Not sure is this the first Australian silent on Blu-ray but National Film and Sound Archive of Australia has released The Kid Stakes (1927) quite recently. From their site:
Please Note: This Bluray is produced in BD-R format ('burned') and as such may not play in certain Bluray players. Please check your equipment.
If it's a BD-R then no thanks.
I have The Sentimental Bloke (1918) which is a normal DVD. What about those other silents released by NFSA, are they normal DVDs as well?
rockysds wrote:Last year Les Documents Cinématographiques released a completely English friendly release of four surviving Louis Delluc films, recently restored in 2K: Le Chemin d'Ernoa, La Femme de nulle part, Fièvre and L'Inondation plus a disc of extras (also English subbed) that includes fragments from La Fête espagnole.
I recently became aware of this and purchased through amazon.fr and having now seen the middle two feel confident enough to recommend it. Not eye-popping discs, but it looks like decent prints transferred ably and the films themselves are very strong.
Having this in my Amazon basket for some time I noticed it being suddenly not available anymore. I wrote Les Documents Cinématographiques and they informed me that they are indeed almost out of stock. They have some for their own shop and a further handful was supplied to Amazon.fr, but then apparently that's it. So those interested should probably strongly consider buying this set.
According to this article a DVD is coming. Do I understand this correctly?
This site of the Bundesarchiv, published four days after the Deutschlandfunk article, clearly states that the film can not be purchased, it is only accessible at the Bundesarchiv. That may change in a few years though.
Given all the attention this restauration gets - if only because of the Luther anniversary year - I'm quite optimistic that some label will officially release a dvd later this year; or at least an arte TV broadcast seems very likely to me.
Tommaso wrote: I never even noticed the BFI had released "South"
The BFI South dvd is a beautiful package. I bought if for my Mother's birthday due to her interest in Shackleton's expedition and whilst I have not had a chance to watch it all the way through yet (she lives many hundreds of miles from me) I did watch some of it and it looks absolutely beautiful. It is also such incredibly valuable archive material and I was amazed that it exists at all. I've been meaning to buy a copy for myself and I'll get there in the end.
Watched this today and the BFI DVD is really buggy. I couldn’t get many of the extras to play on my PC with any player (VLC, Kodi, PotPlayer). Seems to be fine on my Blu-ray player, but very odd.
I actually bought that one two months ago when I was on holiday in Portugal. It was a blind buy, but I'm very happy that I made it, as the film is a very entertaining 'mainstream' silent, very stylish and suspenseful, and I'm pretty sure that anyone who is into Feuillade or 'pulpy' silent crime stories will certainly enjoy it. But what makes this release truly remarkable is the excellent restoration and transfer quality, the very fine new music, and the outstanding quality of the bilingual 64-page booklet and the extras which detail everything that is needed to come to an understanding of this film and Portuguese silent cinema in general. The extra middle-length film "Rita ou Rito?", while not as great as the main film, is also rather entertaining. Portuguese silent cinema is probably not very well known outside the country itself, but this release is a great starting point. On the same level as anything released by Edition Filmmuseum or MoC, this is one of my most favourite silent releases this year.
Dive! Lyda Borelli • Francesca Bertini sure looks impressive. I think Rapsodia Satanica is first time on DVD while the other three have been available for some while.
Since everyone's talking Anna May Wong today, it's a good time to announce we're preparing a release of her 1923 film DRIFTING, directed by Tod Browning, restored by the George Eastman Museum. Anthony Slide recorded his commentary track earlier this week, and Phil Carli is working on the score.
Don't know where to put this curiosity, but someone has made a 4K 60fps version of Arrival of a Train and posted it on Youtube. This looks like a result from the same technology behind the 48fps "restoration" of The Horse Thief.
Reminds me of my parent's TV settings. Edison's films back then were shot at around 40fps I believe. Are they available to see somewhere at this speed ?
andyli wrote: Wed Feb 05, 2020 5:52 am
Don't know where to put this curiosity, but someone has made a 4K 60fps version of Arrival of a Train and posted it on Youtube. This looks like a result from the same technology behind the 48fps "restoration" of The Horse Thief.
That's barely worth the time it takes to watch it. Interesting only in that the ugly motion smoothing simulates what the event would look like if shot on video (which, given the age of the original footage, is marginally more intriguing than seeing any late 20th century 35mm-sourced film on an HD television with motion smoothing left on).
When I saw this in my Facebook feed this morning, I noticed that someone commented that they hoped this same technology could be applied to Metropolis.
Huh, seems I'm going against the grain here in saying that it's somewhat interesting as a historical document, but I definitely wouldn't want to watch an entire film like that (or have it replace the original). As a window into the past, though, it's kind of neat.
There were a variety of "It's an educational opportunity! It's making people interested in silent film!" reactions on Twitter to this. Which, sure, I guess that's a half-decent side effect, but besides "burn it with fire," this made me think that if people just saw properly projected quality film restorations, they'd be just as floored. Having really only casually watched B&W and silent film on TV or terrible PD DVDs prior to the past five years, I remember how surprised I was, when I first started seeing it on film in a theater, that B&W film photography could look that good, that realistic, with that much depth and detail.
Well I certainly did shout out "Aaaargh! It's coming right at me!" and try to dodge away from the screen, but probably not for the reasons the original filmmakers intended!
The restored version of the Laurel & Hardy short The Battle of the Century (1927) will debut on BD on 6/16/20 as part of Sonar Entertainment / Kit Parker Film's Laurel & Hardy: The Definitive Restorations release. It's the only silent short on the set of two features (Sons of the Desert, Way Out West) and 17 shorts. More info on blu-ray.com. Thad Komorowski also confirms in that thread that Sonar now has the US rights to all the silent L&H films, so ideally this set will do well enough for future volumes.
Wikipedia:
"The original version was 2,507 metres long, the equivalent of 92 minutes. The reconstructed version is 2,357 metres long, which corresponds to about 90 minutes. On 11 January 2001 ARTE broadcast a version reconstructed in 1995 by the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv in Berlin, Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung and the Deutsches Filminstitut with the cooperation of Jugoslovenska Kinoteka in Belgrad. This version had new music by Henning Lohner and was also given background noises and the sound effects of an interrogation scene off, which was not universally approved. Since then the film has been shown at many film festivals worldwide. Another version was released on DVD by Kino Lorber in 2008, based on the 1995 reconstruction and restored by Bret Wood with a score by composer Paul Mercer and additional footage courtesy of The Raymond Rohauer Collection in Columbus, Ohio. The Filmarchiv Austria has restored the film with material from its archives. It will premiere at Konzerthaus Wien on June 13, 2013 as part of the Vienna Music Festival, with a new score by American composer Donald Sosin, performed by the composer at the piano and Dennis James at the Rieger organ."
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hands ... 1924_film)
