Frederick Wiseman

[ryannichols7]

basically the same as the early Michael Powell set

[ikms]

On assembly they must have jammed the book in after the disc because my cover page crumpled on the inner box flap to the point of tearing. Having been a while I started with a re-watch of High School but soon found my eyes following the relentless flow of the grain icebergs. I had a bad feeling about the encode, but when was the last time a BFI release has this kind of issue? I felt somewhat assured when I checked the booklet since it credits FiM (of Arbelos' Satantango encoding fame), so at less than 3 hours on a disc, almost certain this was not down to the disc mastering. Checking the 25min mark in High School I could see what looked like a hair in the gate (bottom center of the frame) that had been cloned out with a static blob while the muted grain field swirls around the perimeter. So it looks like the picture quality issues are down to decisions made at the 4K remastering stage, which is a shame unless you can ignore it - but hard for me watching handheld camerawork with frequent closeups.

[jlnight]

Another one was The Human Condition, if you count that as one nine-hour film instead of a trilogy of three-hours. That was shown over three nights from 9pm to past midnight in 1985 and again I watched that. Black and white, subtitled, fully letterboxed in Scope in the days of 4:3 TV sets...again something that only C4 would have done then and wouldn't now. I've no idea what the viewing figures were for this, nor indeed for Near Death, to take us back to Wiseman.

I popped into London to do some research and checked on this. You will be unsurprised to learn that Near Death did not get into Channel 4's top 30 weekly ratings. To give you an idea of what you needed to get onto the list back then, for the week ending 31st March '91 an episode of Brookside topped their charts with 4.69m viewers while the 30th-rated programme was Vic Reeves' Big Night Out (1.49m).

For comparison, the week ending 14th April '91 featured the following: Juvenile Liaison 2 (1.76m at no.30), WR: Mysteries of the Organism (2.23m at no.21) and the film version of Scum (3.43m at no.6). Yes, the Banned season did attract viewers!

Can also confirm that the Wiseman box was going for 35 quid in Fopp and £34.99 in the BFI Shop.

[senseabove]

On assembly they must have jammed the book in after the disc because my cover page crumpled on the inner box flap to the point of tearing. Having been a while I started with a re-watch of High School but soon found my eyes following the relentless flow of the grain icebergs. I had a bad feeling about the encode, but when was the last time a BFI release has this kind of issue? I felt somewhat assured when I checked the booklet since it credits FiM (of Arbelos' Satantango encoding fame), so at less than 3 hours on a disc, almost certain this was not down to the disc mastering. Checking the 25min mark in High School I could see what looked like a hair in the gate (bottom center of the frame) that had been cloned out with a static blob while the muted grain field swirls around the perimeter. So it looks like the picture quality issues are down to decisions made at the 4K remastering stage, which is a shame unless you can ignore it - but hard for me watching handheld camerawork with frequent closeups.

Having seen a dozen+ of these restorations over the the past year, I can unfortunately confirm, some of them had pretty bad grain management in the theatrical DCP. But the good news is I didn't notice it on all of them, just a few of them...