Satantango (Artificial Eye & Facets)

[cdnchris]

I don't see the point of choosing AE over Facets

How about if the transfer is sh$t.

That would do it

[HerrSchreck]

Fuckup of the year for sure, if true.

Glad I held off. I held it in my hands again today, but bought The Outlaw & His Wife, and the no-dialog 1952 noir The Thief (w Ray Milland) instead. Can't go wrong w 2 littleknown, sublime masterpieces...

EDIT: beevcomp. I don't see any PAL-NTSC ghosting, and the interlacing looked very minimal in the caps (may be a mix, like some CC's of prog & interlaced), but one thing Gary's definitely right about is the look of the image itself.

Rober DeNiro would love those discs-- the the images're just like the way he likes his chicks... dark & soft.

[denti alligator]

To be fair the AE is also non-anamorphic, isn't it?

[domino harvey]

Yes, but for all of the time Facets spent claiming they were working on this title, they still weren't able to do an anamorphic transfer? The market for this title has already picked it up in R2, I hope this bankrupts Facets.

[denti alligator]

Yes, but for all of the time Facets spent claiming they were working on this title, they still weren't able to do an anamorphic transfer? The market for this title has already picked it up in R2, I hope this bankrupts Facets.

They may have only had a non-anamorphic source to work with, in which case it's a good thing they didn't make it anamorphic, because this process leads to the kind of over-soft ugliness that plagued the Second Run Cremator.

I'm not defending Facets, just pointing out that calling them on it being non-anamorphic is unfair, since the AE is also.

That said, although the AE certainly looks sharper, I don't think the Facets looks that bad (based on Gary's caps). Maybe I would need to see it in motion.

[kaujot]

I hope this bankrupts Facets.

Right there with you.

[colinr0380]

Glad I held off. I held it in my hands again today, but bought The Outlaw & His Wife, and the no-dialog 1952 noir The Thief (w Ray Milland) instead. Can't go wrong w 2 littleknown, sublime masterpieces...

I get this image of Satantango singing a siren song that has twice drawn Schreck into the store - maybe floating in like a cartoon character when they're following the scent of a particularly delicious pie!

The disc is picked up, weighed, perhaps the cover caressed a little and its purchase seems to be assured when suddenly Satantango finds itself falling to the ground with a clunk, just catching a final brief glimpse of Schreck's shoes running towards the cult classic corner and some more rare flicks as it gets knocked under the counter, leaving it to curse its luck that it has been foiled for a second time by better looking and cheaper discs!

[HerrSchreck]

Glad I held off. I held it in my hands again today, but bought The Outlaw & His Wife, and the no-dialog 1952 noir The Thief (w Ray Milland) instead. Can't go wrong w 2 littleknown, sublime masterpieces...

I get this image of Satantango singing a siren song that has twice drawn Schreck into the store - maybe floating in like a cartoon character when they're following the scent of a particularly delicious pie!

The disc is picked up, weighed, perhaps the cover caressed a little and its purchase seems to be assured when suddenly Satantango finds itself falling to the ground with a clunk, just catching a final brief glimpse of Schreck's shoes running towards the cult classic corner and some more rare flicks as it gets knocked under the counter, leaving it to curse its luck that it has been foiled for a second time by better looking and cheaper discs!

Close-- but the siren song that keeps pulling me into the damnable store is Vampyr... I've expected this thing to have been on shelves for an early streeting for at least a week now. (More like three to tell the truth.) I work within walking distance of the St Mark's Kims, so I drift over at lunch everyday expecting to see it on the new shelves and go "ah, at last"... but they havent gotten it. Even the dude at the register says the buyer (the whole store of employees, actually) is flabbergasted and doesn't know why they havent gotten it yet.

So I go every day to buy one thing and walk out with something else.. if Vamp doesnt come out soon (I was complaining to the cash reg dude) I'm gonna go broke and have no money for Vamp. As weakly arranged as the store is (at least vs the old days), its still tough to walk into Kims and walk out empty handed.

[Kirkinson]

I hope this bankrupts Facets.

Right there with you.

This would rob me and every other Chicago cinephile of an absolutely invaluable rental source for thousands of VHS titles that have next to no chance of advancing to other formats. If we have to wish them ill, can we limit the suffering to just their own video distribution line?

[Barmy]

VHS? LOL.

Whatevs. This is truly one of the most overrated flix ever. Mesmerizing in 35mm, yes, but less so on the tube.

moveon.org

[bunuelian]

moveon.org

Wow. The movement to get Clinton having his balls licked out of public discourse has moved on to getting Satantango boycotted. Three cheers for the course of our republic.

[domino harvey]

Actually, I was pretty shocked to see what the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth uncovered about Tarr

[MichaelB]

If we have to wish them ill, can we limit the suffering to just their own video distribution line?

I can't tell you how much it pains me to note that if their video distribution line went under, the chances of most of the titles being eagerly snapped up by rivals and given decent releases are rather less than the proverbial cat in hell's.

I have a disproportionate number of Facets discs for the simple reason that they're often the only option for a huge number of rare central and eastern European titles - not Satantango, thankfully, but even some of the earlier Bela Tarrs.

[Steven H]

I understand the complaints, but as far as FACETS is concerned, the transfer is a relative watershed moment in respectability. They've moved up from "did they do this transfer in a public toilet?" to "they didn't do this transfer in a public toilet, obviously." I applaud them. Maybe five or six years from now they'll finally be within the realm of doing good work.

[cgray]

I wrote Facets expressing some disappointment with the release.

Here's the response from Ed Husayko (ed@facets.org):

Dana forwarded your message and your concerns about our SATANTANGO release to me. I wanted to address the anamorphic issue you raise -- SATANTANGO is not, in fact, anamorphic and the aspect ratio that you see in the Facets DVD release is exactly as it should be. Are there other issues which disturb you in the SATANTANGO release which would lead you to conclude that it is a "poor release"? For your information, the transfer and digitization were checked against all existing source materials by the Hungarian Film Laboratory which controls the negative, and personally by Bela Tarr at several stages of the production process. The gray scale and tone that you have in the Facets Satantango release is that specifically preferred by Bela Tarr.

[swo17]

I wasn't aware a film could be inherently non-anamorphic. (Unless he means it wasn't shot with an anamorphic lens.)

[jsteffe]

Well, if the film itself has a 1.66:1 aspect ratio, then it's certainly not "anamorphic"--it would have been shot with a spherical lens. Making an anamorphic video transfer is another issue altogether. Obviously the transfer was originated in Hungary, they didn't make it anamorphic since it was only 1.66:1, and that is that. For me at least, it's not as much of a problem as a non-anamorphic DVD of a film with a 1.85:1 or wider AR.

Also, I have to question the widespread assuption that because the Facets image is darker than the Artifical Eye it's not as good. Maybe Bela Tarr wanted it to look darker, and the Artificial Eye transfer is bit too bright? That's what the email from Facets could potentially mean, and it could well be correct. At any rate, the difference is minor.

The PAL-to-NTSC conversion artifacts that Gary T. identified is another issue, as is the MPEG-2 encoding on the disc. I'm going to refrain from weighing in on that one until I see actual Facets discs.

[HerrSchreck]

For your information, the transfer and digitization were checked against all existing source materials by the Hungarian Film Laboratory which controls the negative, and personally by Bela Tarr at several stages of the production process. The gray scale and tone that you have in the Facets Satantango release is that specifically preferred by Bela Tarr.

There's something that Husayko may not me taking into account. If the transfer was done/checked in Hungary one would assume this was done on a PAL digital master, so therefore checking a PAL transfer on PAL equipment, prior to a nonconverted encode to NTSC, would result in HFL not being exposed to image corruption that the improper standards conversion would produce.

So unless Husako looked at the encoded NTSC discs themselves, and observed them in action on an NTSC television, his assessment of the release is worth almost nothing.

However-- again-- I see none of the artifacting (and I'm sure gary would have blasted the ghosting in caps all over the review as he's obviously "against" Facets as he is Kino.. review copies being an issue there) resident in nonconversion, and the interlacing doesn't seem very evident-- it may just occur during chapter bridging as it occasionally does on CC (a la "alchemy") titles.

But Gary has at very least to revise his review of the discs re anamorphism. What is alleged to be a negative is in fact, not.

[Titus]

FWIW regarding the set being non-anamorphic, I emailed AE a couple of years ago (prior to their release) whether their transfer would be anamorphic. They responded that it wasn't, and stated that Tarr specifically told them he didn't want it anamorphic (I actually may have reported this somewhere early in this thread). I can't imagine why. Perhaps he was under the impression that an anamorphic transfer of a film with an OAR of 1.66:1 would result in cropping to fit a 16:9 monitor, and nobody properly explained to him otherwise (AE's initial, anamorphic release of Werckmeister Harmonies actually was cropped in such a manner, and their subsequent correction of it was non-anamorphic). But, regardless, if this was true, and if Tarr also had a hand in the Facets release, then they may very well have released it non-anamorphic at his request. Or, it could just be another example of Facets being Facets.

[kaujot]

I can't trust a word that comes out of their collective mouths. Sorry.

[HerrSchreck]

The only thing I can think is Tarr wanted-- or thinks that this will get him-- a very detail-less, dark (like Dreyers cracked apaerture giving lightleaks on Vampyr) image with less definition. Why he'd not want to 16x9 enhance... odd.

Who the hell knows wtf is the story here?

[Darth Lavender]

I've been meaning to ask about the effects of anamorphic enhancement.
I recall reading a few times in DVDBeaver comparisons, were a newer disk is softer than an older disk (Clockwork Orange comes to mind) it's been suggested that the 'softness' is a result of anamorphic enhancement?

Is that something to do with how Beaver captures anamorphic images or what? If anamorphic enhancement does introduce softness, then it seems an awfully silly idea.

[denti alligator]

I've been meaning to ask about the effects of anamorphic enhancement.
I recall reading a few times in DVDBeaver comparisons, were a newer disk is softer than an older disk (Clockwork Orange comes to mind) it's been suggested that the 'softness' is a result of anamorphic enhancement?

Is that something to do with how Beaver captures anamorphic images or what? If anamorphic enhancement does introduce softness, then it seems an awfully silly idea.

See my post in the Beaver thread:

If the film itself was not shot using an anamorphic lens then it's best that the DVD remains non-anamorphic. This is why Criterion's release of Withnail and I remains non-anamorphic, even after CC began releasing anamorphic discs.

Now they could have created an anamorphic DVD anyway, by some process that actually results in a less sharp image. For an example of the difference, compare the beautiful Czech DVD of The Cremator (non-anamorphic) with the hazy Second Run edition (made anamorphic). If the result would have been similar, it's best to have a non-anamorphic transfer, even with the resulting loss in resolution. I'm assuming that's why AE and Facets did it this way.

It apparently does introduce softness if a non-anamorphic lens was used, which (I'm a bit in the dark on this technical stuff, so help me out here, please) I think would always (?) be the case with a 1.66 film.

[vogler]

I think there are a couple of issues being confused here. Shooting films anamorphically i.e. with an anamorphic lense, and anamorphic video transfers. They are not the same thing - just the same word.

Softness can be introduced into a transfer if a non anamorphic video master is encoded anamorphically. This is because the resolution has to be adjusted and the image blown up to fit the anamorphic DVD format. This is rather like when softness is introduced by converting ntsc to pal. There are probably quite a lot of DVDs that have been authored this way by converting non-anamorphic masters to 16:9 DVDs. This is just fake anamorphic though. No resolution is being gained, only the shape is changing and probably some image quality lost in the process. The new 'remastered' Dario Argento DVDs of Tenebre and Phenomena have been made this way. Tenebre, in particular, looks worse than the original non-anamorphic DVD as a result.

If the original video transfer from fim had been anamorphic, resulting in an anamorphic 16:9 video transfer then the anamorphic DVD should look sharper than if it had been transferred non-anamorphic.

In the case of Satantango the original video master was obviously non-anamorphic therefore the only correct way to author the DVD from that particular master is non-anamorphic. In order to make a true anamorphic DVD an entire new telecine would have to be done to create an anamorphic video master, and I don't suppose anyone would have the money for this.

Please feel free to correct anything I have said if I am talking crap.

[denti alligator]

Thanks for clearing that up, vogler.