BD 135 1900

[rapta]

Coming April 18th

Eureka Entertainment are to release Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 (NOVECENTO), a stunning five-hour saga featuring an award-winning international cast including Robert De Niro and Gerard Depardieu, on Blu-ray for the first time in the UK on 18 April 2016.

After the international firestorm of Last Tango in Paris, Bernardo Bertolucci went on to create one of the grandest and most legendary epics in modern cinema. A stunning five-hour saga following the intertwined fates of two childhood friends born on the same day in 1900 at opposite ends of the social scale through five decades of class struggle. Also stars Burt Lancaster, Alida Valli, Sterling Hayden, Stefania Sandrelli and Donald Sutherland.

Specs:
• 1080p high-definition transfer
• English and Italian uncompressed PCM soundtracks
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard-of-hearing for the English audio and English subtitles for the Italian audio
• The Story, The Cast and Creating An Epic, two video pieces from 2006 featuring Bertolucci and Storaro
• Bertolucci secondo il cinema: an hour-long on-set documentary about the making of 1900
• PLUS: A booklet featuring the words of Bernardo Bertolucci, archival imagery, and more!

[Drucker]

Excellent news considering the Olive could apparently have been improved upon.

[McCrutchy]

Yes, great news. And the Olive release got me thinking: Obviously, I saw shades of The Quiet Man (though I suspect that Eureka may not be using the Paramount master, particularly as this is an MGM title in the UK), so I went back to take a look at something.

According to the BDInfo scans, yes, the Olive release is on two BD-50 discs, but, despite each disc having over 2 1/2 hours of the film, both are only about 30 GB in size, leaving over 19 GB unused on each disc. I don't understand why that was done at all, especially considering that the Olive discs have three lossless (albeit 2.0/1.0 16-bit) soundtracks. There isn't any other content on the Blu-rays, either.

So I fully expect that the encoding will again be far superior here. The biggest question is where the Eureka master comes from. I never saw the 2007 UK DVD from Fox/MGM, but apparently, it had to be redone in 2008 because they forgot the opening credits sequence? Yikes.

[Drucker]

From a Facebook comment:

• 1080p high-definition transfer
• English and Italian uncompressed PCM soundtracks
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard-of-hearing for the English audio and English subtitles for the Italian audio
• The Story, The Cast and Creating An Epic, two video pieces from 2006 featuring Bertolucci and Storaro
• Bertolucci secondo il cinema: an hour-long on-set documentary about the making of 1900
• PLUS: A booklet featuring the words of Bernardo Bertolucci, archival imagery, and more!

[L.A.]

Sorry for asking this here but which BD of Il conformista is worth getting?

[rapta]

From a Facebook comment:

• 1080p high-definition transfer
• English and Italian uncompressed PCM soundtracks
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard-of-hearing for the English audio and English subtitles for the Italian audio
• The Story, The Cast and Creating An Epic, two video pieces from 2006 featuring Bertolucci and Storaro
• Bertolucci secondo il cinema: an hour-long on-set documentary about the making of 1900
• PLUS: A booklet featuring the words of Bernardo Bertolucci, archival imagery, and more!

Ta, will put that in the OP!

Sorry for asking this here but which BD of Il conformista is worth getting?

The Arrow disc is pretty good, and cheap to boot. Seen it for as little as £5-6 recently.

[Stefan Andersson]

Excellent news.

The French language track would be a desirable addition (Dépardieu, Sanda).

[beamish13]

Is there a snowball's chance in hell of this film's deleted scenes ever resurfacing-or even an excerpt from the original script?

[nitin]

Sorry for asking this here but which BD of Il conformista is worth getting?

the current Raro is the best, although still far from perfect.

[Dylan]

Is there a snowball's chance in hell of this film's deleted scenes ever resurfacing-or even an excerpt from the original script?

Curious, what are the deleted scenes you're referring to? I've never read about them.

It would be interesting to see a restored version of the American theatrical release become available, even if by all accounts it's inferior to the European version.

[Feego]

"The Story, The Cast" and "Creating an Epic" video pieces were featured on the Paramount DVD, so I wonder if that means the master will come from Paramount as well.

On another note, are there any preferences for language tracks? I've yet to see the film myself. I have the Olive Blu-ray, which features English, Italian, and French tracks. I'm sure all of the American actors' voices can be heard in the English track, which makes it my first choice, but are there good cases to be made for the other soundtracks?

[TMDaines]

I personally go with Italian. It's pretty common not to get the original actor's voice in Italian, and other European, films of that period. So many non-Italian-speaking stars were cast in Italian films at this time and there's even notable cases of filmmakers choosing to dub Italian speakers with a different voice of their choosing. Dubbing was a tool employed by directors, many of whom were quite happy to cast one person for visuals/acting and another for voice for both the "original" dub and any number of other language versions. Whilst it might strike us as perverse coming from countries where dubbing people with others is not standard practice, evidently people thought differently elsewhere where dubbing was a massive part of the film industry.

Ultimately with 1900, you are going to get plenty of original voices and dubbed voices no matter what track you choose.

* Of course, there are plenty of "Italian" films, which are actually English-language affairs and the Italian dub is exactly that for a specific market who does not want subtitles.

[Feego]

Thanks, I'll keep that in mind. I may sample a bit of both English and Italian tracks before I actually watch the whole film (whenever that day comes).

[ando]

I'm braving Paramount's open vault version on YT tonight. Not sure about the specs on this one but it'll do til April 18th comes round.

[TMDaines]

Beaver

I might eventually swap my Olive release for the MoC for the different extras.

[Altair]

Caps-a-Holic on the new remastered German BD. Grain and detail increase over the MoC but there is a dramatic colour shift, particularly noticable in the screencap of the wagon train, which goes from almost desaturated to a rather teal-esque grading... I don't know the provenance of the restoration, does anyone have any perspective on this?

[tenia]

It's a 4k restoration performed by Ritrovata. It was released on BD a few years ago. Storaro supervised it and Bertolucci had a look at it since it was finalised just before his death.

I think this one is particularly awful, but I don't think one second the older gradings were faithful either.

[Altair]

Ah, I feared as much. I will have to stick with the MoC for the time being.

[jegharfangetmigenmyg]

It's a 4k restoration performed by Ritrovata. It was released on BD a few years ago. Storaro supervised it and Bertolucci had a look at it since it was finalised just before his death.

I think this one is particularly awful, but I don't think one second the older gradings were faithful either.

Are you referring to the French blu-ray from Wildside here? What baffles me is that the color grading between the Koch and that one again differs dramatically, even though it looks to come from the same restoration. To me, the Koch BD is clearly superior with the Wildside suffering from all the typical Ritrovata trademarks. It even looks like the Koch has been de-ritrovata'ed in a way similar to what Arrow did with their Tree of Wooden Clogs: https://caps-a-holic.com/c.php?go=1&a=0 ... 38&i=7&l=0

[ChunkyLover]

Are you referring to the French blu-ray from Wildside here? What baffles me is that the color grading between the Koch and that one again differs dramatically, even though it looks to come from the same restoration. To me, the Koch BD is clearly superior with the Wildside suffering from all the typical Ritrovata trademarks. It even looks like the Koch has been de-ritrovata'ed in a way similar to what Arrow did with their Tree of Wooden Clogs: https://caps-a-holic.com/c.php?go=1&a=0 ... 38&i=7&l=0

The Wildside looks like a case of having botched gamma settings.

[tenia]

For 1900, it rather looks like Koch tried to remove the Ritrovata color signature for their release.