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The original broadcast was in 1080..

Bright Lights Film Journal:

Like their Blu-ray of Murnau's City Girl, Master of Cinema's Coeur Fidèle is another example of a silent film miraculously surviving in nearly pristine shape — as if nigh onto 90 years mattered not at all — and then, just as miraculously, made available to all in the video marketplace. What times we live in!

Release of the year.

This is staggeringly beautiful, and I commend MoC for putting this out in 1080p. Thank you! Thank you! I know sales will not be superb, but please please release more of these silents in 1080p.

I thought the score, by the way, was absolutely marvelous. Nearly perfect. I 'm so sick of the standard solo piano for silent films, which gets old real quick. Cyrin's approach is in my opinion the way to go: minimalist and understated.

Has anybody found a retailer that has this in stock recently?

Everyone I have found lists a 1 month wait for shipping.

Send Eureka an email, they normally are willing to invoice you via paypal with free shipping.

Such a fantastic release. With a transfer as glorious as there it's hard to decide who deserves the most credit. The director and cinematographer themselves, those who were behind the restoration of the film or the Masters of Cinema team. Surely a combination of all three! I'm not sure whether this or the Czech print of Sunrise looks more beautiful. Both are truly reference quality.

This is a perfect example of what can make silent cinema still so great eighty years on. A simple tale combined with beautiful visuals. I would suggest the story is what one could describe as Zola-esque naturalism.

I saw this last year - not sure if it was this release - but it was gorgeous! It reminded me of the flipside to L'Atalante in some ways, a simple story told through poetic realism, defined through the purity of its emotion but here the dominating emotion is pain as opposed to L'Atalante's bittersweet joy. What a beautiful film, and the fairground scene is deservedly legendary. I saw this with a recent score which fitted it to a T, a very minimalist piano-based track - however I can't remember who did it.

puxzkkx wrote:I saw this with a recent score which fitted it to a T, a very minimalist piano-based track - however I can't remember who did it.

That would be Maxence Cyrin. The same (wonderful) score is used on the MoC edition.

I enjoyed this on the whole, but I did find the melodrama here just way, way too thickly ladled in. I like lovers up against it as much as anyone, but this Barretts of Wimpole Street brand of persistent audience-goading oppression is more annoying than heartbreaking. The constant holding for the emotional stop watches to click and wait is effective to a point, but eventually it becomes clear that to some degree this extremely slim narrative is just padding out its action. This needed better material to meet the formal mastery of the filmmaking

That's a recurrent issue (if that's the word) with the French "impressionist"/narrative avant-garde filmmakers, who typically were much more interested in stylistic experimentation and efforts at photogénie than narrative. They were often content to let their experiments adorn extremely conventional plots. In this case Epstein admitted as much, saying the basic plot was a melodrama of the most banal sort designed to get Pathé to fund the film.
This isn't just a retrospective criticism; a lot of 1920s critics and other filmmakers (and critics/filmmakers) were ambivalent about the films of Epstein, L'Herbier, Delluc, Gance, etc. precisely because the plots often seemed like an afterthought. (I'm too lazy to look this up, but one critic said of Gance's work, "Such awful melodies, such delightful instrumentation.")