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This is awesome news, and having four (count 'em!) scores to choose from is even cooler.

Please note the absence of the term "windowboxing" in the notes on the transfer...

arsonfilms wrote:Please note the absence of the term "windowboxing" in the notes on the transfer...

No doubt the transfer was done well before windowboxing became standard policy at Criterion (see Equinox).

Peer Raben did a score for the 1997 German Pabst retrospective. I wonder if that's one of the 4 included. How many scores for this can there possibly be?

does this come out in November then?

The Looking For Lulu documentary will feature the voice of Shirley MacLaine in one of her least annoying performances.

Tribe

domino harvey wrote:does this come out in November then?

Yep.

Fantastic news, this going to be up on my list in the next few weeks. =D>

Must be 2 discs

Criterion of the year?

matt wrote:Peer Raben did a score for the 1997 German Pabst retrospective. I wonder if that's one of the 4 included. How many scores for this can there possibly be?

At least we know that Gillian Anderson's is one of the four.

Anderson.....well that's one I can skip based on previous efforts! Any ideas on other possibilities? I used to like Stuart Oderman's piano score for the Embassy VHS...only problem is that I've heard a number of his live performances at MoMA over the years which draw from the same slender bag of tricks.

I would like to hear Raben's score.

Ah! Miracles do happen!

Yea that "defocusing" phenom is rampant on the previous Janus/Kino VHS from HVe. I could never tell whether or not this was inherent to the print image itself, or if due perhaps to oddball form of nitrate shrinkage causing the film to waver in the telecine gate, slightly changing it's vantage point messing with it's proximity to the reader and therefore bonking the focus. Dave youre saying that the Munich resto print had the same focus fluctuations in parts?

Does anybody know what year the Munich Filmmuseum restoration took place? I ask because I thought there was no "definitive" restoration on this film-- I recall Kline saying the longtime holdup on this project was that they (CC) were waiting on delivery of superior elements from the UK, and he came on about how the British are always slow, notoriously so, etc etc. I'm pretty sure it was BOX he was talking about. Now if this film has had a definitive restoration done on it, I don't know why CC would have been held up via waiting for a print from a country peripheral to the restoration.. unless of course they were waiting for the UK to deliver a print to Munich (or Italy/Bologna c/o Munich) to complete the restoration, which would mean the resto is extremely fresh.. brand spankin new in fact. Which would be cause to rejoice!

Yet I would find that difficult to believe as Janus/Kino just put the film on the road over the last few months-- a screening I held off on as reports were coming back that the print looked no better than the R2 dvd's and the R1 VHS sourced from the same 2 co's.

The only explanation I can think for going on the road with an old print on the eve of a Brand New Stunning Digital Restoration, is that they wanted to maximize revenues on their investment in an old print which will now be put out to pasture for good.

Can anybody definitively compare this Munich resto with the material that's been in R1 on VHS & R2 on DVD, which look basically similar (also to the print that's been on the road since springtime?) If this is the print on the CC dvd, with some MTI cleanup, then I'll basically be buying the disc(s) for the extras. Maybe the Brit print has some missing/censored footage, and was used to plug gaps in the above mentioned editions. The talk of focus fluctuation in the resto tells me this is the print we've been watching all along-- I really hope I'm flat wrong.

Incidentally I love the piano score on the old Janus/K VHS. I hope it's included. It's got a great gloomy, haunting feel, really underlining the social underbelly which we are witness to.

For what it's worth, the new print will be playing at the Music Box in Chicago on October 13 & 15. I'm going to be there, but I've never seen any of the old copies. I can try and wrangle one up cheaply before then to compare it to, though.

That is unless someone can beat me to the punch (which is very possible).

-Toilet Dcuk

Okay, I found what I was looking for from Kline, from the 2004 HTF Chat transcript

[BrianPB] Welcome back, Mr. Kline. I wondered if you could give us a status report on three silent film projects Criterion is rumored to be working on: EISENSTEIN: THE SILENT YEARS, Pabst's PANDORA'S BOX, and and Dreyer's VAMPYR (for the latter, I trust you'll use Martin Koerber's definitive 1998 restoration). From a technical standpoint, these must be among the most difficult releases (due to aged and compromised elements).

[leekline123] You said it- these are tough ones, and we are continually working on getting these films out. Eisenstein is moving along, but it's the hands of the Russians right now, and they move VERY slow. Pandora is complicated because it is a huge restoration, with many film elements involved in the hands of many people. The "restoration" that was done in the 90's was done on video, in Pal format, and is not suitable for NTSC conversion. As for VAMPYR, I have no new news, although we would definitely use Martin Koerber's restoration (if we could easily access it!)

The notoriously slow part got mangled in my head from the EISENSTEIN quote, but if this chat, which was from 04, was not referencing the PAL resto from the Munich Filmmusem in 99 "not suitable for NTSC", then what's he doing talking about the restoration to-be-used as if it were a current process-- in 2004. In other words, in 2004 he's saying he's waiting for the completion of a restoration done in 1999? Which was indeed done in the Pal standard, of course, like all German material.

It sounds to me like they were waiting on-- or engaged in-- a new restoration, which didn't come to pass.

If they had to start from scratch with the actual reels/elements (as the original resulting 7 yr old digibeta was not acceptable), why even call it the "1999 Munich Filmmuseum Restoration"? I'm a little confused here. I think we're going to get a meticulously MTI'd NTSC version of the discs out in Europe now.

I'll probably be buying the discs, but I think this film is mildly overrated-- I'm with Denti on this one.

I've looked too many times to count. So many times the "idea" of the film, and even it's memory (so to speak) draw me back to it causing me to pull it back out, all psyched up, to really want to "fully dive in" this time and really swim in the fullness of it's substance. I.e. really enjoy the historically legendary PANDORAS BOX, and not the merely Good Silent Film in my collection that occassionally sees me getting antsy & bored, feels confused and way too long.

I find myself revisiting DREI..OPER and JEANNE NEY at least as much if not more. My oft-stated problems w PANDORA: once the effect of the gorgeously stimmung-soaked treatment of the decadent subject matter (subjects handled w appropriately constructed mise en scene by say Bauer or Kirsanoff in MENILMONTANT) wears off, youre left with a film that is not sure whether or not it is a straight melodrama. I'm not sure why the film is paced the way it is, why certain questions are left mysterious, and certain boring details are belabored with specifics... why certain plot zones are embellished with a heavy mood-effect, and others are left to the actors under general fill lights. To me there's an essential poetry-lack, beyond the art direction and camera work (which is truly fabulous in PANDORA, I love the whipping around & tracking so fabulously effected in the beginning as she chucks Schigolch into the boudoir leaving the utility gent standing inna doorway; check out his ABSOLUTELY INCREDIBLE work on the UK Karloff vehicle from '33, THE GHOUL), the film is not consistently certain as to it's identity. It proves that gorgeous art direction, deep moody stimmung, excellent subject matter, great performances and tour de force camera work doesn't automatically guarantee the hugeness of poetry & depth so inherent and effortless in Murnau. Despite the beautiful embroidering-- and this film really "looks" like a Murnau-- it never really becomes about more than the actualities occurring onscreen at any given moment. POetry and cinematic power are for me hereby specifically proven that they cannot be taken for granted, are not "given"s. People's subconsciousness' don't automatically go to work on a film that walks and talks a certain way. They don't come at the end of an equation i e a mise-en-scene sort of "guarantee", i e you use Murnau-quality X + Murnau Quality Y and you automatically get Murnau-quality depth, poetic-infinitude and timelessness. It proves that Murnau was not a "style" that can be duplicated with a series of factors arranged just so: Murnau was a man, a population of one, a person whose poetry wasn't a secondary byproduct of a primary set of physical ingredients. To create poetry the filmmaker must first and foremost be a poet, have a running theme coursing thru his fabric. Pabst the Inner Human Being to me is not very evident in his films-- at worst I see a dry technician very carefully observing what "works" in the films of his peers, to fold these elements into his own; at best I see a very fine filmmaker who falls just a bit short of the masters due to lack of depth & innovation. His great observational eye for human absurdity is what I admire most along with the ambitious camera work, leading to some sublime casting/performances. Much of it reminds me of Paul Leni, Dovzhenko, or Dreyer's caricaturing in JOAN: the stooges in 3PENNY, the headmistress (those EARS!!!) and her husband in DIARY, THYMIAN's excercising "bearded" "john" in DIARY, the fat matronly madame in same, the stingy cuckolded chubby hubby being shown the photo evidence & not wanting to pay in NEY (despite it's obvious mildly antisemitic quality), that films wacky sly staff detective (Pabts' stock player, also the above John in DIARY), the killing of the parrot to get the stone from it's gut and the resulting lens-almost-in-the-fat-woman's-mouth scream. To me this was Pabst finding his voice, but he was too engrossed in the obviously-hopeless enterprise of Murnau-imitating. Even Borzage knew to keep the melodrama tight and engaging-- and primary-- that is, to keep the viewer invested in the narrative first and foremost, to use the art-direction and gorgeous photography as environment, bonus mood-setters... whereas in PANDORA the primary element seems to be "what the film is generally about", combined with the amazing look and feel of the film... so that when I'm stuck in long stretches of what the film is specifically about, and the lighting & camerawork is unspectacular, it feels weak & adrift, like I'm not watching an "important" part of the film. PANDORA has great poetic moments-- not neccessarily pure poetry but certainly poetic-- which, once ended, leave the long stretches of surrounding footage feeling, to me, weirdly dry.

To me JENNE NEY shows the proper balance and lack of identity-confusion that PANDORA suffers from. NEY is not "visual poetry" a la Murnau-- it's not an "art film" per se, but is is a very visually poetic melodrama. The right blending of American melodrama with German mood & style. The moments of visually poetic punctuation operate in support of the physical events going on onscreen, they're all part of the same effort... whereas in PANDORA the stretches of straight melodrama feel like dead time-killing in between the elevated moments of photographic beauty. The falling short of PANDORA to me is a perfect illustration of the reasons Pabst never went on to the sound-film glories & innovation of Sternberg of Lang or Dreyer. There was never a huge, original, force of nature in there propelling those films.

I was just listening again to Roger Ebert's commentary on Dark City last night and he mentions a shot that is similar to Pandora's Box of the prostitute leading Rufus Sewell's character up to her apartment. He mentions that the character in Pandora's Box is

Spoiler

Jack the Ripper. Has the plot of the film been spoilt for me by finding this out? It makes me wonder if the film is like a 1920s Looking for Mr Goodbar!

colinr0380 wrote:I was just listening again to Roger Ebert's commentary on Dark City last night and he mentions a shot that is similar to Pandora's Box of the prostitute leading Rufus Sewell's character up to her apartment. He mentions that the character in Pandora's Box is

Spoiler

Jack the Ripper. Has the plot of the film been spoilt for me by finding this out? It makes me wonder if the film is like a 1920s Looking for Mr Goodbar!

I don't think the film as a whole has been ruined for you, but the ending probably has. The film is very episodic, so the knowing the resolution in advance shouldn't really hurt your enjoyment of the individual segments -- each of which has its own climax.

And I speak as somebody who knew the ending in advance -- by way of being familiar with Alban Berg's opera Lulu.

davidhare wrote:It's the very uncertainty of the tone and the small details lthat I relish. Louise is such a life force/id without any need for "explanation" or apparent "morality". Her incredible strength as a performer takes Pabst and the movie into another realm, certainly for him. I think it belongs, by virtue of the anti-psychological anti-sociological flavor of the material in that special class of Hyper-real cinema, like the Fountainhead or even the Devil is a Woman, which largely dispense with motivation, and the very sort of detail in minutiae Pabst so readily covers in his other movies. In its place we get a work of near abstraction in which the narrative per se is subsumed to a level of poetic exhiliration seemingly projecting from some sort of unique chemistry between star and director who dare to take the movie beyond the predictable.

David Hare and Schreck, very nice analysis. Actually, I think you two are closer than you care to admit, although I look at this more through DavidHare's prism. It's "the effect of the gorgeously stimmung-soaked treatment of the decadent subject matter" (as Schreck notes) that sucked me in on this and I found it extraordinary enough that I can overlook Pabst's deficiencies in other areas. Where Schreck and I go our separate ways on this is that the effect doesn't wear off on me.

But, and I could be misinterpreting Schreck (which is not hard to do), the issues he has are plot/story issues and any Murnauesque qualities the film might have. All Pabst silents that I've seen (Pandora, Lost Girl and Jeanne Ney) have those plotting issues....Jeanne Ney more so. I've always wondered if that's owing more to edits that have been lost over the decades? Are there scenes/sub-plots that are missing from all of these today?

I saw Pandora before I ever saw any of the other Weimar Republic greats and, yeah, Murnau is indeed unique...it's almost unfair to compare Pabst to Murnau. But for better or worse, because Pandora was my first exposure to German silents, it's still soemthing of the standard I use to evaluate all of them.

Tribe

EDIT: I also wonder if folks who are unimpressed with this film are folks who arrived at it after hearing raves from those who are fans of it. Inevitably it'll never live up to that hype.

Well, owing to the obvious pictorial influence, it's inevitable the film would be compared to Murnau. By it's very nature it-- and NEY, & TAGEBUCH-- is virtually demanding association with Murnau. It's sort-of kind-of like listening to Robin Trower and knowing it's a given the man was a Hendrix fan knocking on the door via his ambition to the stylistic club. It's impossible to overstate Murnau's influence in the 1920's, and triply so in Germany, particularly as Lang flumped with METROPOLIS-- then the iffy-drippy Gerda Maurus cycle.

I can say that I read such little cinema-academy that my reaction to very few films have been influenced by such... if any, which goes double for classic cinema. My searching the film out initially wasn't due to anybody's raves (nobody in my social circle is into silent film) but a desire to locate a film considered a classic right up my alley... the same reasons I search out any great film. In the case of PANDORA I actually came to it not too long after reading Kracauer (and read Eisner's HAUNTED SCREEN not too long after). Kracauer I believe, sees the film as an utter failure (but he's virtually useless to me these days anyhow, his theories are so half-baked), and I believe Eisner sees it as hit-miss. Certainly there are tour de force moments within PANDORA that cannot be denied. Sometimes the film works for me as completely as it does for Dave. But sometimes it doesn't, and the flaws glare at me.

For me the film has weaknesses-- what can I say? The great zone running from the trial to just prior to the start of the dissolution in london sequence is far too long with far too little to recommend it. This film is not a quiet "painted myth", cryptically poetic and leading you from tour de force mystery to mystery a la VAMPYR, or even Epstein or Kirsanoff (these eclectic gems are among my favorites in avant style & construction); it's not the Expressionism of Carl Mayer or early Murnau, or the later Kammerspiels of Murnau & Lupu Pick. It's an expressive melodrama which, when it has nothing much to express in terms of story, looks great and says little or, at times, nothing. And is often ill-assembled. But that may well be, as Monsieur Tribe points out, a product of bad reconstruction after being butchered by censors. Maybe the CC will be a revelation with the revised intertitles and the perhaps corrected assembly.

Don't mean me doesn't like it, gents. Just means it comes up short at times and certainly in places. But that's not anything new-- the problems with the film are certainly not underdiscussed in the critical canon. I've gotten whiffs of them thru the bit I've bothered to read.

Brooks is, for me, an essential actress -- while Pabst is a completely inessential director. I may get this -- but only for her sake.

davidhare wrote:Shreck I certainly think next time around you might find the "escape"/abduction to London and the sleaze pit hovel episodes more compelling, even with Louise very much merely a part of the quartet at this stage.

I said I LUUUVV the scenes in London! It's the scene-chunk running approx from courtroom to brothel/casino-ship that drag out endlessly for me at times. The scenes in London, that wonderful fucking window with the rain yelling in thru the burlap windowpane, the long stairway up to her flat with Springy J... ah , sublime mood music.

And this london a warmup for the London of Dreigroschenoper.

HerrSchreck wrote:Incidentally I love the piano score on the old Janus/K VHS. I hope it's included. It's got a great gloomy, haunting feel, really underlining the social underbelly which we are witness to.

That was written by Timothy Brock, but the VHS had a shortened running time due to wrong film speed, so it's unlikely the Criterion DVD will use Brock's score.

I liked the score also, btw -- a simple piano solo, IIRC. I also liked the violin solo used for Kino's old VHS of "Diary of a Lost Girl", also composed by Brock.

kevyip1 wrote:

HerrSchreck wrote:Incidentally I love the piano score on the old Janus/K VHS. I hope it's included. It's got a great gloomy, haunting feel, really underlining the social underbelly which we are witness to.

That was written by Timothy Brock, but the VHS had a shortened running time due to wrong film speed, so it's unlikely the Criterion DVD will use Brock's score.

I liked the score also, btw -- a simple piano solo, IIRC. I also liked the violin solo used for Kino's old VHS of "Diary of a Lost Girl", also composed by Brock.

Something is getting confused here. The old Janus/Embassy Vhs of Pandora's Box (we're talking mid-80s) had a piano score by long-time MoMA pianist Stuart Oderman. I think Timothy Brock was just a pup then. In any case, all of Brock's scores that I know of are orchestral. The score you mention for Diary of a Lost Girl is also NOT Brock's, but is by one Joseph Turin. Brock did scores for Caligari, Berlin Symphony of a City, Faust & The Last Laugh.

You're right about Stuart Oderman being the composer of the said score. I've read that Brock did compose scores for "Pandora's Box" and "Diary of a Lost Girl" during the 80s, so that was probably how I got confused...