ltfontaine wrote:On the other hand, we regularly see on this forum evidence that many discriminating DVD buyers, presumably including much of the audience for Vampyr, will defer buying even a great film on disc if the quality is less than Criterion-perfect. Markéta Lazarová, The Red and the White, and others from Second Run.
Just to be absolutely clear, the transfer of
Marketa Lazarová (one of Second Run's best) is much, much better than
The Red and the White (one of their worst) - the two really shouldn't be mentioned in the same sentence. But that's still part of the problem - "very good" isn't the same as "perfect", which means that there are bound to be nitpickers.
I think part of the problem is that obsessive film buffs rarely pay that much heed to economic factors - which is fair enough: they probably don't worry that much about supermarket logistics either. When I ran a repertory cinema getting stopped by people in the foyer with nitpicky complaints was an occupational hazard - they wanted to know why we'd left out such-and-such an "obvious" title from a season (as though I hadn't spent months trying to track down a print) or why I hadn't rejected a less than wonderful print out of hand (because it was literally the only bookable one in the country, and the alternative would have been not screening it at all), or why we'd shown an obscure rarity on a Wednesday afternoon instead of a Saturday night (go on, have a wild guess).
Back then, though, people were prepared to put up with a lot more than seems to be the case now. We showed some frankly dreadful prints - I recall one of Clouzot's
Le Corbeau that looked like Pixelvision and sounded worse - and got remarkably few complaints, because I think people knew that they had no practical alternative, and neither did we.
The problem with the DVD revolution is that it's massively raised people's expectations, in many cases to a frankly unrealistic level. Believe me, the more conscientious labels would
love to source everything from an HD master of a graded telecine of the original camera negative, and they're not deliberately spitting in the face of their audience when they don't.
There are a great many cases where labels are well aware that they're releasing a flawed product, but do so anyway. This is usually because there's no realistic alternative (either because no superior materials exist or it would be unfeasibly expensive to prepare them) - and by the time this is discovered, a substantial sum of money has usually been spent already on rights clearance and other logistics. So they're left with the unenviable choice of releasing something less than perfect and awaiting the ire of discerning customers, or not releasing it and writing off the costs. Unsurprisingly, most labels would opt for the former, provided it didn't damage their reputation too much. And I can't really blame them.
But that's what absolutely separates conscientious labels like Second Run and MoC from cheapskate operators like Facets. They don't always get it perfect, but they do genuinely try to do their best with the materials and money to hand. And both labels have done an amazing job of spinning silk purses from some pretty hideous sow's ears in their time.
It's also highly relevant that Second Run and MoC are both British operations - because the discerning cinephile market in the UK is several times smaller than its equivalent in the US, and transatlantic imports are overwhelmingly biased in the R1-to-R2 direction. As we've discussed elsewhere in these forums, in the European independent arthouse DVD market, you're doing well if you manage to shift over a thousand units per title, exceptionally well if you manage five thousand, and you've got a major blockbuster if you break five figures. Compare this with the likes of Anchor Bay in the US, which releases "limited editions" of 50,000 and 100,000!
Come to think of it, maybe Second Run and MoC should individually number all their discs and try that marketing tactic?
