705 Breaking the Waves

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mfunk9786
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Re: 705 Breaking the Waves

#26 Post by mfunk9786 » Sat Mar 29, 2014 10:49 pm

Director approved, before anyone goes off the rails. It's like someone breathed new life into this classic. Amazing. Day one for me, no doubt

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Gregory
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Re: 705 Breaking the Waves

#27 Post by Gregory » Sat Mar 29, 2014 10:52 pm

He must have been in an "Element of Crime" mood when he approved that.

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Re: 705 Breaking the Waves

#28 Post by cdnchris » Sun Mar 30, 2014 1:27 am

It looks really, really good. I always thought this was actually shot on video so this was a surprise when I popped it in. The colours are different but it looks fine. The notes state von Trier supervised. I'm wondering if he altered them to still give a that "degraded" look Moe said von Trier was going for with the video look, and was maybe no longer a fan of the video look?

Also, "Life on Mars" has been restored.

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Re: 705 Breaking the Waves

#29 Post by wesfox » Sun Mar 30, 2014 5:30 am

Very different from the previous home video releases. It looks a lot more brown and earthy. I think he did 35mm to video and then back to film. Maybe the 35mm was used.
Won't be surprised if LvT isn't that keen on Dogme principles as much anymore. Be interesting to read the release notes on the blu-ray!

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Re: 705 Breaking the Waves

#30 Post by The Fanciful Norwegian » Sun Mar 30, 2014 6:43 am

Yes, the original version was Super 35 to D1 (an early SD digital format) and then back to 35mm—a primitive digital intermediate, in other words. I suspect at the time von Trier didn't think digital video cameras were ready for prime time and shot in 35mm as a kind of hedge. Anyway, looking at those caps, there's no way the Criterion transfer used the same method. I'm not going to pretend I remember what this looked like in cinemas, but I'm pretty confident the Blu-ray looks better than it ever did in theaters. Hell, even the Criterion DVD probably looks better.

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Re: 705 Breaking the Waves

#31 Post by JabbaTheSlut » Sun Mar 30, 2014 8:31 am

The yellow tone is the same look as it was in the prints during the original theatrical run. The previous DVD color corrections are too cold.

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Re: 705 Breaking the Waves

#32 Post by bdsweeney » Sun Mar 30, 2014 8:43 am

JabbaTheSlut wrote:The yellow tone is the same look as it was in the prints during the original theatrical run. The previous DVD color corrections are too cold.
I have memories of that too: a dirty, yellowed look.

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Re: 705 Breaking the Waves

#33 Post by The Fanciful Norwegian » Sun Mar 30, 2014 9:04 am

The Criterion LD was director-approved as well, so it would be interesting to see (or at least read) a comparison with that. My copy is unfortunately halfway across the world right now.

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Re: 705 Breaking the Waves

#34 Post by cdnchris » Sun Mar 30, 2014 10:39 am

To add on to what Fanciful said, the notes on the transfer for this edition say they made a 6k scan from the original 35mm negative and 35mm interpositive.

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Re: 705 Breaking the Waves

#35 Post by MichaelB » Sun Mar 30, 2014 1:46 pm

JabbaTheSlut wrote:The yellow tone is the same look as it was in the prints during the original theatrical run. The previous DVD color corrections are too cold.
I've only seen it on the original theatrical run, and I'd agree with that - the Criterion version matches my memories better.

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zedz
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Re: 705 Breaking the Waves

#36 Post by zedz » Sun Mar 30, 2014 3:14 pm

bdsweeney wrote:
JabbaTheSlut wrote:The yellow tone is the same look as it was in the prints during the original theatrical run. The previous DVD color corrections are too cold.
I have memories of that too: a dirty, yellowed look.
I only ever saw the film theatrically, and that sickly colour scheme, plus the constantly moving camera and enormous screen, literally made people sick.

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Gregory
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Re: 705 Breaking the Waves

#37 Post by Gregory » Sun Mar 30, 2014 5:06 pm

Image

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Re: 705 Breaking the Waves

#38 Post by manicsounds » Tue Apr 08, 2014 10:04 am


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Re: 705 Breaking the Waves

#39 Post by Zot! » Tue Apr 08, 2014 11:28 am

So, it seems like they did away with the video post processing for this release. I'm a little on the fence about that. Sure, it looks nice, but "nice" is not how I remember this. Anybody know if the Japanese BD is the same, or if that retains the original look?

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Re: 705 Breaking the Waves

#40 Post by cdnchris » Wed Apr 09, 2014 2:51 am

He supervised it so it appears to be intentional and how he wants it now. I haven't gone through everything yet so i'm unsure if he explains his reasoning. I was hoping for an explanation because it's such a big change. All I can figure is he didn't care for it anymore.

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Re: 705 Breaking the Waves

#41 Post by Zot! » Wed Apr 09, 2014 9:25 am

cdnchris wrote:He supervised it so it appears to be intentional and how he wants it now. I haven't gone through everything yet so i'm unsure if he explains his reasoning. I was hoping for an explanation because it's such a big change. All I can figure is he didn't care for it anymore.
Right, I get that. An overprocessed look was such a signature for his first part of his career that it's funny that he's revising it now. He even sneaked a low-res shot from Riget into Nymphomaniac. That said, despite his "difficult" reputatution Lars is not a director that refuses to compromise, considering his endless huckstering, shooting in English and relinquishing final cut on Nymphomaniac. I assume the new look is partly to stay in step with recent trends.

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Re: 705 Breaking the Waves

#42 Post by mfunk9786 » Wed Apr 09, 2014 10:37 am

He also replaced all the guns with radios in this release :(

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Re: 705 Breaking the Waves

#43 Post by Zot! » Wed Apr 09, 2014 11:20 am

mfunk9786 wrote:He also replaced all the guns with radios in this release :(
I'm terrified for the CGI Udo Kier. I can't find any screen caps, but generic user review is that the Japanese release looks ugly, while the Criterion is getting nothing but raves. It would please me if both transfers were available on BD.

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Re: 705 Breaking the Waves

#44 Post by cdnchris » Thu Apr 10, 2014 2:40 pm

I do need to ask to those that own either the previous LD or DVD editions:
SpoilerShow
How is the finale with the bells presented audio wise? I don't own the DVD and I never watched it on a surround set up. The film is primarily mono with stereo effects during the chapter headers, but on the Criterion edition the surrounds kick in overtime during the bell bit. I was wondering if that was the case with the Artisan DVD.

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Re: 705 Breaking the Waves

#45 Post by colinr0380 » Mon Apr 14, 2014 6:04 pm


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The Fanciful Norwegian
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Re: 705 Breaking the Waves

#46 Post by The Fanciful Norwegian » Mon Apr 28, 2014 1:42 pm

Zot! wrote:
mfunk9786 wrote:He also replaced all the guns with radios in this release :(
I'm terrified for the CGI Udo Kier. I can't find any screen caps, but generic user review is that the Japanese release looks ugly, while the Criterion is getting nothing but raves. It would please me if both transfers were available on BD.
A bit late, but I can confirm that the Japanese BD is from a different (presumably older) source and looks much more like the DVDs than the Criterion. So if you're nostalgic for the intentionally-degraded look, go for it.

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Re: 705 Breaking the Waves

#47 Post by colinr0380 » Mon May 05, 2014 8:04 am

The film looks wonderful in this new edition but I'm just as frustrated with it as I have always been, but frustrated in intriguing ways! Interestingly this and Melancholia have the same problem: the starting point of the film makes it difficult to judge whether the character is suddenly behaving more abnormally than usual, which therefore impacts on what the 'base level' is from which their crisis builds and on our reaction to the responses of the characters surrounding them. Is this normal or extreme behaviour in the context of the character's wider history? Has the character always been like this, or are the events in the film significant as a whole new phase of their lives and a bringing of their interactions with their world to a head? Both of the films feel shrewdly, and frustratingly, calculated to elide the outside world from the equation, narrowing events down into literal deus ex machina situations controlled by the filmmaker to guide their heroines to an inevitable end.

I guess I'm most interested in this aspect because for me the most fascinating part of the film isn't the sacrifice or degradation or turmoil and redemption that Bess faces but the question of wilfulness (I would go as far to say that I think rather than Bess's problem being that she was too "too good", it was perhaps more that she was 'too willful' for society in all its forms and facing punishment from a society that had felt able to assume that she had been too socialised and subdued to show any sense of purpose for herself. More extreme punishment than those who rebel from an early age would face, as if society is expressing its 'disappointment' in her. But that I think is what is putting me in fundamental opposition with von Trier's guiding philosophy for this film). The film foregrounds this wilfulness in the prologue scene of Bess being questioned by the sceptical elders of the church over Jan - is this the first time that she has 'turned her back' on the church to show love to someone else? The one hint at previous events are the key comments from Dodo about the death of the brother and the ominous mental problems that Bess had after that. Is that traumatic event what caused her problems, or is that too neat (too pat) an explanation to put on events? The, interesting but rightly deleted, scenes on the disc show the problem of giving overly neat explanations of Bess's mental state.

I think that the wilfulness is expressed in a number of interesting ways, and it is interesting that giving herself to her husband too fully, (as also suggested in the relationship with the absent brother) is the aspect that appears to have caused Bess's first and fatal break with society. Nothing else is important, as love, redemption and guidance have been embodied in the form of another human being rather than abstractly in the church and the mores of society. I think it is extremely telling that at the turning point of the story that Bess's 'God voice' briefly turns into a 'Jan voice' giving her instructions. She is being lorded over whilst simultaneously writing her own narrative. Responsible for her own abdication of responsibility in some senses. In some ways Jan's actual instructions then become a way of problematically sharing her own neurosis with her, of taking the responsibility of becoming the dominant partner so that Bess does not have to do it all herself of being both the passive and the dominant one in the relationship.

I think the film bears a lot of comparison to In The Realm of the Senses in that way as a couple abandon themselves to each other, needing nothing else. Both films also involve the single-minded and driven female partner, while the male lies in bed all day, going out to prostitute themselves for a specific goal and illustrating the difference between even the physical act of sex being just one tool used in an obsessive relationship, and perhaps not the most important one. Though Breaking The Waves does play around with ideas of Jan having awakened a kind of 'sex mania' in Bess, another aspect of wilfulness that Bess begins to try and wield on her own terms before being slapped down for having the temerity for having done so.

I particularly love that Bess has those moments of standing up to everyone else in the film (pointedly even Jan when she abandons him after he asks her to help him commit suicide), such as her best friend Dodo in the scene of their argument (exposing the contradictions, even hypocrises in Dodo of staying while hating the place, and of participating whilst disagreeing with the church, pushing Dodo into her own final, futile confrontation at the graveside); the doctor as she tries to wrestle control of her own sanity back from him; the church as she tries to wrestle control of her own morality back from them (of her 'God voice' being as much, if not more, legitimate than the 'God voice' from the pulpit); and wrestling control of her own destiny by meeting her end and making her sacrifice in her own way. She doesn't mean to oppose them, it is just that the things that she wants conflicts, or get twisted, when those beyond herself get involved.

Yet I think this is undermined by von Trier's insistence on Bess's 'goodness' being her primary quality (Although maybe we are not meant to take the kindly but useless Doctor's comments at face value, turning him into an early version of the intellectual, yet compromised by their lack of action when it counts, figure later critiqued more severely in Dogville and Nymphomaniac, although idealistic 'do-gooders' have been a feature ever since The Element of Crime. I think Dogville gets far more powerfully into the whole concept of 'goodness' and its exploitation when others recognise that quality). It imposes a layer of meaning on top of Bess that ignores and in some ways undermines her more admirable qualities, and I think the literalised Bells of Heaven ending is just the most extreme final example of this.

I think it is very interesting to compare this with Dancer In The Dark, which I think pulls off a similarly sacrificially transcendent ending in a magnificent way and in a manner that remains sensitive towards the character instead of having to pull back to provide the audience with a final zinger (and Melancholia itself, for its similarities to Breaking The Waves, works better by having the equivalent of the Bells of Heaven at the beginning of the film).

Anyway, while the film beautifully shows that kind of dawning wilfulness I'm not sure that the film particularly wants to deal with those particular ideas, in fact is likely structured in order to not have to deal with those kind of questions (a form of self criticism of the filmmaker themselves as flawed deus ex machina figures? Later explored more fully in The Five Obstructions), which means that I'm really looking for something on a bit of a wider scale than a narrower one. But I'll have to re-watch it again some time to see how it affects me in the future!

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Re: 705 Breaking the Waves

#48 Post by DignanSWE » Mon Jun 23, 2014 12:14 am

Here's an interesting video about the restoration process used at Zentropa. The color correction of Breaking the Waves is covered in the second half of the video. (The first part of the video reveals that Riget is being restored in 4K!)

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Re: 705 Breaking the Waves

#49 Post by Laitings » Sat Jan 10, 2015 6:58 pm

Moe Dickstein wrote:Lars - does it look like it's from the film negatives, or is it the version that's gone through video processing?
The original filmnegs were scanned in 6K and then downscaled to 4K. The whole film was then reedited. It was then colorgraded again using the original 35 theatre release print as a reference instead of the video version. Along side colorgrading the the film went through a frame by frame manual dustbusting process where dust and artifacts were removed. In fact it went through this process 4 times and this process alone took 4 months.

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Re: 705 Breaking the Waves

#50 Post by Zot! » Sun Jan 11, 2015 9:55 pm

Laitings wrote:
Moe Dickstein wrote:Lars - does it look like it's from the film negatives, or is it the version that's gone through video processing?
The original filmnegs were scanned in 6K and then downscaled to 4K. The whole film was then reedited. It was then colorgraded again using the original 35 theatre release print as a reference instead of the video version.
You mean instead of the dvd, right? Because the original 35mm theatre release print was the "video" version.

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