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One of the July titles has shown up on Amazon, for those that don't mind finding out before an official announcement: TWO FILMS BY G.W. PABST: WESTFRONT 1918 + KAMERADSCHAFT (Dual Format Edition) due out July 24th

NB: I imagine those are what were being hinted at in this Instagram post from last year's Berlinale (unless it was just the 'FROM CALIGARI TO HITLER' doc for their CALIGARI steelbook reissue).

Had suspected it would either be one of four Pabst titles from Deutsch Kinemathek - either PANDORA'S BOX, WHITE HELL OF PITZ PALU, or either of the two it ended up actually being - or alternatively, perhaps an upgrade of Dreyer's VAMPYR. Certainly glad to see more Pabst coming to MoC but do hope they get PANDORA'S BOX as well one day (...and obviously VAMPYR would be just as exciting).

Great news. Very exciting and diverse set of releases coming up from them, which is wonderful.

Marvelous news for Westfront 1918. I caught the restoration in theaters 2 years ago and it's a commandable one. The movie dragged a very little bit but is otherwise very good.

Kameradschaft is a magnificent film. I used to watch this over and over on an old Embassy Home Entertainment World Cinema VHS tape (from the Janus Collection), but I haven't seen it in years. Rich black and white photography in the mine setting.

These two films are great examples of movies that were once canonical but slipped into obscurity through lack of access. It's long overdue that they get proper home video attention.

If these are really coming from MoC, I'm speechless. Contentwise, they are not even among my favourite Pabst films, but the sheer hope for new transfers which would get the 1.19 aspect ratio right (the German dvd of "Kameradschaft" looks completely ridiculous with its 1.33 chopped-off heads) is enough for me to get totally excited about the prospect of these new editions.

These two are easily the best Pabst films I've seen so this is very nice.

I've been waiting for Janus to release Westfront 1918 since I saw their logo before watching it on TCM tweleve years ago. Despite seeing it as a teen, I remember it incredibly well including the incredible and claustrophobic special effects and the ending that rubs the horror of the first World War in your face. I am excited for this and any critical reevaluation of G.W. Pabst.

Specs according to amazon:

DUAL FORMAT EDITION FEATURES:

Limited Edition O-card [First 2000 copies]
Both films presented on Blu-ray in stunning 1080p
Uncompressed PCM soundtrack for both titles (on the Blu-ray)
Optional English subtitles
Westfront 1918, an introduction by film scholar and author Jan-Christopher Horak
Kameradschaft, an introduction by film scholar and author Jan-Christopher Horak
PLUS: A booklet featuring a new essay by Philip Kemp, alongside rare archival imagery

MoC's second and third quarter are (looking to be in the latter case) so much better than their first.

Actually it looks like their best year since a long, long time.

Seriously. MOC's stretch of only releasing better-encoded versions of Olive and Twilight Time films seems over!

Dude, don't jinx it.

Great to see MoC coming back to top form!

Does anyone know if this will be available for Pre-Order from Eureka's own website? Or should one go ahead and Pre-Order from Amazon?

They usually put them up on their site a few weeks before release, and match the lowest price from Amazon (and Amazon themselves tend to just price-match HMV these days).

Looks great. Love the subtitling options too. This should be more common.

TMDaines wrote:Looks great. Love the subtitling options too. This should be more common.

That was a late addition - during QC, I noticed that Jan-Christopher Horak mentioned in his intro that the film was shown unsubtitled initially, leaving French and German audiences to fend for themselves, and that this all tied in to the film's theme of brotherhood even when your notional brothers don't speak your language. So I thought "wouldn't it be cool if the disc could replicate that effect for decent speakers of one of those languages?", pitched the idea to Eureka, and they went for it.

(It was pretty easy to arrange: I just took the full subtitle file and stripped out the ones that weren't necessary for whichever translation was being offered.)

And it will be handy for people like me, being French and understanding English !

Unfortunately, this edition suffers from some serious issues in terms of its visual presentation. While the restoration and mastering is indeed good for both features, they're presented with incorrect video levels. All shadow details are below the reference level for black (16) and all highlights are above the reference level for white (235). When watching Westfront 1918 on my OLED, the image was so dark I could barely see anything during the night scenes. After changing the video levels from limited to full on my TV, the image was displayed properly. I later checked with the settings on my Blu-Ray player (Pioneer BDP-450K) and it was set to YCbCr 4:2:2, which is correct. After various testings with other films as well as AVSHD there was no doubt that Eureka has made a serious mistake. The issue can, of course, be corrected on most sets but please be aware of this before purchase.

Is there a reason people don't have their players outputting full range permanently?

This would result in all discs exhibiting the same problems Westfront 1918 & Kameradschaft apparently do.

Note that nissling had to change his TV settings to fix this, not his player.

To answer your next question, TVs should not normally be set to Full range because this would cause the opposite problem on discs; blacks would be washed out and milky.

TVs should be set to limited and players should be too.

TMDaines wrote:Is there a reason people don't have their players outputting full range permanently?

Since Blu-Ray, as well as DVD, HD-DVD and UHD-BD, uses the limited range for reference there's not much reason to change it in the player unless you're using a computer monitor that handles full range better.

Should also be noted that for YCbCr, full range is very rare and not supported by the HDMI protocol. Therefore if you want the player to output the signal in its intended color space you don't have much of a choice. I want to state however that for limited range, 16 is the reference for black. It's not the technical limit, although a properly mastered disc shouldn't have any information below 16 nor over 235 but it happens. That's called blacker than black and whiter than white.

One thing though is that most players do support RGB full range, where 16...235 is converted to 0...255. If you then set the TV to limited range, some Asian releases are displayed correctly. This also goes for the recent French release of Stalker. Like EddieLarkin puts it, blacks gets washed out.
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On Stalker though, the black bars are not at 16 but 23, so it doesn't seem to be the only reason for this end result.
And the Asian releases don't have a Full / Limited range issue, it's an IRE level issue.