Eclipse Series 47: Abbas Kiarostami - Early Shorts and Features

[Matt]

This one's 3 discs but it may be more instructive to consider it as featuring nearly 10 hours of content

I'm sure we'll get a minimum of two features (up to four hours) per disc for the Blu-ray sets instead of the one per disc of the DVD sets.

[zedz]

And no Report, which is odd, since Criterion have released it already as an extra.

I can only assume they’re bringing it out to the main line, with a new transfer and extras.

That would be pretty big news for a film that only survives as an ancient analogue video copy of a copy. I was assuming it was the terrible elements that kept it off this new set (and the fact that they've already released it).

[ryannichols7]

... (surprised they haven't done Ten yet)...

Given the rape and, to a much lesser degree, plagiarism allegations, I'm not surprised that Ten (and 10 on Ten) have been shelved.

while fair, I would think that would be enough for them to have shelved all releases for his movies if they were going to do so, but we had quite a few releases of his work since those allegations came out. I know obviously that all centers around Ten specifically, but nonetheless

EDIT: I went back and read all of our posts on this subject from back in 2022. Criterion has obviously held their ground but it wasn't until today that I learned Letterboxd credits the movie as a codirection with Akbari, which of course got very well disputed. I don't blame Criterion for avoiding it, instead quietly releasing his other movies to.... absolutely zero controversy whatsoever, including praise for this very boxset

[dwk]

... (surprised they haven't done Ten yet)...

Given the rape and, to a much lesser degree, plagiarism allegations, I'm not surprised that Ten (and 10 on Ten) have been shelved.

while fair, I would think that would be enough for them to have shelved all releases for his movies if they were going to do so, but we had quite a few releases of his work since those allegations came out. I know obviously that all centers around Ten specifically, but nonetheless

EDIT: I went back and read all of our posts on this subject from back in 2022. Criterion has obviously held their ground but it wasn't until today that I learned Letterboxd credits the movie as a codirection with Akbari, which of course got very well disputed. I don't blame Criterion for avoiding it, instead quietly releasing his other movies to.... absolutely zero controversy whatsoever, including praise for this very boxset

I imagine that the market for Iranian cinema is so small that it likely wouldn't get much flak from the general population, but who knows what controversy will break containment.

[pistolwink]

It's worth noting that the film itself (that is, Ten) has unusually short and simple credits that comprise cards with the names of the main players and crew—including both Akbari and Kiarostami—and that's it. So although the film understandably was treated as an "Abbas Kiarostami film" the actual credits are more ambiguous. IIRC Akbari says this was part of Kiarostami's attempt to obfuscate the circumstances of the film's making.

[nicolas]

Received my copy today. When knowing how some of Criterion's most recent multi-film sets turned out quality-wise (the Akerman and Rohmer in particular), I went into this one with low expectations but as Kiarostami is one of my favorite directors, I still hoped for the best. Well, what can I say... I think I just stumbled across Criterion's best BD boxset encodes. Yep, bold statement but I'm convinced of it.

All three discs have +/- 3 hours of video material with visual characteristics across a wide spectrum of aspect ratios, colors, grain structures and source materials. I've checked all of the 17 films and they look glorious when it comes to encoding. Everything that gave NexSpec (assuming they did the encodes) trouble in the past is so much better here that it almost feels like another authoring house worked on the set. They had problems with shadows and darker, near-black areas; with brighter, creamy colors; coarser grain; resolving the color red and securing a generally stable appearance with many color films. None of this is the case in the extent we've previously had to endure and in most films these anomalies are actually totally absent.

In short, these are beautifully organic presentations that far exceed how they look on streaming and the French Potemkine boxset,...

...because Criterion put in extra work into the masters! Yes, another surprise I think no one saw coming. As was previously discussed when these restorations were launched, Ritrovata did the gradings and it absolutely shows, particularly in the color films but even those in black and white got their treatment that favors elevated blacks and a limited dynamic range. For screenshots, see tenia's review here. I based my comparisons on these caps.

Criterion came to the rescue and did the following two improvements:

- They corrected the gamma for all the films to much better levels. Blacks still aren't OLED-deep (and they shouldn't be) but lower to a point where the little amount of shadow detail that survived Ritrovata's unfortunate grading is still intact on the Criterion BDs yet it blends in better with the rest of the images. This has a positive effect on the color films as well as they appear less washed out and more colorful.
- They adjusted the brightness levels for Bread and Alley and Breaktime, both of which looked incredibly dim and dynamic range limited in their native masters. You'd never think anything was ever wrong with these when seeing the Criterion masters.

The color gradings are still the same, for better or worse but this isn't Criterion's doing. I'm incredibly happy with what they put into this set, which is quite a bit more than I expected for the bare-bones Eclipse but surprisingly they didn't mention their technical adjustments or any tech specs at all in the booklet.

I know that these early Kiarostami films aren't everyone's cup of tea but suffice to say that anyone considering getting this should be very happy with what Criterion put to disc. Now I'm excited for the future of their Eclipse line.

[denti alligator]

Dang, this is so exciting! Thanks for the write-up.