to screenshots with less teal.

It's not only the tealness but the overall pale yellow aspect with milky blacks. Even without reference, it compares with just so many other colour restorations graded by Bologna that at this point, there is no need for comparison references anymore. It's something I wrote recently about in the 100 Years of Olympic Films, for instance, where the gradings performed at Bologna can be guessed without even looking at the restoration credits, just because the overall color-grading speaks for itself. Caps like the ones at the end of Beaver review (#0508, 0700 and 1022 notably) don't have comparative references but they still look like a Bologna job. It's all the more ironic to see a technical specificity popping up like "A vintage print of the film produced on Orwo stock was used to guide the grading phase." but in the end, it looks no different than stuff that have nothing to do with Orwo stock or Russian film stock stories.

As a whole, it has already be discussed here and there multiple times, but it really seems more and more urgent that their grading methods are looked into. How many colour movies that never looked the same before will Bologna need to grade this way for the industry do something about it ?
This is becoming the "HD magenta push", and we're now several years into this.

I still can't understand how we put up with this for years (those 2 specific studios that do this), and noone says a word.

When has no one said a word about it?

I've never seen a print of this film with deep blacks, and I think it would be a mistake to use conventional wisdom in judging its look. I'm going to leave things at that.

I can't be the only one who just really doesn't care about individual restoration houses and rolls my eyes when threads are regularly sidetracked to discuss something that will never change

I suppose that Costa writes more about the industry than people like us who, technically, are mostly outside the industrial decision makers.

The only direct industry-related people I can think of who have explicitly criticized their grading method are Camera Obscura. But even so, they explained they had to re-do the grading afterwards, not that they discussed this point with Bologna in order for them to just not do the grading this way in the first place. Even Arrow went the hidden way to re-do the Olmi's grading, but without stating directly why they felt the color-grading from Bologna was so incorrect it needed to be deeply modified.

jsteffe wrote:I've never seen a print of this film with deep blacks, and I think it would be a mistake to use conventional wisdom in judging its look.

It's not a question of using "conventional wisdom in judging its look", but a question of why despite having a seemingly very specific look, it actually looks the same than many other Bologna restorations, making it not specific at all anymore.

If Pomegranates ever had a specific look, it now simply looks very similar to the 2 Hunebelle movies I've seen from Pathé recently, some gialli Arrow released like Your Vice is a Locked Door or Argento's Deep Red, The Tree of Wooden Clogs, Dragon Inn, or 2 of the Olympic Games movies. What's the rationale for this ?

Bologna are pretty much the only ones to do this (Eclair does it, but it's visibly a different LUT table though yellow is also pushed), in a way that no matter how unique the look of the movies they're restoring, they all end up looking the same.
You can't recognize the movies' photography specificity anymore. The only visible signature is the lab's one. Are Bologna the only ones in the world to be given movies that originally looked this way ? I doubt it. Very highly.

Ribs wrote:I can't be the only one who just really doesn't care about individual restoration houses

It’s not a question of individual restoration house, it’s a question of having faithful restorations, full stop.
Currently, I strongly believe that most (if not all) the movies graded this way by Bologna simply aren't vastly unfaithful when it comes to color gradings, and it feels important enough so that the concerned titles are pointed out for this in the same way that, say, an incorrect AR should be pointed out.

Ribs wrote:something that will never change

It might be a naive thing, but in some ways, I refuse to overlook this because we, at our level here, are unlikely to have this changed in the very near future. However, not saying anything will certainly won't have this change at all.

But if some feels it's an issue to discuss this in each concerned disc (which is understandable), I'm happy to have my post moved in a dedicated topic and centralise the discussion there.

dshooker wrote:

The Arrow Blu-ray versions of The Colour of Pomegranates offer linear PCM 2.0 channel mono tracks (16-bit) for both cuts.

Glad I'm not the only one to copy-paste base-text from older reviews.

Arrow has never released this title on any format, so what is this “older review” of which you speak?

That was the original wording in DVD Beaver's review of the Second Sight release.

I know, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m wondering what this “older review” can possibly have been.

Whatever he just previously wrote.

I just assumed he meant that Gary had started with an older review of some Arrow title and replaced the title correctly but forgot to change the name of the label in this one instance.

MichaelB wrote:I know, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m wondering what this “older review” can possibly have been.

Swo17 summarizes my intention. Reading that part of the review just gave me a chuckle since I make similar mistakes in the technical writing pieces I do for my grad program. Apologies if I wasn't clear!

tenia, besides THE TREE OF WOODEN CLOGS, could you supply me with some additional examples that you have observed of L'Immagine Ritrovata restorations affected by this color shift? I am very much interested in this question and want to research it further.

jsteffe wrote:tenia, besides THE TREE OF WOODEN CLOGS, could you supply me with some additional examples that you have observed of L'Immagine Ritrovata restorations affected by this color shift? I am very much interested in this question and want to research it further.

Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key, The Black Cat, What Have You Done to Solange? (color corrected for Arrow), Deep Red (color corrected for Arrow), Dragon Inn, A Touch of Zen, Mariage Italian Style, Death Walks on High Heels, Death Walks at Midnight, The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave, The Red Queen Kills Seven Times, The Bloodstained Butterly, Fist of Fury, The Big Boss, Game of Death, Way of the Dragon (all 4 color corrected for Shout), The 10th Victim, Manila in the Claws of Light, Property is no longer a theft, A Better Tomorrow, Once Upon A Time In America, White Vertigo (Olympic movie), Rome 60 - The Grand Olympics (Olympic movie), Purple Noon (Studio Canal restoration), Fellini Roma, Amarcord (new 2015 4K restoration), Hunebelle's Les 3 mousquetaires, Pane e cioccolata, and probably some others I forgot or aren't available on video yet (Santa Vina and KAKABAKABA KA BA? look like they have a similar grading).

What worrying is that their Asian venture titles (the Bruce Lee, notably) show the exact same grading, so they're geographically expanding it.

In some regards, L'amant and Indochine are often perceived as revisionisticly graded. Same goes for Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources. I would also argue that Banzai seems very modernly graded.

They're also not the only ones doing this (though their restorations' grading really have a very specific aspect). Digimages with Les demoiselles de Rochefort and Les parapluies de Cherbourg isn't far away when it comes to white balance, and Eclair have done very yellow things for Gaumont (many many Gaumont Découverte titles are very modernly graded : La 7e victime, Il était une fois un flic, La valise, Une saison en enfer, Coup de tête, Laisse aller c'est une valse, Un nuage entre les dents, Eaux profondes..., but also some Classiques titles like Black Moon, Atlantic City, Marie Antoinette, ...) but not only : Ran (Studio Canal) is also quite off regarding white balance, and many Pathé titles are modern-looking now : La reine Margot, Mort d'un pourri, Pour la peau d'un flic, Garçon, ... Finally, Eclair also are the ones behind L'argent, or the recent Costa-Gavras restorations.
Rather than being overly yellow or pale, their work usually is cold, with strong modern blues.


It's all the more fascinating that I can pretty much pinpoint when it started to happen, because the very first restoration I remember seeing and thinking "god, I've never seen a movie graded that way" was L'homme de Rio in May 2013 (through the TF1 Video release). This is a work by Eclair.


Now, when they do the scanning only but not the grading, the result isn't looking the same at all. A typical example is what Criterion is doing / has done (ie Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, A Brighter Summer Day or Breaker Morant), because they only very rarely relies on the labs grading, instead using their own colorist Lee Kline. Arrow has started doing this, it seems.

Finally, you don't see Vinegar Syndrome, or Shout, Criterion, Arrow, Warner, Sony, Universal or Fox's restorations looking this way. None of them look yellow like this or blue like this, and more specifically, their movies don't end up having one unique look !



NB : note that I can't say, factually speaking, that Bologna's grading is faithful or not. What I'm debating is how they're giving all the restorations they're grading the same look, despite the concerned movies being totally different and many many other labs never grading movies this way. I'm also debating why we never had movies graded this way before circa 2013, and now, movies graded like this are a recurring thing. I just look like specific laboratories' thing, and my concern is that this is a pretty much the new Magenta Push.
As I wrote in the past, it seems abnormal to me that the movies' photographies are now lost behind the lab's signature. This movie was lit this way ? Printed on this stock ? This person was the DoP ? Marvelous, except it just looks like a Ritrovata grading and there's just no way to find out the movie's specificity now.
For instance, I can already predict how Legend of the Mountain will look, and probably Memories of Underdevelopment too.

Does someone here have connections to the industry so that an influential film writer may want to publish something about this issue and bring visibility to it, rather than it just remaining a forum topic?

tenia wrote:Game of Death, Way of the Dragon,

Shout color corrected these two as well, but all four of their Bruce Lee titles are OOP.