1051 The Elephant Man

[yoloswegmaster]

Interesting that it went OOP almost exactly 5 years since it got released. Wouldn't be surprised if Paramount released it on 4K.

[omegadirective]

Criterion won't have the 4K upgrade?
They've been upgrading all the other Lynch films...

[CSM126]

Criterion won't have the 4K upgrade?
They've been upgrading all the other Lynch films...

I wonder if Paramount decided they want this for their Paramount Presents series. They pulled Nashville back from Criterion for that reason, so it wouldn’t be unheard of.

[swo17]

Jul 7

[justeleblanc]

So this is basically the same blu ray but now with the Janus logo?

[DRW.mov]

So this is basically the same blu ray but now with the Janus logo?

Now it's a 4K UHD disc

[yoloswegmaster]

One thing that wasn't mentioned was that this release doesn't have a HDR/DV grade like the SC release. I reached out to my good friend Jon Mulvaney to see if that omission was a mistake and he responded with the following:

As we are confident that director David Lynch approved the 4K SDR master, we chose to present THE ELEPHANT MAN in SDR on our forthcoming 4K release.

So it sounds like they are saying that the restoration Lynch supervised and approved was finished in SDR, while SC decided to add a HDR/DV grade right after.

EDIT: A user found a press release saying that the HDR grade was done under Lynch's supervision:

The new 4K picture and sound restoration of The Elephant Man was carried out at L’Immagine Ritrovata (Bologna and Paris) under the supervision of David Lynch, who also personally curated the color correction which took place at Fotokem in Los Angeles. The restoration was created from the Original Camera Negative with the latest HDR 16-bit workflow used in order to obtain the best possible result. As a result, the black and white image has been restored to its original look.

[ChunkyLover]

Odd that this is the second SC-sourced B&W restoration that Criterion are passing on using the existing HDR pass (the first being The Trial).

[Matt]

I'm skeptical that this will be a major improvement over Criterion's existing Blu-ray, but I'd love to be proven wrong.

[Orlac]

Hope they fix that missing fade-to-black.

[andyli]

Hope they fix that missing fade-to-black.

Didn't they fix it for their Blu-ray edition already?

[tolbs1010]

One thing that wasn't mentioned was that this release doesn't have a HDR/DV grade like the SC release.

I wasn't going to wait for Criterion on this title anyway because it's an all-time favorite, but now I feel better about buying the Studio Canal release at an elevated price. It looks and sounds absolutely stunning; among the 2 or 3 best presentations of the many 4k discs I own. The SC bonus features seem better on the whole as well, unless watching David Lynch read a book is more scintillating than what I'm imagining.

[thebatman97080]

Hope they fix that missing fade-to-black.

It has been fixed. A user on the other forum messaged Criterion and this is what they were told.

Thanks for writing to me! I can confirm that the missing fade has been reinstated on our upcoming release of THE ELEPHANT MAN 4K UHD and on Blu-ray.

Best,
Jon Mulvaney

[Orlac]

Hope they fix that missing fade-to-black.

It has been fixed. A user on the other forum messaged Criterion and this is what they were told.

Thanks for writing to me! I can confirm that the missing fade has been reinstated on our upcoming release of THE ELEPHANT MAN 4K UHD and on Blu-ray.

Best,
Jon Mulvaney

thanks for the info!

[dwk]

I saw it mentioned somewhere that the version currently on the Criterion Channel has the fade restored, so it isn't too surprising that the UHD will also have it back.

[hearthesilence]

Now that a definitive version may be coming, I thought I'd give this film another try and see if I'd want to get it. You can't overstate how important this was to Lynch's career as a filmmaker - if Mel Brooks hadn't given him the job, he would've been fixing roofs and hopefully painting something that would become his breakthrough into the art world. And what he brings to the film delivers on the promise of Eraserhead - it's hard to imagine anyone else coming up with anything as striking as his imaginative dream-like sequences (or in a couple of scenes actual dreams). Some visual motifs are even developed further to greater effect later in his career, such as the closing visions that look like a precursor to some of the things we see in Twin Peaks: The Return.

But it still comes off as one of his lesser works. It feels a little uneven, as if the most inspired bits were the moments where Lynch was free to do whatever he wanted rather than getting tied down by a fairly staid drama. (To be fair, the cries for empathy feel more potent now than they did before.) It also feels like a step back - Eraserhead was astonishing in how fully-formed its unique vision appeared to be, with any influences fully absorbed rather than regurgitated or recreated. Not so here, with stretches that feel like L'enfant sauvage or Freaks reworked for this story. Even some of the basic filmmaking, like blocking and cutting, came off as awkward and clumsy in a few moments. Still, there's no denying that it's amazing to look at from the production design and costumes to the cinematography - some of the early close-ups of Merrick are so striking in their texture and lighting, I had to guess that Lynch's experience as a painter and sculptor were coming into play. (He was famously hands-on with make-up right before cameras rolled.) It should look even better from a true 4K master.

[beamish14]

Now that a definitive version may be coming, I thought I'd give this film another try and see if I'd want to get it. You can't overstate how important this was to Lynch's career as a filmmaker - if Mel Brooks hadn't given him the job, he would've been fixing roofs and hopefully painting something that would become his breakthrough into the art world. And what he brings to the film delivers on the promise of Eraserhead - it's hard to imagine anyone else coming up with anything as striking as his imaginative dream-like sequences (or in a couple of scenes actual dreams). Some visual motifs are even developed further to greater effect later in his career, such as the closing visions that look like a precursor to some of the things we see in Twin Peaks: The Return.

I’ve always been curious to know if Lynch was interested in astronomy, at least during his formative years. There is similar imagery of constellations in this, The Straight Story, Dune, etc.

The movie clearly owes a huge debt to John Huston’s magnificent Freud.

[Lowry_Sam]

But it still comes off as one of his lesser works. It feels a little uneven, as if the most inspired bits were the moments where Lynch was free to do whatever he wanted rather than getting tied down by a fairly staid drama.

For me, this is why it's among his best (along with Eraserhead & Blue Velvet). I'm of the opposite persuasion, namely that artists often do their best work when they are working with some constraints or under duress. Truly great artists make interesting choices or come up with inventive results when forced to do so. The idea that artists do their best when they have no restraints seems very Ayn Randian/libertarian to me. Much of the appeal of noirs (which were made during the Hays code) is because of the constraints placed on them & the way the director worked around them. I loved Lynch's work in the beginning of his career but felt he lost the plot and his mojo after the big reveal in the Twin Peaks tv series. From that point on it felt to me like he was just being weird/vague/surreal for the sake of being weird/vague/surreal and whatever purpose it was serving didn't extend beyond his own ulterior motive for doing so (and didn't extend beyond himself to me as a viewer).

I just received a random Youtube stream on David Lynch & Michael Jackson working together on a project, which I had never heard about. Apparently Michael's favorite movie at the time was The Elephant Man and so he called David and asked to work with him to come up with a promotional video for his Dangerous album: When David Lynch Directed Michael Jackson

[hearthesilence]

Ayn Randian? Libertarian? No offense, but it's absurd to claim I'm suggesting some kind of ideological doctrine based on my criticism of one single movie. Regardless, it would be a fallacy and far too simplistic to make such a broad claim that artists are more likely to do their best work under rigid constraints than they are without them, just as it would be to claim the opposite.

I'd even use Twin Peaks as a good example of why such claims are way too simplistic - as popular and entertaining as it may have been, I never thought the one season most hold up as its prime was ever Lynch's best work. I'm sure it looked much more impressive compared to everything else on network television in 1990, but Eraserhead and Blue Velvet were stronger and much more inventive and unsettling works, and so were most of his films later on. But without that show, you don't get Twin Peaks: The Return, and even though it wasn't the sequel some wanted (specifically Twin Peaks followers who paid little attention to Lynch's other work), it was still done within the framework of the old show's history and that cast of characters. At the same time, the latter was made with far more leeway than anything that could have been granted for a network television production. You could make one doctrinal argument or the other by cherrypicking which specific constraints are relevant and go from there, but no one should be buying into any of it.

[The Curious Sofa]

As an Eraserhead fan who saw every David Lynch film at the cinema when it was released, I was impressed by his ability to adapt his style for a more mainstream project without compromising his vision. Mel Brooks undoubtedly deserves a lot of credit for this, as he kept Lynch's back free while his next commercial project, Dune, went haywire due to the constraints and duress of mainstream production.

The Elephant Man remains one of my favourite Lynch films, a period drama in which the past truly feels like a 'foreign country'. When The Elephant Man was released, it wasn't clear what direction Lynch's career would take. Would he have become a mainstream director if he had directed Return of the Jedi? Without being able to compare it to later masterpieces like Blue Velvet or Mulholland Drive, The Elephant Man felt profoundly idiosyncratic and strange at the time, and not as mainstream as it may seem in retrospect.

That said, The Straight Story and Inland Empire are at the extreme opposite ends of Lynch's career, and they are both my least favourite films of his. The former because it doesn't feel that different from many a heart-warming Sundance indie, and the latter because, by shooting on video, the film is completely untethered by constraints and becomes a self-indulgent chore.