Bluebeard's Castle

[Black Hat]

My copy arrived today without a booklet.

[swo17]

Where did you order it?

[Black Hat]

Rarewaves. No clue why, but I never realized the BFI ships stateside until today.

[DeprongMori]

A month or so ago, BFI had just sold out their first run, and Rarewaves was out of stock. I figured that when Rarewaves restocked it would be sans booklet. The only place that had the title in stock at the time was DiabolikDVD, and the copy I got from them did have a booklet, as expected as it was before the second run.

[domino harvey]

I'm just wondering how there can be an optional English language "track". Or maybe I'm misreading. Wouldn't they have had to film the thing twice?

Presumably they had separate audio stems of the singers and the orchestra, so it would just be a case of the singers re-recording their parts in sync. Which doesn't sound too onerous.

Now that I have this in hand, I can shed a little light on the language options. The disc features the original German language version of the film, presented without subtitles as was Powell’s wish. He wanted the viewer to be totally immersed in the sound and image without distraction.

Several years later, Powell decided to add limited on-screen English text (not quite subtitles, more like brief, contextualizing text overlaid on the image). The disc uses the same video for this version with a digital recreation of the titles (which is done very well—the titles look exactly like the old style of burned-in subtitles you used to see on film prints).

Finally, there is an alternate English language recording of the audio, performed by the same singers and musicians, that was intended for a separately shot English language version that ended up not happening. This is presented as an alternate audio track. The music is in sync, but the lip movements are obviously still German, so you could technically call it an English dub track.

Watched this yesterday and I must have hit the wrong subtitle selection because every lyric was translated-- presumably these were the dubtitles. I didn’t mind it though, as I have no problem ignoring dumb directorial decisions like this anymore than I feel bad about skipping Godard’s “Navajo” subtitles. I know Bluebeard fairly well cinematically at the point but the film isn’t a silent picture, you miss a lot if you don’t know the language or the outline. That said, I found this merely okay. I enjoyed the visual flourishes and set dressing stagecraft, but I’d rather spend my time with other, more interesting murdering husbands (the memories of Carradine, Burton, and Denner all loom large over my ability to vibe with this)