Camera Obscura: The Walerian Borowczyk Collection

[Ron]

Dear Michael, I have another question concerning Goto. Is this version different than any other cuts previously released on DVD?

[MichaelB]

Dear Michael, I have another question concerning Goto. Is this version different than any other cuts previously released on DVD?

I believe there has only ever been one version of the film in terms of running time, at least in terms of UK releases (Arrow's is 93m26s without the logos at the start, which tallies with PAL video releases running 89m47s). At least one previous video release carelessly/ignorantly presented the six brief colour shots in black and white, but they were present in Nouveaux's 2009 DVD, and are obviously included in Arrow's restoration.

[perkizitore]

For whoever missed this, it is available again from Zavvi.

[Ron]

Dear Michael,

Would it be possible to post Boro's original poster art from the reversible sleeves here in this forum?

Many thanks in advance!
Ron

[kekid]

Hi Michael,
When do we expect kickstarter to send a communication asking people to confirm shipping addresses for this box? I hope they allow some time for people to respond (in case they are on vacation etc.).
Thank you.

[L.A.]

From Facebook:

**CAMERA OBSCURA UPDATE**

Due to the unprecedented growth of this project and all the aspects from the enormous book to the filming/editing/proofing of discs we have unfortunately run over schedule but the end is finally in sight and so a new date has been set. The Box set and now all five individual releases will be available on 8th September.

[MichaelB]

There's been a further delay to the release, I'm afraid - Arrow is now releasing all their Borowczyk titles on September 8th.

Which is good news if you're only buying the standalone releases, as it means that Immoral Tales is coming out several weeks earlier than originally planned - but I concede that it's less good news if you were after the box, The Beast or Goto.

All I can say in mitigation is that the end is in sight - the book has already been printed and bound (I haven't seen a copy myself, but Daniel Bird has and confirms that everything's turned out OK), several discs have already been signed off, and I'm hoping to sort out the final laggards over the next few days.

(The most recent problems have mainly been subtitle-related, particularly in connection with the intertitles on Immoral Tales - as they consist of wall-to-wall text, there's nowhere to conveniently place the subtitles, and I wasn't happy when the initial QC flagged up situations like this:



...so we're experimenting with alternative arrangements.)

[Drucker]

I have been purposely building a kevyip in anticipation of canceling my cable service and I'll be in need of lots of things to watch. I'll also have the Herzog box to go through when the BFI comes out. So this is good news for me in terms of being able to watch the set in a timely manner!

[MichaelB]

It really will be worth the wait, I promise! I've now seen three completed BDs and the other two at a very advanced stage, and they look absolutely stunning.

I only realised the other day that for the first time in my producing career I'm putting out a product in which literally every single item across all eleven discs (!) has been generated in-house, whether we're talking original scans of the 35mm materials or entirely home-grown extras. There isn't a single thing that was simply pulled off the shelf in an existing video master and sent off to the encoder for slapping onto the disc - even things like the trailers and TV commercials were newly scanned to HD.

Which is obviously great news for the end user, but the workload has been humungous, with unexpected issues constantly coming out of left field. For instance, with the (hilarious) original French trailer for The Beast, in which quotes from French journalists are presented as three-line subtitles, do we attempt a simultaneous onscreen translation and risk the underlying image being swamped by a surfeit of text, or do we present the English translation after the originals in a similar style? (After much experimentation, we opted for the latter - people might be a bit confused when a chunk of seemingly untranslated French initially pops up on the screen, but hopefully they'll realise that it plays much better the way we've done it.)

Still, we're very very nearly there.

[EddieLarkin]

For some reason I was the under the impression The Beast and Immoral Tales were off the shelf from Argos. Did Arrow do the scanning/mastering for those as well? I was worried they may not look as good as the new James White restorations afforded the other 3 films.

[MichaelB]

For some reason I was the under the impression The Beast and Immoral Tales were off the shelf from Argos. Did Arrow do the scanning/mastering for those as well? I was worried they may not look as good as the new James White restorations afforded the other 3 films.

Good point - I forgot about those two.

They and Les Astronautes did indeed come from Argos, although of course the middle episode of the five-part 'L'Âge d'Or cut' of Immoral Tales is a James White original - and looks surprisingly good considering that the only known source was a 16mm projection print, which we believe is the only surviving copy of Borowczyk's 22-minute original cut before the 35mm negative was re-edited to make the dream sequence in The Beast. Handily, it comes right after the 16mm-shot 'Thérèse Philosophe', so it's not visually jarring at all.

[olmo]

It really will be worth the wait, I promise! I've now seen three completed BDs and the other two at a very advanced stage, and they look absolutely stunning.

I only realised the other day that for the first time in my producing career I'm putting out a product in which literally every single item across all eleven discs (!) has been generated in-house, whether we're talking original scans of the 35mm materials or entirely home-grown extras. There isn't a single thing that was simply pulled off the shelf in an existing video master and sent off to the encoder for slapping onto the disc - even things like the trailers and TV commercials were newly scanned to HD.

Which is obviously great news for the end user, but the workload has been humungous, with unexpected issues constantly coming out of left field. For instance, with the (hilarious) original French trailer for The Beast, in which quotes from French journalists are presented as three-line subtitles, do we attempt a simultaneous onscreen translation and risk the underlying image being swamped by a surfeit of text, or do we present the English translation after the originals in a similar style? (After much experimentation, we opted for the latter - people might be a bit confused when a chunk of seemingly untranslated French initially pops up on the screen, but hopefully they'll realise that it plays much better the way we've done it.)

Still, we're very very nearly there.

You mentioned on Twitter that you'd just signed off on Blanche which is your favourite Borowczyk film by a whisker, I'm curious as to which film it just surpasses in your opinion?

As someone who is coming to Borowczyk films for the first time; (apart from 'Blanche') when the box-set arrives, would you recommend watching the films in chronological order as an exercise in seeing how this particular director evolved?

[MichaelB]

You mentioned on Twitter that you'd just signed off on Blanche which is your favourite Borowczyk film by a whisker, I'm curious as to which film it just surpasses in your opinion?

It varies all the time. Working on this project has made me much more appreciative of Immoral Tales and a fair bit less appreciative of The Beast - with the latter, you can never really recapture the sheer shock value of that initial viewing, which in my case was nearly thirty years ago. Probably a tie between Goto and Dr Jekyll if we're talking features.

As someone who is coming to Borowczyk films for the first time; (apart from 'Blanche') when the box-set arrives, would you recommend watching the films in chronological order as an exercise in seeing how this particular director evolved?

Yes, I think that would make a lot of sense. Especially if you're in the unusual position of not having seen the later features - you can actually go some way towards recapturing what Borowczyk's original audiences must have made of his work.

Incidentally, the 'play programme' option on the shorts disc is deliberately not in chronological order (Borowczyk preferred his films not to be shown chronologically, and we've largely duplicated a sequence that he himself devised), but the individual titles on the menu are listed chronologically.

[olmo]

You mentioned on Twitter that you'd just signed off on Blanche which is your favourite Borowczyk film by a whisker, I'm curious as to which film it just surpasses in your opinion?

It varies all the time. Working on this project has made me much more appreciative of Immoral Tales and a fair bit less appreciative of The Beast - with the latter, you can never really recapture the sheer shock value of that initial viewing, which in my case was nearly thirty years ago. Probably a tie between Goto and Dr Jekyll if we're talking features.

As someone who is coming to Borowczyk films for the first time; (apart from 'Blanche') when the box-set arrives, would you recommend watching the films in chronological order as an exercise in seeing how this particular director evolved?

Yes, I think that would make a lot of sense. Especially if you're in the unusual position of not having seen the later features - you can actually go some way towards recapturing what Borowczyk's original audiences must have made of his work.

Incidentally, the 'play programme' option on the shorts disc is deliberately not in chronological order (Borowczyk preferred his films not to be shown chronologically, and we've largely duplicated a sequence that he himself devised), but the individual titles on the menu are listed chronologically.

Thanks for that, I'll follow your advice. I suppose for the uninitiated, the temptation would be to delve straight into The Beast as it's arguably the most notorious. However, since the collections inception I've been intrigued by Goto the more I've read up on it. I wasn't even aware of it to be honest. Only made aware of Immoral Tales & The Beast through Tom Dewe Matthews 'Censored' from the mid-nineties.

Inordinately excited and looking forward to immersing myself in all things Boro'. Cheers.

[olmo]

I'm wondering MichaelB, if you overcame the obstacle of the intertitles / subtitles problem that arose the other week? If so, how you did it?

[MichaelB]

Yes! It took quite a bit of trial and error (not least because any solution had to work for both BD and lower-resolution DVD subtitles), but we ended up "ghostboxing" the relevant subtitles - by which I mean setting them against a translucent block that made them stand out against the background while still ensuring that the background remained visible (the translucency isn't obvious in this iPhone shot, but is much more so on the actual disc).



So we redid every affected subtitle like that (including a couple in the extras).

This threw up a further problem, which is that the opening dialogue of 'Thérèse Philosophe' overlaps with the text introduction, with the result that a subtitle ended up being "ghostboxed" over the live action in a rather unsightly way, but after analysing that segment of video we discovered that this subtitle only appeared over the text screen for eighteen frames, and so we ended up starting it eighteen frames late. In other words, the subtitle will appear a fraction of a second later than it ideally should, but we thought this was a better compromise than either not ghostboxing the bit over the text screen or, worse, ghostboxing the bit over the live action.

(I did briefly toy with the idea of creating two textually identical subtitles appearing immediately after each other, one ghostboxed and the other not, but was advised that this was playing with fire in terms of anticipating how players might react!)

[olmo]

Yes! It took quite a bit of trial and error (not least because any solution had to work for both BD and lower-resolution DVD subtitles), but we ended up "ghostboxing" the relevant subtitles - by which I mean setting them against a translucent block that made them stand out against the background while still ensuring that the background remained visible (the translucency isn't obvious in this iPhone shot, but is much more so on the actual disc).



So we redid every affected subtitle like that (including a couple in the extras).

This threw up a further problem, which is that the opening dialogue of 'Thérèse Philosophe' overlaps with the text introduction, with the result that a subtitle ended up being "ghostboxed" over the live action in a rather unsightly way, but after analysing that segment of video we discovered that this subtitle only appeared over the text screen for eighteen frames, and so we ended up starting it eighteen frames late. In other words, the subtitle will appear a fraction of a second later than it ideally should, but we thought this was a better compromise than either not ghostboxing the bit over the text screen or, worse, ghostboxing the bit over the live action.

(I did briefly toy with the idea of creating two textually identical subtitles appearing immediately after each other, one ghostboxed and the other not, but was advised that this was playing with fire in terms of anticipating how players might react!)

A tiny compromise which sounds as though it will be barely noticeable, cheers for that. Was this particular problem only applicable to 'Immoral Tales' with it's portmanteau story-telling? I'm guessing that is the reason for the intertitles?

[MichaelB]

A tiny compromise which sounds as though it will be barely noticeable, cheers for that. Was this particular problem only applicable to 'Immoral Tales' with its portmanteau story-telling? I'm guessing that is the reason for the intertitles?

Yes - there are no other films with a similar situation (i.e. repeated screens of text with nowhere obvious to place the subtitles).

Although throughout all eleven discs we've been very careful about subtitle placement, even to the extent of redoing a couple of DVD subtitles after signing off on the BD equivalents because the larger font size made them slightly wider - and therefore they just overlapped with an onscreen caption in a way that they didn't on the BD.

[MichaelB]

In fact, talking of subtitle placement, it was also a conscious decision to place the subtitles in the trailer for The Beast after the relevant French press quotes, as the alternative would be to have the screen crammed with twice as much text on a regular basis. Fortunately, the timing of the original quotes facilitated this, so you get the original...



...and then the translation:



...with the subtitles onscreen for exactly the same amount of time as the original text. In other words, it alternates French-English-French-English throughout the trailer.

It'll be a bit confusing for the first ten seconds when it initially appears to be in untranslated French, but hopefully it will become very clear very quickly why we did it this way.

[olmo]

I can't imagine there being an easier or satisfactory way to do it to be honest. A less thorough job would have no doubt left the trailer as it was and use the fact it was after all; 'a trailer' and left it as authentic. I think it will be of great interest to most to see how the French press received (in this instance) The Beast; critically, far more appreciative than ours by the looks of things. Always ahead in matters artistic, are our continental counterparts, sadly.

It looks and sounds a superbly crafted presentation. I really can't wait.

[MichaelB]

I think it will be of great interest to most to see how the French press received (in this instance) The Beast; critically, far more appreciative than ours by the looks of things. Always ahead in matters artistic, are our continental counterparts, sadly.

I always instinctively bridle at sweeping statements like that, largely because they're often borne out of pure snobbery instead of delving through hard evidence. In this case despite the film opening three years late in a heavily cut version, The Beast actually garnered several very positive reviews on its UK release - you could easily replace the quotes in the French trailer with these:

In other hands such a tale might have been the stuff of indictable pornography. Not here, I think. Here it looks the stuff of legend, the material of an audacious but refined obsession.

The brilliance of The Beast as a comic fable of sexual attitudes, and of the eternal battle human desire wages with social restraints, lies in the way all its parts work and contribute to the whole.

The film is a consistent joy to watch, and Borowczyk's compositions remain uniquely and often startlingly his own. And his caressing, almost disinterested fondness for the half-clothed female body still carries a rare charge in these days of frequently misbegotten cinematic 'eroticism'.

It's also well worth adding that while Blanche was a box-office disaster in sophisticated and enlightened France, it was a substantial arthouse hit in uncultured and xenophobic Britain - and of course the box set under discussion is a British rather than French project. Indeed, the Kickstarter campaign came about after Arrow was unable to secure partnership funding from a French label!

[olmo]

It was more a comment on how the continent dealt with sexuality in film (which admittedly I didn't make explicit). I think the British, historically, have been far more prudish. I would expect Walker to have lauded the film as he was a critic who watched a film (and understood it) for what it was. Vehemently defending Kubrick's 'A Clockwork Orange' in the face of press vitriol for example.

The quote from the screenshot was taken from the France Soir newspaper which was the most popular mainstream daily in France. You take a British counterpart of that time and I very much doubt 'The Beast' would have garnered any such appraisals or even an honest review for that matter. Of course I'm aware that the likes of Sight & Sound, and various other film periodicals would have received the film genuinely and reviewed it objectively, as would the serious critics in the press.

It wasn't a slight on British film critics then or now. And it wasn't a statement borne of snobbery at all, if anything a slight ignorance and possibly had the infamous comments from the Daily Mirror / Mail?? review foremost in my mind.

Certainly meant no offence.

[EddieLarkin]

This threw up a further problem, which is that the opening dialogue of 'Thérèse Philosophe' overlaps with the text introduction, with the result that a subtitle ended up being "ghostboxed" over the live action in a rather unsightly way, but after analysing that segment of video we discovered that this subtitle only appeared over the text screen for eighteen frames, and so we ended up starting it eighteen frames late. In other words, the subtitle will appear a fraction of a second later than it ideally should, but we thought this was a better compromise than either not ghostboxing the bit over the text screen or, worse, ghostboxing the bit over the live action.

The meticulous attention to detail on even small issues like subtitle timing shown here earns a great deal of respect from me. Owning presentations of films that are essentially perfect, where every aspect of the release is pored over until it's just right, is one of the things I love most about good home video. If such a great deal of care is going into the subtitles, I know that the bigger issues are in safe hands as well. I wish more disc producers were so dedicated.

[whaleallright]

I have a very dumb question that I'm simply to lazy to scour this entire thread for an answer to: is this box set still available for sale?

[WorstFella]

I believe Moviemail still has copies remaining, but I wouldn't dally on grabbing it if you want it.