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My copy of Obsession works fine on every Region A player I've tried it on.

Thank you for the info! Going to be purchasing these for sure now! Been dying to see the Yoshida films!

Anyone here know the classical piece heard throughout Eros + Massacre? You can hear it periodically in the trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWVrSxivE1Y

The trailer is NSFW, by the way.

It sounds a bit like Bach's St. Matthew's Passion. I'm not a classical music guy (and neither is David Desser; he admits to not knowing the piece in one of the scene commentaries); that it sounds familiar to me is due to having heard it in another movie.

I could be mistaken, but it sounds as if this is original music composed for the film. It doesn't sound like Bach, at least. I'm pretty sure that the composer Toshi Ichiyanagi deliberately juxtaposed "classical" sounding music with more "experimental" music to parallel the contrasting time periods in the film.

I considered the possibility it was an original score, but what little English-language writing there is on the film only mentions the soundtrack in passing!

Just announced for a US release in April

Wait, wasn't this already region free?

It was, so the only change will be removing the BBFC logos.

Basically this has just guaranteed this won't be going OOP anytime soon. Like the MoC Imamura set, it seems clear there is a market of around 2,500 people interested in buying these sorts of films with any kind of speed and it's totally stopped since then. This is still overall good news because I think I'd still say this is the most important set Arrow has put out* and I'm glad people will be able to watch it for years to come if they can afford to but it does detract from the LE appeal (to be fair, all of the US rereleases have done this, but this one seems especially unlikely to sell speedily).

*I guess most people would point to Boro first, but I missed the boat on it so I'm not counting it in my estimation; still, ten sets in with a perfect hit-rate I think the Academy line really is best defined by these two sets.

With regards to the BBFC logos: of the Academy sets, only the Fassbinder set has had BBFC logos placed on the box spine; this set always had it just on a belly band, though it won't be on the cover either I suppose. Either on Blu-ray's forums or on Twitter one of Arrow's producers confirmed that going forward from January this year even UK-only releases will not have BBFC logos on either side's spine.

Ribs wrote:it seems clear there is a market of around 2,500 people interested in buying these sorts of films with any kind of speed

... in the UK.

Awareness for foreign releases, I've been told, is always very limited, so nothing ever replaces a domestic release.

tenia wrote:Awareness for foreign releases, I've been told, is always very limited, so nothing ever replaces a domestic release.

And this is particularly true of US purchasers, many of whom simply don't recognise a home video world outside their borders. This is why you get bizarre situations like the Cohen edition of the recent Taviani restorations polling at no.21 in the Beev's strongly US-weighted 2016 poll, while the Arrow edition only came in at no.40 despite containing literally everything in the Cohen set plus four more hours of extras and a 100-page book.

And, after I compared my Arrow copy to the Cohen screencaps, a not insignificant improvement in picture quality.

MichaelB wrote:

tenia wrote:Awareness for foreign releases, I've been told, is always very limited, so nothing ever replaces a domestic release.

And this is particularly true of US purchasers, many of whom simply don't recognise a home video world outside their borders.

Just a home video world?

Go watch some futbol you Canuck.

I know the picture quality is different between the director's cut and theatrical cut, but does anybody's theatrical cut have issues any time the camera cuts to a new take? The image in the frame seems to jump a bit and there are some white lines at the bottom of the screen for just a split second. This does not happen at all in the director's cut. It's fairly distracting.

jdj wrote:I know the picture quality is different between the director's cut and theatrical cut, but does anybody's theatrical cut have issues any time the camera cuts to a new take? The image in the frame seems to jump a bit and there are some white lines at the bottom of the screen for just a split second. This does not happen at all in the director's cut. It's fairly distracting.

I was watching some of the theatrical commentary yesterday and those look like splice marks, probably a result of the lab work that created the shorter cut. As antnield mentioned earlier in the thread:

antnield wrote:The theatrical cut was scanned from an old print - with reel change markers, evident splices and so forth - whereas the director's cut was scanned from a source closer to the original negative. The theatrical cut looks nowhere as good, but then it's presence is more for curiosity's sake.

So that's just what the element looks like. Even if the desire were there to clean up the theatrical print the splice marks are printed in which would make them more difficult to minimise.

Ah, I see, thanks for the info! I was mainly worried I got a defective version.

Heroic Purgatory is so visually original on a shot-by-shot basis that you don't need more reasons to see it. But I was also fascinated by the script, which reminded me of the work of writers like Robert Coover, where the narrative is structured around false starts, retreads, and recombinations, spiraling inward more than progressing linearly, with the fears, desires, pasts, presents, and futures of the characters treated as equally real and immediate. It isn't as airtight as, say, Coover's "The Babysitter" (which came out around the same time) but the strategy is exciting and mysterious when put to film, as such "unrealities" are superimposed in space-time and made incarnate.

med wrote: Tue May 31, 2016 7:00 pm I considered the possibility it was an original score, but what little English-language writing there is on the film only mentions the soundtrack in passing!

It appears to be an original composition, as jsteffe supposed. Ichiyanagi released his composition in 1969 on record.
Here is the record album of the recording.
And you can listen to a few tracks here.
And this blogspot has a paragraph about the musical stylings of Ichiyanagi.

Also, if you haven't picked this up yet, it's on sale at Barnes and Noble for $45 for the next few days. Arrow titles are 50% off MSRP, plus this discount code:
10% off your Order Online or In-Store
J7C9Y3X In-Store expires July 7 at close of business
FIREWORKS Online expires July 8 at 2:59am ET

My copy came in and I was sampling each of the films; I am already blown away by just watching a couple of random scenes. Very happy with the purchase.

I revisited Eros + Massacre for the first time since I bought this set, and it's just as confounding and lyrically-inebriating as it was then. I don't feel authorized to deconstruct the film in depth, but my main takeaway was just how complex the deceptively-simple idea of "free love" is in a milieu embroiled in rich history, inexhaustible agendas, and on a micro-level, dissonant perspectives that are incongruous with the idealistic position in a social world populated by individualized perspectives propelled by myopic emotions. The experimental style that obstructs clarity seems to self-reflexively operate on this wavelength, both refusing to disentangle the serpentine compound "free love" ignites when introduced into the zeitgeist, and simultaneously liberating itself from strict barriers the medium superimposes to ironically attempt to provide a faux-freedom in streamlined access to these philosophies. I'm not sure where this ranks for me as one of the best films of the 60s, but it certainly feels like one of the most important.