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Seems comparable imagewise with the French subbed Carlotta CAMELIE (in their MA set with RED DESERT & CRONACA DI UN AMORE)...

The Story of Sin (1975)

DVD Poland (Propaganda Film)


DVD England (Nouveaux Pictures)




Walerian Borowczyk on DVD

Mr Bongo's El Bruto, with framegrabs chosen to match the ones in this Beaver review of the Facets edition. I haven't seen that in motion, but it's obvious just from the framegrabs that Mr Bongo's edition is significantly better, with a brighter, clearer picture offering more detail.

The print source was clearly the same, as the damage is identical (though the four-way tramline is thankfully brief) - but, as the last grab reveals, the interlacing present on the Facets is not an issue here: it's a progressive transfer that appears to be native PAL (it's three minutes shorter than the Facets, which one would expect as a by-product of PAL speedup).

In a nutshell, far from perfect, but very watchable (it looks better in motion than the screencaps suggest), and I doubt there'll be a superior edition along any time soon.

...and here's Mr Bongo's Susana, again with grabs chosen to match this Beaver review of the Facets edition.

Not much to say: the Facets looks dreadful, whereas Mr Bongo's disc, while clearly from an analogue tape source, is very watchable indeed - as with El Bruto, it looks better in motion than these grabs suggest. I'm guessing that both versions had a common source, but Mr Bongo's appears to be much less compromised.

Second Run's A Blonde in Love, taken from a final production copy. Grabs chosen to match this Beaver comparison.

Eyes Without a Face (Franju, 1960).

Top: French blu-ray, Gaumont, NO ENGLISH SUBS (click the images for full 1920x1080 res.)
Bottom: Criterion Collection dvd









The French blu-ray has no English subs, and is missing a brief scene, that is on the Criterion DVD. It's listed as Region ABC on the cover.

From the Portuguese "Raúl Ruiz - Raridades" box set, discussed in the Ruiz on DVD thread. More caps are available here. All the films have English subtitles (except when the dialogue is already in English). Point de fuite has burnt-in French subtitles in the scenes where English is spoken.

I admit that I have no idea if the software I'm using (Totem Movie Player on Ubuntu) is actually much good.

City of Pirates





Point de fuite





The Territory



Love Torn in Dream



Again, there's more here.

EDIT: Apologies for the previously non-working images.

You Only Live Once BD

Region B, C.
codec: MPEG-4 AVC, 1080p; feature size: 22, 2 GB
Audio: DTS-HD 2.0 (It), Dolby Digital 2.0 (Eng, It)
Subs: Italian (HoH)

frames:






and: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4

That Obscure Object of Desire - Italian BD

Region B/C locked. DTS-HD 2.0 Italian track, Dolby Digital 2.0 French and Italian track.

Italians SDH subs, no English subs.



More images here.

Ladri di Biciclette (Italian BD)

Codec: MPEG-4 AVC, 1080p.; feature size: 21, 1 GB.
AR 1.33:1
Audio: DTS-HD 2.0, Dolby Digital 2.0.
Languages: Italian.
Subs: Italian (HoH), English.

PS. the English subs are great.

just another couple of grabs from the Italian disc of Bicycle Thieves (compare with DVDBeaver) )

Images from 1PM DVD (Pennebaker Hegedus Films DVD):

Len Lye: Rhythms (Re:Voir DVD-R, R0 PAL) buy from BFI Filmstore

menu screen


A Colour Box


Rainbow Dance


Trade Tattoo


Free Radicals

The BFI's Un Chien andalou, taken from the DVD (I can't do Blu-ray captures, but the source master is the same). The images were deliberately chosen to match these Beaver grabs:













Conclusion: although obviously sourced from the same 1960 restoration and showing many of the same issues regarding age-related damage, even the 576p version of the new BFI transfer is a very noticeable improvement on the old BFI one, which in turn was clearly superior to the Facets. The 1080p version isn't a dramatic advance, but it does offer noticeably more detail.

...and here's the BFI's new L'Âge d'or, again from the DVD, grabs also chosen to match this Beaver review. The 1080p version is dramatically better (a much more marked improvement over the 576p version than is the case with Un Chien andalou), but even this version shows a distinct advance on the previous edition, not least because it's been framed correctly at 1.19:1 - there's much more at the top of the compositions than there was before.

For comparison to the BFI of Un chien andalou, stills from the Filmoteca Española DVD:

Second Run's Szindbád, sourced from the recent Hungarian National Film Archive transfer. Note that this is from a test pressing on DVD-R, not the final production version.

You have just sold a dozen copies of Szindbad.

...And one salad. Seriously everything about this film that is introduced to me makes me want to throw a feast.

Merry-Go-Round (1981, Rivette). PAL, R2, dual-layered, Ripley's Home Video, no English subtitles (forced Italian subtitles, but not burnt-in).

Merry-Go-Round (1981, Rivette).

Two sceen captures from the German Kinowelt/Arthaus 4-disc Rivette box for comparison.
PAL, R2, dual-layered, no English subtitles (German subs, not forced).

Second Sight's long-awaited The Colour of Pomegranates, the first three grabs deliberately chosen to match this comparison.

The subtitles are optional, but I thought I'd include them on one grab so you can see what they look like - and also to show that Second Sight have conscientiously identified the language being spoken.

[rest of post deleted because of superior grabs below]

I've uploaded some screen captures taken via DGIndex, so without the aliasing seen above

MichaelB wrote:Second Sight's long-awaited The Colour of Pomegranates, the first three grabs deliberately chosen to match this comparison.

The subtitles are optional, but I thought I'd include them on one grab so you can see what they look like - and also to show that Second Sight have conscientiously identified the language being spoken.

[rest of post deleted because of superior grabs below]

So with the SecondSight website stating the language as Georgian this release is one of the so called "Director's Cut", am I right? The releases of this film confuse me.

The Second Sight website is unintentionally misleading, I'm afraid. It will definitely be the Yutkevich version, which has (mostly) the same soundtrack as the Armenian release version (the so-called "director's cut") but uses Russian-language credits and chapter titles. Most of the soundtrack is actually in Armenian, though there is a smaller amount of Georgian and Azerbaijani Turkish. (The poet Sayat-Nova wrote in all three languages.)