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Philip French in yesterday's Observer

Been enjoying this set a lot. Watched the interview with Wajda on the Innocent Sorcerers disc this morning and thought it (and he) was great. Good insight into the film, its context, etc. Really nice release.

Mondo Digital.

Electric Sheep on Night Train.

MichaelB wrote:If you're familiar with the older Polart and Best Film Co releases, these restorations will be close to unrecognisable.

Well, it depends, I just compared my "50 Years of Polish film school" boxes to the screenshots of the Second Runs. Eroica obviously fares better, the Polish transfer is unpleasently grainy, tape-ish. Pociag indeed is a far, far brighter copy while the Polish DVD is simply too dark. Goodbye see you tomorrow has the slightest advance, it's properly anamorphic and some vertical lines have been digitally removed, the Second Run has a blueish tingue though.
Generally I think it's safe to say that it's worth double-dipping if one has the Polish DVDs.

The subtitles should also be superior - or at least more idiomatic.

MichaelB wrote:The subtitles should also be superior - or at least more idiomatic.

I see. Do you know why exactly the Polish produced all these very representative boxes without properly restored material and now are redoing the whole stuff? The differences here or with the ridiculous materials for Knights of the Teutonic Order and Mother Joan of Angels given Second Run or the Has rereleases are rather baffling.

lubitsch wrote:Do you know why exactly the Polish produced all these very representative boxes without properly restored material and now are redoing the whole stuff? The differences here or with the ridiculous materials for Knights of the Teutonic Order and Mother Joan of Angels given Second Run or the Has rereleases are rather baffling.

I've always been baffled as to how Polish DVD rights work - at any given moment there'll be half a dozen editions of certain titles on, seemingly, multiple labels.

For instance, last year saw two releases of Tadeusz Konwicki's Salto - an unsubtitled edition from Gazeta Wyborcza that was sourced from the new Studio Kadr restoration and then, a couple of months later, an English-subtitled edition from Best Film Co that was sub-VHS quality: presumably a straightforward reissue of the old master.

Anyway, after years of routinely producing lousy masters, the Poles are finally getting their act together and restoring their classics properly. In fact, this is why Second Run hasn't released a Polish title in ages - Passenger and Knights of the Teutonic Order came in for probably the most abuse of any of their releases, and Mother Joan of the Angels didn't go down especially well either.

So between mid-2007 (The Third Part of the Night) and earlier this year, they didn't release a single Polish title - largely because supplied materials for things like Barrier and Eroica were VHS quality. Both were announced, and Eroica was even given a release date and up for preorder on Amazon, but original plans were scrapped when a chance conversation with someone from the rejuvenated Studio Kadr at the Kinoteka Film Festival revealed these restoration plans, initially involving twenty titles, but I understand a second phase has begun.

Hence both the long gap and now the sudden flood of material - and I understand Second Run has quite a few more classic Polish titles scheduled for later this year (one should be announced tomorrow, in fact).

MichaelB wrote:(one should be announced tomorrow, in fact).

That's a cruel tease. I'm very glad though that their bread and butter is improving itself so much lately. I find it very interesting and a tad bizarre that all of these restoration projects having been popping up just as the claims to the death of physical media reached a fever pitch. Out of curiosity has SR ever spoken about reissuing these titles if a good enough resto was done?

knives wrote:I find it very interesting and a tad bizarre that all of these restoration projects having been popping up just as the claims to the death of physical media reached a fever pitch.

These restorations are primarily preservation/cultural heritage projects, and are often carried out with hefty dollops of state funding - the aim being to create high-quality 2K and 4K masters that can be used as the basis of all future copies, be they cinema, Blu-ray, DVD, TV (at various resolutions) or whatever. So physical media doesn't have much to do with it - they're just as capable of fuelling streaming media or TV broadcasts.

Out of curiosity has SR ever spoken about reissuing these titles if a good enough resto was done?

Well, it depends on the title - they've pretty much ruled out reissuing Marketa Lazarová because of the BBFC issue. It's less than three seconds, but the Czech edition is both uncut and also on Blu-ray, so they wouldn't be able to offer much competition (after much research and number-crunching, Second Run has ruled out going down the Blu-ray route any time soon). Similarly, you can probably forget about a reissue of Knights of the Teutonic Order because it had far more extensive BBFC problems - and the other Second Run film that really drastically needs a restoration, Passenger, hasn't had one yet.

But I certainly wouldn't rule out one of their older VHS-quality releases getting an upgrade - it really depends on whether they think there's enough of an incentive to double-dip.

“This is a mighty treasure of a set, a house with many mansions to explore” - Gordon Thomas at Bright Lights Film Journal

Michał Oleszczyk (who wrote the booklet essay for Innocent Sorcerers) on Night Train.

Jonathan Rosenbaum's Global Discoveries on DVD at Cinema Scope

We're delighted to find our POLISH CINEMA CLASSICS Box Set voted #5 Best DVD of 2012 at DVD Beaver ...and also to have CASA DE LAVA, our restored MOTHER JOAN OF THE ANGELS and CONFIDENCE in the top 65 of the year!

Will Goodbye, See You Tomorrow be getting a standalone DVD release? I have the two others from the boxset that were released by themselves and the Polish Blu-ray of Night Train, so would love this to fill the gap!

thirtyframesasecond wrote:I have the Facets version of Night Train. It's a really great film. Great news on more Polish classics though.

Absolutely loved 'Night Train'
Yes, it is fair to say that it looked as if director/scriptwriters couldn't quite make up their mind whether they were making a thriller, comedy, or ensemble character-study, but in my book this is one rare case where all elements co-exist beautifully, without having to blend.
And it looks gorgeous.

A title Second Run should consider is Wajda's Popioly. It really deserves a blu-ray treatment & I put in a request to Criterion ("Thanks for your email and suggestions, I'll share them with my colleagues" - Jon Mulvaney), but as Criterion hasn't released anything else by Wajda & hasn't upgraded the box or Danton to blu, they don't seem to have much interest in him. I saw the 234 minute version, but apparently there is a significantly longer one. The version I saw was excellent, but felt a bit choppy (editing-wise) & the jumps in time from scene to scene seemed random, so it wouldn't surprise me if there was a longer version out there somewhere. It really is as sweeping & gripping as Marketa Lazarova and deserves more attention outside of Poland.

There's no restored master available to the best of my knowledge, and the Polish DVD is terrible.

I'm sure they'll get round to it at some point (quite a bit of Wajda's back catalogue is being restored at the moment), but there's absolutely no point in releasing the current version.

Oh, and far as I'm aware the four-hour version is the long version - there's also a 160-minute cut.

The bonus feature on "Night Train", the excerpt from "My Seventeen Lives", at the end says Second Run will release "My Seventeen Lives" in 2012.

Is this still coming soon, or cancelled?

Still coming - but later rather than "sooner".