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Buttery Jeb wrote:Not sure if this has been mentioned or not, but will the eventual Criterion release have the same film speed issues as their release of "Berlin Alexanderplatz" (i.e., a shift from 25 FPS to 24 FPS for American home video)?

World On A Wire was shot on film at 24fps, so there shouldnt be a problem.

manicsounds wrote:

Buttery Jeb wrote:Not sure if this has been mentioned or not, but will the eventual Criterion release have the same film speed issues as their release of "Berlin Alexanderplatz" (i.e., a shift from 25 FPS to 24 FPS for American home video)?

World On A Wire was shot on film at 24fps, so there shouldnt be a problem.

That would certainly be a bit of luck if it's true, but I thought that WoaW had been made for TV, which would suggest a 25fps rate for easy conversion to a PAL signal. Was the film released with a theatrical run as a priority?

arsonfilms wrote:That would certainly be a bit of luck if it's true, but I thought that WoaW had been made for TV, which would suggest a 25fps rate for easy conversion to a PAL signal. Was the film released with a theatrical run as a priority?

A lot of "prestige" television was still shot on film at that time. World on a Wire was shot on 16mm.

Good to know.

Jeff wrote:

arsonfilms wrote:That would certainly be a bit of luck if it's true, but I thought that WoaW had been made for TV, which would suggest a 25fps rate for easy conversion to a PAL signal. Was the film released with a theatrical run as a priority?

A lot of "prestige" television was still shot on film at that time. World on a Wire was shot on 16mm.

If you recall though, Alexanderplatz was also shot on 16mm for TV, but run at 25fps or an easy conversion to broadcast TV. I don't know anything solid about the framerate used for this, but there is already a precedent set for a Fassbinder project shot on film to run on TV that had a native 25fps rate to contend with. Criterion could slow the rate down to 24fps again, or try to master in 1080i. That is, if this was shot for tv and not a theatrical run.

Indeed, being shot on 16mm doesn't guarantee that it was shot at 24fps. That said, the run time of the French Blu-ray, which is transferred at 23.976p (according to DVDBeaver) is just over 204 minutes, corresponds nicely to the run time of 205 given by IMDb and the BFI's film & TV database, and the 206 run time given by the Fassbinder Foundation's web site (which also shows that all the European DVDs except the one from the Netherlands also hover around 204 to 205 minutes) all of which suggests there's probably nothing to worry about in this case.

Jeff wrote:The Janus World on a Wire poster is amazing. . . . Really hoping they make it available for purchase.

Hope fulfilled.

Surprise! Criterion just threw this up on Hulu.

Matt wrote:Surprise! Criterion just threw this up on Hulu.

And since the total running time for the two parts is 212 min, I guess they're slowing it down (like they did with Alexanderplatz). No big deal (I think this will become standard when putting out 25 fps material on blu).

Watched this on Hulu last weekend and really enjoyed it. I wondered how Fassbinder would handle science fiction, and the answer is: exactly how you'd expect. It's a Fassbinder film through and through. The acting style is still somewhat monotone and robotic, similar to his other early films, but maybe more so in this one. I felt it worked thematically. The film is striking to look at and Fassbinder's attempts at a futuristic look are, for the most part, successful. The camera frames interior locations geometrically and with an eye towards depth. One particularly memorable shot involves a long backwards dolly shot through a room that seems smaller at first glance. Once again, I think this all works thematically and I appreciated his attempts to convey what the story was about through camera and mise-en-scene. He lends the exterior shots effective paranoia by zooming in from far away and back out numerous times. The droning electronic sounds in the background of most of the film work too and add to the mysterious tone of the film.

World on a Wire is not without its dated aspects (the cars and some of the hairstyles), but by keeping everyone dressed formally in suits and dresses, in addition to keeping the sets sparse and clinical, the feel is still decidedly modern. This is probably why Janus has seen fit to give it a theatrical release at the end of the year. One thing that still works is, naturally, the most important: the story. Parts 1 and 2 each have a mystery driving them which helps keep the daunting length manageable. I agree with an earlier poster who said that part 2 was weaker than part 1, but I only feel this way because it felt padded out a bit to fit the television space it was allotted. Nevertheless, I don't remember being bored. It features an interesting concept explored in more recent films such as The Matrix and The Thirteenth Floor (which is based on the same novel), yet it is different from them purely by virtue of being a Fassbinder film. And a good one. Lovers of science fiction should jump on this yesterday.

PS And how about that crane shot during part 2 that moves from the street to the cabin and stops at a few windows to see what's going on inside? Awesome stuff! Not really something I expected from Fassbinder. He was quite ambitious with World on a Wire, and it shows.

I said somewhere else that I am not a big fan of Fassbinder at all. Being german, his way to direct actors seems artificial at best, utterly monotone and enraging at worst, and I have a problem with the self-pitying and tedious pace of some of his films.

Having said all this - World on a Wire is surely his best work!! By a mile!! It even may be the best german film of all time (I yet have to see Alexanderplatz and Effie Briest but have seen all his other major works, so that says something - this is far better than the 'hyped' Fassbinders).
The article posted above may give away too much, but it strikes the nail on the head: 2001, Blade Runner and the Matrix are all, sort of, points of comparisons.

I cannot say often enough how much I loved this film. Shame I didn't see it in theaters... #-o

It's currently playing at the IFC Center here in NYC advertised as a 'High Definition Digital Restoration'. Debating whether to see it there for the first time (it'd be my introduction to Fassbinder even though I own -but haven't seen- The BRD Trilogy) or just wait for the inevitable Blu-ray.

nolanoe wrote:I said somewhere else that I am not a big fan of Fassbinder at all. Being german, his way to direct actors seems artificial at best, utterly monotone and enraging at worst, and I have a problem with the self-pitying and tedious pace of some of his films.

That's ok - but I've got to defend Fassbinder here. When I was little, I was also taken aback by most of his movies, only to realize later that the "worst" of his films became the most memorable for me. I guess when we are young we accept it more easily not to understand everything, because we are used to it.
Fassbinder wants to irritate us. He let's the actors act like actors so that we realize that their behavior as characters in a story is just facade, which he is about to tear down. Give Effie Briest or Chinese Roulette or even the extreme (and extremely underrated) Querelle a shot without expecting you are being told a conventional story in a conventional way.

I got to see a screener copy of this recently. It will show in HD in Miami Beach starting at the end of the week. I got it from the hands of someone working in Criterion, so this will see a Criterion release, for sure. Here is my review/analysis with lots of quality images.

That's such a great image for the film. Criterion would be crazy to replace it for the cover.

But we clearly don't understand how these things work:

Spoiler

Spoiler

So they're putting this on one disc, with a 50-minute doc and other extras? I trust they've got it worked out, but that seems like it would be pushing it.

They fit the five-plus hour Fanny and Alexander on one blu-ray without trouble. This oughta be cake.

CSM126 wrote:They fit the five-plus hour Fanny and Alexander on one blu-ray without trouble. This oughta be cake.

Indeed you can seemingly comfortably fit a far greater amount of footage on a Blu-ray with only negligible loss. This probably has just as much to do with the fact that very few users of Blu-ray get the most out of it anyway - unlike DVD.

And don't forget that this was shot on 16mm and is an absolute grainfest: much lower resolution required than for a sharp 35mm film like Fanny. The main thing to hope for is that they don't port over that abortion of an HD transfer that was released in France - but I'm guessing that Criterion's reputation is too important to them to screw it over like that.

Wouldn't a grainfest cause more compression problems? And it also depends when the HD transfer got destroyed/DNRed. The underlying telecine might have been great - for all we know the DNR was their very stupid attempt to stop the grain from causing compression problems.

Anyway, not particularly worried. When Criterion do screw-up, it's not their compression that does them in. Just wait till you World on a Wire's new colours.

TMDaines wrote:

CSM126 wrote:They fit the five-plus hour Fanny and Alexander on one blu-ray without trouble. This oughta be cake.

Indeed you can seemingly comfortably fit a far greater amount of footage on a Blu-ray without a negligible loss. This probably has just as much to do with the fact that very few users of Blu-ray get the most out of it anyway - unlike DVD.

It also helps when the film is 1.33:1, since ~1/4th the image in the 16:9 encode is black, making less picture information to be resolved by the compression. A close comparison is Seven Samurai which is the same AR and around the same length, and looks great.

captveg wrote:It also helps when the film is 1.33:1, since ~1/4th the image in the 16:9 encode is black, making less picture information to be resolved by the compression. A close comparison is Seven Samurai which is the same AR and around the same length, and looks great.

...but has the extras on a second disc.

John Edmond wrote:Wouldn't a grainfest cause more compression problems?

Not that I'm any kind of expert, but wouldn't the much larger grain of 16mm (especially in this film) be easier to resolve satisfactorily than 35mm grain?

As for the underlying transfer, the UK DVD looked fine, without any of the horrors of the French transfer, so I'm pretty sure Criterion can get hold of good elements to work with.