865 Blow-Up

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knives
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Re: Blow-Up

#26 Post by knives » Mon Mar 01, 2010 2:04 pm

karaman wrote:I protest it because it is censoored. If we don't buy that kind of stuff and protest it with our e-mails, perhaps Warner will be more respectful for "Blowup".This is my opinion.
While the e-mails idea is fine and dandy, even though in this case I'm not sure if even several hundred e-mails would help, as Swo said the not buying of the DVDs will only make Warners go, "No one's interested in this, might as well as never release this sort of thing again." It is definitely a lose-lose situation for the consumer.

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aox
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Re: Blow-Up

#27 Post by aox » Mon Mar 01, 2010 2:18 pm

The solution then is to just walk into a store and steal it. Warner will see that there is interest, and you'll still be 'protesting' the release by withholding your money. Win-Win.

karaman
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Re: Blow-Up

#28 Post by karaman » Mon Mar 01, 2010 3:24 pm

If you don't protest an accept it as it is you can't get a result.
That Warner is a video nasty. They are just destroying beautiful movies.
Their treatment to Foreign classics is inbelievable.

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Napier
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Re: Blow-Up

#29 Post by Napier » Mon Mar 01, 2010 3:27 pm

karaman wrote: That Warner is a video nasty.
Sorry mods, I couldn't help myself. :lol: But, if things don't start shaping up over there, we might have to rename their thread.

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Gregory
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Re: Blow-Up

#30 Post by Gregory » Mon Mar 01, 2010 3:47 pm

triodelover wrote:
karaman wrote:We have the right to watch our DVDs as the director himself intended.
If you can find a legal basis for this assertion in any country in which this DVD is sold, I'll buy you a beer. In the US...

I'm pretty sure karaman was talking about an ethical right. For example, it would be unethical to publish a controversial novel by a deceased author with certain parts removed because readers have the right to read it the way the author conceived it.
Concerning a "protest", when you can devise a scheme that will hurt the company's bottom line enough that they will need to listen to you, you will be onto something. Until then, you're just listening to your own echo on the Internet.
So if someone can't have an instant and measurably obvious impact on something, they might as well not even to discuss the problem? I think people who criticize someone with a worthy complaint about the censorship of an important work, because that individual can't change the situation alone or have any certain predictable impact, are the ones really wasting their keystrokes.
Are you aware of the outcome that all the "echoing voices on the internet" had on the botched MGM Ingmar Bergman set? Discussing it on sites including this one, which may have seemed pointless at first, led to enough people complaining to MGM that they did an expensive recall.
Sending emails to Warner about it, if enough people are concerned and do likewise (and are not discouraged by people telling them to quit complaining) then there some chance it will make a difference. Corporations are not democratic institutions by any stretch, but for their own reasons they often do listen to consumer feedback and often spend large sums of money to get it.
The less encouraging part of the picture, as I said before, is that WHV does not seem particularly receptive to customer feedback anymore, especially if Feltenstein's public statements are any indication, nor does it seems like they're re-releasing a lot of films in their catalog like Blow-Up.
Even if it could be known that nothing could be done to get WHV to release the film in untampered form in the future, I still think it's good to raise awareness that it was issued this way.

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triodelover
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Re: Blow-Up

#31 Post by triodelover » Mon Mar 01, 2010 4:20 pm

Gregory wrote:
triodelover wrote:
karaman wrote:We have the right to watch our DVDs as the director himself intended.
If you can find a legal basis for this assertion in any country in which this DVD is sold, I'll buy you a beer. In the US...

I'm pretty sure karaman was talking about an ethical right. For example, it would be unethical to publish a controversial novel by a deceased author with certain parts removed because readers have the right to read it the way the author conceived it.
I understood that. But how does one enforce an ethical right in the face of the rights of those who own the intellectual property? In fact, the very definition of an ethical right will differ from individual to individual while property rights are codified. So to say one has an ethical right to something is all well and good, but how does one exercise that right if one is not the recognized owner of the intellectual property in question? The very assertion, although noble, seems rather quixotic.
Gregory wrote:
Concerning a "protest", when you can devise a scheme that will hurt the company's bottom line enough that they will need to listen to you, you will be onto something. Until then, you're just listening to your own echo on the Internet.
So if someone can't have an instant and measurably obvious impact on something, they might as well not even to discuss the problem? I think people who criticize someone with a worthy complaint about the censorship of an important work, because that individual can't change the situation alone or have any certain predictable impact, are the ones really wasting their keystrokes.
Are you aware of the outcome that all the "echoing voices on the internet" had on the botched MGM Ingmar Bergman set? Discussing it on sites including this one, which may have seemed pointless at first, led to enough people complaining to MGM that they did an expensive recall.
Sending emails to Warner about it, if enough people are concerned and do likewise (and are not discouraged by people telling them to quit complaining) then there some chance it will make a difference. Corporations are not democratic institutions by any stretch, but for their own reasons they often do listen to consumer feedback and often spend large sums of money to get it.
The less encouraging part of the picture, as I said before, is that WHV does not seem particularly receptive to customer feedback anymore, especially if Feltenstein's public statements are any indication, nor does it seems like they're re-releasing a lot of films in their catalog like Blow-Up.
Even if it could be known that nothing could be done to get WHV to release the film in untampered form in the future, I still think it's good to raise awareness that it was issued this way.
Discussion is all well and good. It's how every action begins. But unless someone can advance a way to make WHV see that it is in the interest of their bottom line to be responsive - as was apparently done in the Bergman case - then the efforts will be futile. (As you point out it was a larger investment for MGM in that it was a set by a director that is likely better known to the casual film-goer than Antonioni.) That's not the same thing as saying "Don't even try". But simply calling for protest seems pointless. In the current economy and with the approach that the majors have been taking toward their back catalogues recently, I think you are correct in saying even a well-crafted campaign would fall on deaf ears at WHV. One chooses one's battles more carefully as one gets older, and since WHV hasn't even returned to this title in 6 years to give us an amaray case instead of that damned snapper, I think the best hope is that someone like MoC or BFI pick up the title in Region B/2. If I seemed harsh or overly cynical in my response, I apologize.

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MichaelB
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Re: Blow-Up

#32 Post by MichaelB » Mon Mar 01, 2010 4:44 pm

triodelover wrote:But how does one enforce an ethical right in the face of the rights of those who own the intellectual property? In fact, the very definition of an ethical right will differ from individual to individual while property rights are codified. So to say one has an ethical right to something is all well and good, but how does one exercise that right if one is not the recognized owner of the intellectual property in question? The very assertion, although noble, seems rather quixotic.
The simple answer is that you can't. We've already brought up Ken Russell in this thread, so here's an excellent example: his 1970 film Dance of the Seven Veils. This has had just one legal screening, on British television in February 1970, after which the estate of the composer Richard Strauss made it very clear that they would not be granting any further permission for the film to exploit his music. Since the film is about Strauss, most of the soundtrack is wall-to-wall music, and even the verbal content was taken from Strauss's own writings, this effectively makes it unshowable. (There's a copy in the BFI National Archive, but only accessible by bona fide researchers, and for a price).

In this case, there's nothing anyone can do (least of all Russell) except wait for Strauss to pass into the public domain. Barring a change in copyright legislation between now and 2010, there's just under a decade to go.
Discussion is all well and good. It's how every action begins. But unless someone can advance a way to make WHV see that it is in the interest of their bottom line to be responsive - as was apparently done in the Bergman case - then the efforts will be futile. (As you point out it was a larger investment for MGM in that it was a set by a director that is likely better known to the casual film-goer than Antonioni.)
I suspect there's also the not insignificant factor that the problems affected the entire films, not mere seconds. I know some absolutists maintain that any film that's been modified is "butchered" or "ruined", but I'm somewhat more pragmatic. I wouldn't touch a DVD of the US release version of The Devils with the proverbial ten-foot bargepole, but I'd buy the British release version if that ever saw the light of day. True, it's not the same as the restored cut that I was lucky enough to see in 2004, but it is nonetheless identical to the longest version available between 1971 and 2004 - and the changes don't make that much difference (not least because Russell himself supervised the re-editing).

So while I can understand why a distributor might recall a title if there's a serious problem with it - for a recent example, see the BFI's Blu-ray of The Leopard - I really don't think most people are going to be especially bothered about whether or not they see Vanessa Redgrave's norks. Does it seriously affect appreciation of the film?
I think the best hope is that someone like MoC or BFI pick up the title in Region B/2.
That won't happen without a policy change at Warners, I'm afraid.

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Gregory
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Re: Blow-Up

#33 Post by Gregory » Mon Mar 01, 2010 5:21 pm

Triodelover, I think everything in your last post is perfectly reasonable. As for the problem you describe in the top half, I think it's probably not possible for Antonioni's widow or anyone else to do anything legally. So the only alternative is to try to appeal to WHV, as pointless and unappealing as that sounds. I'm as prone to defeatism as anyone else, but it's hard to judge how many readers of Beaver and the last version of this forum have already complained or how many would do so if it were more widely known. It is Antonioni, after all.

And contrary to how MichaelB and others here have put it, I don't think most people concerned about censorship of an important film see this as an issue of being able to see x because they want to be able to see x. A more significant issue at stake (among several) is the extremely worrisome precedent this kind of thing sets. Many will also resent being condescended to for the purpose of upholding an absurd and irrelevant moral codes that the film was meant to push against decades ago. Saying that this doesn't affect appreciation is something that the studio could use as a justification, and it's a poor one. The burden of proof should not be on the artist or viewers to make a specific case for the importance of not censoring a particular thing. Let's just have it as the filmmaker made it, and then one needn't worry about whether a given person's appreciation or understanding of the film and its sensory impact will suffer from changes made to the director's cut.
Would we be having this discussion if someone was going back and softening the language in Henry Miller?

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ellipsis7
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Re: Blow-Up

#34 Post by ellipsis7 » Mon Mar 01, 2010 6:00 pm

Antonioni experienced the most censorship in the late 40's and 50's with his scripts and films portraying a decadent and delinquent middle class generation of 'lost youth', who had grown up under fascism - now that was a sensitive subject then, counterculture, sexuality etc. then... Am researching and writing on this right now, tons of actual evidence here... As David Hare points out, it could well be an open matte allowing the projectionist to rack a frame up or down, to reveal whatever, and it is possible that when a transfer to Academy 4:3 ratio VHS some of this was also exposed.. But, guys, this is Antonioni & BLOW UP and the idea of what is seen and is not seen is not reduced to a physical attribute in his oeuvre, it's far more cerebral - miss the whole point of the film and the filmmaker... At this stage of his career, MA was so experienced in elision, and the production history of this film with Producer Carlo Ponti (fulfilling a promise he had made 16 years earlier, when he had acquired the intial script of Lo Sceicco Bianco/The White Sheik and reassigned to Fellini) reveals there were reasons for excision of scripted scenes, but these were almost entirely due to the control and creativity of the director... This contrasts with his next film, ZABRISKIE POINT, where he was working with a Hollywood Studio and an American crew (he had largely Italians on BLOW UP), an altogether more fraught experience, but equally fruitfully finally... Would kill for a Blu of BLOW UP, of course...

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triodelover
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Re: Blow-Up

#35 Post by triodelover » Mon Mar 01, 2010 6:02 pm

Gregory wrote:Triodelover, I think everything in your last post is perfectly reasonable. As for the problem you describe in the top half, I think it's probably not possible for Antonioni's widow or anyone else to do anything legally. So the only alternative is to try to appeal to WHV, as pointless and unappealing as that sounds. I'm as prone to defeatism as anyone else, but it's hard to judge how many readers of Beaver and the last version of this forum have already complained or how many would do so if it were more widely known. It is Antonioni, after all.

And contrary to how MichaelB and others here have put it, I don't think most people concerned about censorship of an important film see this as an issue of being able to see x because they want to be able to see x. A more significant issue at stake (among several) is the extremely worrisome precedent this kind of thing sets. Many will also resent being condescended to for the purpose of upholding an absurd and irrelevant moral codes that the film was meant to push against decades ago. Saying that this doesn't affect appreciation is something that the studio could use as a justification, and it's a poor one. The burden of proof should not be on the artist or viewers to make a specific case for the importance of not censoring a particular thing. Let's just have it as the filmmaker made it, and then one needn't worry about whether a given person's appreciation or understanding of the film and its sensory impact will suffer from changes made to the director's cut.
Would we be having this discussion if someone was going back and softening the language in Henry Miller?
I agree with everything you say about censorship and that this is not about just wanting to see some specific thing. But I also agree with Michael that having Vanessa cropped just above her bust doesn't materially affect the enjoyment or intent of the film. It shouldn't be done, but I can imagine it happening for even less cynical reasons that avoiding parental guidance stickers. Possibly it's just an artifact of rematting and not an intentional effort to censor. (I have the R1 snapper case and on my version Jane Birken's pubic hair is quite visible.) After all, neither the VHS shown for example nor this DVD (and the R2 counterpart) is in the correct AR, something that bothers me more that not seeing Redgrave's nipples. Rather than intentional censorship (because I doubt anyone buys or rents this film as a family viewing experience), what we may be seeing is just sloppy production values, which may be even more disturbing. One can fight the censorship if the other side is forthcoming about what it is, but if this is just a lackadaisical approach that gave us a product that they were just too lazy and cheap to go back and correct, it's truly a lost cause. That means they don't give a s**t which leaves you with no weapon to use against them. I doubt this was a big seller for WHV in the best of times.

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triodelover
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Re: Blow-Up

#36 Post by triodelover » Mon Mar 01, 2010 6:05 pm

ellipsis7 wrote: Would kill for a Blu of BLOW UP, of course...
Me, too. But as Michael said, Warner's has hardly been friendly to licensing. One can only hope that they will loosen up on that front since they seem to be giving up on large swaths of their back catalogue and dumping it into the Warner archive. Perhaps they'll figure out they can make more off the licensing than dumping Antonia to DVD-R. Of course, perhaps I'm dreaming.

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Gregory
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Re: Blow-Up

#37 Post by Gregory » Mon Mar 01, 2010 6:34 pm

Ellipsis7 and David: what we see in the DVDBeaver comparison is the frame having been racked up or down; it's the momentary stretching of the image to fill the frame while removing what was at the bottom (see how much taller her head is in the DVD cap), and that's one of the things that's so fishy. Combine that with apparent use of the blurring tool, which is of course extremely common not only for censoring images but also protecting anonymity, obscuring brand names for legal reasons, etc. If this was something Antonioni had applied in post production, why would some transfers now remain unblurred?
ellipsis7 wrote:But, guys, this is Antonioni & BLOW UP and the idea of what is seen and is not seen is not reduced to a physical attribute in his oeuvre, it's far more cerebral - miss the whole point of the film and the filmmaker...
I would like to think I've understood this film and certain other works of Antonioni's reasonably well, but I don't quite see the physical vs. cerebral distinction you allude to, nor how this would show anything conclusively about the cause of this discrepancy. If you'd care to be more specific, I'm more than willing to consider it.

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ellipsis7
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Re: Blow-Up

#38 Post by ellipsis7 » Mon Mar 01, 2010 7:02 pm

It's called story - what Antonioni leaves in or out are key elements of story - which leaves us perplexed and fascinated, and ultimately (at least for me) existentially satisfied... This is somehat different from the mammary fixation prevalent in this thread... Forget the obvious stuff.. Rossellini broke through the barrier first of all, destroying forever the absolutism of the 'closed narrative' (all ends tied up, nothing outside the world of the film), to introduce 'open narrative (plot lines frustratingly not tied up, but real, authentic, truthful); Antonioni elevated 'open narrative' to a higher artform... BLOW UP is simply superb, and nothing in the finer critique of the DVD will persuade me otherwise...

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justeleblanc
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Re: Blow-Up

#39 Post by justeleblanc » Mon Mar 01, 2010 7:20 pm

I'm coming to the conversation late, but my current Warner R1 DVD is not censored. I see vaginal pubic hair.

I don't see Redrave's breasts but I'm not supposed to see them as the film is meant to be shown matted and not in academy ratio.

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Gregory
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Re: Blow-Up

#40 Post by Gregory » Mon Mar 01, 2010 7:28 pm

If you read the DVD Beaver piece, you'll see that there is apparently a difference between those marked R1/R4 and those labeled only R1. You might also see that there is distortion of the image, not conventional masking, also discussed just a few posts up, and this greatly complicates the issue of what's "supposed" to be seen.

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justeleblanc
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Re: Blow-Up

#41 Post by justeleblanc » Mon Mar 01, 2010 7:47 pm

To clarify, my R1 disc featured neither the image distortion nor blurred vagina that dvdbeaver sees. If the R1/R4 disc is the problem, then don't buy it. Buy the R1 disc.

And is someone really making the accusation that Warner deliberately censored breasts from the DVD? This argument is absurd as there is plenty of evidence that shows Warner does not censor breasts from their DVDs.

This argument of what's supposed to be seen is complicated perhaps, but not new. Unlike cinemascope, which was shot with an anamorphic lens and stretched during projection, widescreen films were shot open-matte and were projected with varying matted ratios, such as 1.66 to 1, 1.78 to 1, or 1.85 to 1. Maybe you saw Blow-Up in the theaters at 1.85, but then a theater down the road might have screened it at 1.66. It appears that in open-matte you see Redgrave's breasts, but the film was not intended to be shown at open matte. Warner did nothing wrong with not showing her breasts.

Again, if the R1/R4 disc is defective, then don't buy it. Buy the R1 disc as this one is perfect.

Now if you will excuse me I'm going to go watch that awesome full-frontal nude scene from Warner's McCabe and Mrs Miller DVD.

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GaryC
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Re: Blow-Up

#42 Post by GaryC » Tue Mar 02, 2010 3:28 am

MichaelB wrote:That won't happen without a policy change at Warners, I'm afraid.
There's at least one precedent I can think of. Warner's have only distributed the theatrical cut of Natural Born Killers, not the director's cut. In the UK the former is available from WHV, the latter from VCI/Cinema Club (who AFAIK are part of 2 Entertain now).

That said, Oliver Stone might have had conditions in his contract which allowed this that Russell didn't.

I'm hoping that someone (the BBC? the BFI Southbank?) will be showing Dance of the Seven Veils on 1 January 2020, which is the day Strauss's music comes out of copyright. Let's hope Ken Russell will be alive to see it - he'll be 92 then.

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The Fanciful Norwegian
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Re: Blow-Up

#43 Post by The Fanciful Norwegian » Tue Mar 02, 2010 5:13 am

What about Digital Classics' Petulia and Lisztomania? I thought those were WB titles.

In the case of NBK I think you're right -- IIRC Stone had final cut, and his condition for doing an R-rated "studio-friendly" cut was that he could shop the director's cut to other distributors. In the U.S., at least, it seems Warner has "recovered" the director's cut (they released it on Blu).

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Cold Bishop
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Re: Blow-Up

#44 Post by Cold Bishop » Tue Mar 02, 2010 6:40 am

justeleblanc wrote:And is someone really making the accusation that Warner deliberately censored breasts from the DVD? This argument is absurd as there is plenty of evidence that shows Warner does not censor breasts from their DVDs.

This argument of what's supposed to be seen is complicated perhaps, but not new. Unlike cinemascope, which was shot with an anamorphic lens and stretched during projection, widescreen films were shot open-matte and were projected with varying matted ratios, such as 1.66 to 1, 1.78 to 1, or 1.85 to 1. Maybe you saw Blow-Up in the theaters at 1.85, but then a theater down the road might have screened it at 1.66. It appears that in open-matte you see Redgrave's breasts, but the film was not intended to be shown at open matte. Warner did nothing wrong with not showing her breasts.
But the second set of VHS shots show that the VHS was indeed pan-and-scanned, not unmatted. So if that's the case, not only would the Redgrave shot be cropped, not unmatted, but in fact be the cropping of an already cropped pan-and-scan image? In which case, its no longer about Redgrave's breast, but about ruining Antonioni's framing of the shot.

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justeleblanc
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Re: Blow-Up

#45 Post by justeleblanc » Tue Mar 02, 2010 10:13 am

Just because certain scenes are pan and scan on the VHS does not mean that the entire movie was transferred pan and scan.

cinemartin

Re: Blow-Up

#46 Post by cinemartin » Tue Mar 02, 2010 10:51 am

I don't understand why that would be so.

Props55
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Re: Blow-Up

#47 Post by Props55 » Tue Mar 02, 2010 1:54 pm

FWIW the 16mm non-theatrical prints of BLOW-UP (distributed exclusively in the U.S. by Films, Inc.) were cropped with a narrow black border along the bottom edge in all shots of the actresses while nude/topless. If screened in a really dark auditorium it wasn't too noticible but the dead givaway was the sudden squaring of the bottom corner contours. This was obviously done to obscure the view of the actresses' breasts and was truly effective only when they were standing stationary. This worked with Redgrave but less so with the teenagers running and jumping about. Whoever made the decision to hard matte the image (MGM? Films, Inc.) tried to make it fairly subtle but apparently felt that if you caught a stray bit of nipple or pubes you were entitled to your jollies.

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Gregory
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Re: Blow-Up

#48 Post by Gregory » Tue Mar 02, 2010 4:01 pm

(unclear remark deleted)
Last edited by Gregory on Sat Jan 14, 2017 6:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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aox
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Re: Blow-Up

#49 Post by aox » Tue Mar 02, 2010 4:03 pm

Who knew remastering and DVD authoring could be such scandalous work!

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MichaelB
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Re: Blow-Up

#50 Post by MichaelB » Tue Mar 02, 2010 6:10 pm

The Fanciful Norwegian wrote:What about Digital Classics' Petulia and Lisztomania? I thought those were WB titles.
They're both co-productions, so I'm assuming that WB didn't end up with the UK rights. On the other hand, The Devils is definitely WB on both sides of the Atlantic.

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