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dwk wrote: Fri Jun 12, 2026 2:21 pm

Blutarsky wrote: Fri Jun 12, 2026 7:02 am
I think the Kubrick box set is not gonna be announced until later in the month/early July. However, with Le Notti Bianche and Bellissima having new restorations touring, and Rocco and His Brothers getting a new 4K from BFI, I wonder if we will be getting an early Visconti box set in the near future?

I dont know when this happened (someone pointed it out yesterday at the Blu-ray.com forum), Criterion's website now has Le Notti Blanche listed under the title White Nights.

Here's the new touring poster

FrauBlucher wrote: Fri Jun 12, 2026 9:05 pm

dwk wrote: Fri Jun 12, 2026 2:21 pm

Blutarsky wrote: Fri Jun 12, 2026 7:02 am
I think the Kubrick box set is not gonna be announced until later in the month/early July. However, with Le Notti Bianche and Bellissima having new restorations touring, and Rocco and His Brothers getting a new 4K from BFI, I wonder if we will be getting an early Visconti box set in the near future?

I dont know when this happened (someone pointed it out yesterday at the Blu-ray.com forum), Criterion's website now has Le Notti Blanche listed under the title White Nights.

Here's the new touring poster

It’s so weird not seeing it as Le Notti Bianche. I don’t like it, change it back.

The Day of the Jackal (1973) 4k
Manji (1964) 4k
Matador (1986) 4k
The Miracle Worker (1962) 4k
Odd Obsession (1959) 4k
Signore & Signori aka The Birds, the Bees and the Italians (1966) 4k

Close The Door, Raymond wrote: Sat Jun 13, 2026 7:36 pm Signore & Signori aka The Birds, the Bees and the Italians (1966) 4k

Yeah I’m sure Criterion can’t wait to release this after the last couple weeks

Mr.DarjeelingLimited wrote: Sat Jun 13, 2026 7:09 am

FrauBlucher wrote: Fri Jun 12, 2026 9:05 pm

dwk wrote: Fri Jun 12, 2026 2:21 pm
I dont know when this happened (someone pointed it out yesterday at the Blu-ray.com forum), Criterion's website now has Le Notti Blanche listed under the title White Nights.

Here's the new touring poster

It’s so weird not seeing it as Le Notti Bianche. I don’t like it, change it back.

The anglicisation of foreign titles really must stop, le notti bianche is so lyrical. What's more White Nights conjures the Hines / Baryshnikov film.

Radiance had the good sense and yes, decency, to retain the Italian title here in the UK.

"Decency" is going a bit too far, I think. I've always found it curious which films get to keep their original-language titles and which don't when distributed in the English-speaking world, but one thing we should all be able to agree on is that a) the vast majority of foreign titles get anglicised and always have; and b) distributors' decisions on this can be quite capricious.

In some cases it makes perfect sense – e.g. commonly understood phrases like La Dolce Vita, maybe something like La Belle Noiseuse where a word is untranslatable – but I don't think anyone can deny that there's at least a bit of euro-centric thinking going on here, and particularly a favouring of Western European languages. (French, Italian and Spanish seem to fare better than other languages; it's much more unusual for a, say, Russian or Japanese film to be released here in its original language, even if the original title is a single word or something relatively easy to pronounce. Random albeit perhaps rare case in point: Obayashi's House is, I would argue, better known as Hausu among English-speaking cinephiles, but Criterion still released it with the English title.) There seem to be a lot of assumptions operating here around both the average English-speaker's familiarity with Romance languages (perhaps reasonable in the past when they were more widely taught in schools, but I suspect less so nowadays) and unfamiliarity with others in societies whose multicultural composition has extended far beyond European migration.

But it seems particularly odd to put the anglicisation of the Visconti film's title up as a hugely egregious example of this practice when the film is based on a Russian novella that is widely known in the English-speaking world as … White Nights. I guess it's just a matter of taste, but that title is plenty evocative for me! Personally, I'd save my ire for anglicised titles that are completely invented by distributors and bear no relation to the original – in some cases, like Breillat's Fat Girl, that's the director's explicit preference and should be respected, but in others I think labels like Radiance and Criterion can do some good by reversing a historical decision. But I can't say this particular case bothers me much.

House is the correct title for the Obayashi film (just like Ring, not Ringu, is the correct title for that film, so I have no idea why the licensor insisted that Arrow release it as Ringu.) I suspect that people call it Housu either because they mistakenly think that is correct or to differentiate it from the 80s horror film.

If I understand correctly, while Obayashi indeed made the conscious choice to use the borrowed English word "House" for the title, it was still released in Japan with the transliteration ハウス (i.e. Hausu) alongside the Latin-alphabet title, and would have been referred to accordingly in common parlance as "su" is the closest approximation to a hard "s" in Japanese alphabets. So people who refer to the film as such aren't totally barking up the wrong tree. (Here's an example of an original-release poster where both the Japanese and English titles are featured prominently: https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/ ... 1627543149).

Not sure how analogous it is, but I have no doubt some critics must have raised in the past the question of whether the title of Tarkovsky's Stalker should be pronounced with a hard "l" to reflect Russian pronunciation, even though it's, again, a borrowed English word. In that case, it's additionally complicated because the word has such different connotations in English that it tends to give a very different impression of the film for people who haven't previously heard of it; you get far more of a sense of its relevance to the film by thinking of it as a borrowed word in a different language that perhaps doesn't quite mean what the speaker thinks it means.

There's something similarly interesting in the decision to include the "h" in the title of Nostalghia in most of its English-language releases – it's an odd and on first glance unnecessary choice, and one can only wonder whether it's supposed to indicate that the Russian word might have slightly different connotations from its English counterpart, or if it's just a case of preferring to maintain the integrity of the original title when it's similar enough to an existing English word to offer sufficient meaning. (See also: Sátántangó.) I actually suspect a third, more nebulous explanation: there's a desire here to grant a uniqueness in an English-language context that the English word on its own lacks and to perhaps even capture an essence of cultural background in the process. "Hausu", unlike the generic "House", can only mean one thing to English-speaking cinephiles – just as the word "House" written in Latin alphabet probably meant only one thing in Japanese pop culture in 1977. So there is a kind of mirroring of intent going on there, if nothing else.