Ingmar Bergman's Cinema

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tenia
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Re: Ingmar Bergman's Cinema

#251 Post by tenia » Sun Oct 21, 2018 7:42 am

That might be it for this one then. However, Autumn Sonata only states : "Transfer supervisor: Mats Forsberg. Colorist: Mats Holmgren/Chimney Pot, Stockholm."

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RobertB
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Re: Ingmar Bergman's Cinema

#252 Post by RobertB » Sun Oct 21, 2018 8:29 am

I have now looked up "Chimney Pot" and they are not part of the Swedish Film Institute. It's a post production company. So I think that's the answer for you. The previous restorations have probably been done for Criterion, even if the scanning for obvious reasons had to be done in Sweden. The new ones clearly say restored 2017 by The Swedish Film Institute. It's not the same team.

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tenia
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Re: Ingmar Bergman's Cinema

#253 Post by tenia » Sun Oct 21, 2018 9:09 am

Eclair also is a post production company, that never prevented them also being a restoration lab. Some companies can do both, so they do. Being part of an institute also often has nothing to do with it, the same way that the institute might not have the facility themselves to do the work and are mostly a way to centralise works, investments and international promotion. In France, the CNC doesn't do any work, Eclair, Digimages, hell even foreign labs like Ritrovata are doing it.

Chimney Pot is a restoration lab. It is part of the Chimney group and it has performed the restorations for the previous Persona and Wild Strawberries releases but also The Phantom Carriage, in a way that the technical blurb for the respective Criterion releases make it quite clear they are equipped to do the usual work (just like Deluxe would) :

Persona :
"This new digital transfer was created in 2K resolution on an ARRISCAN film scanner from the 35mm original camera negative at Chimney Pot in Stockholm. The film was also restored at Chimney Pot. The original monaural soundtrack was remastered at 24-bit from the 17.5mm magnetic track.
Transfer supervisor: Peter Bengtsson; Mats Forsberg/Chimney Pot, Stockholm.
Colorist: Mats Holmgren/Chimney Pot, Stockholm."

Wild Strawberries :
"This new 2K digital transfer was created on an ARRISCAN film scanner from the original 35mm camera negative at Chimney Pot in Stockholm.
Transfer supervisors: Mats Forsberg, Peter Bengtsson.
Colorist: Mats Holmgren/Chimney Pot, Stockholm.
Scanning: Jonas Jangvad, Chimney Pot, Stockholm.
Restoration: Chimney Pot, Stockholm."

The Phantom Carriage :
"The restoration of The Phantom Carriage presented here was originally undertaken by the Archival Film Collections of the Swedish Film Institute. A new film master was created from two source elements, an incomplete black-and-white nitrate print with Swedish intertitles and an incomplete color-tinted nitrate print with English intertitles. From these source elements, a new black-and-white duplicate negative with Swedish intertitles was completed in 1975. New 35mm polyester viewing prints were then struck from this restored negative, using the color-tinted nitrate print as a color reference.
This new digital transfer was created on an ARRISCAN film scanner in 2K resolution from the new duplicate negative, as the Chimney Pot in Stockholm, using the same color-tinted print from the Swedish Film Institute as reference.
Original restoration supervisor: Inga Adolfsson/Swedish Film Institute, Stockholm.
Original telecine transfer, color grading, and printing: Nils Melander, Bjorn Selander/FilmTeknik, Stockholm (formerly Nordisk Film Post Production).
Telecine colorist: Lee Kline."

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RobertB
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Re: Ingmar Bergman's Cinema

#254 Post by RobertB » Sun Oct 21, 2018 10:26 am

I am not questioning that they can do a restoration. Nobody has complained about the previous releases. But you have repeated that it's the same team doing the new ones. And I am frankly not convinced. This would explain why they don't look the same. More than one team can do a restoration in Sweden. The old ones didn't say SFI, the new ones do.

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hearthesilence
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Re: Ingmar Bergman's Cinema

#255 Post by hearthesilence » Sun Oct 21, 2018 11:44 am

Re: Passion, I think MGM handled that grading/transfer, did they not? If memory serves, MGM wanted to strike new prints for a theatrical release of the titles they owned, and they also decided to release DVDs of the same titles at the same time. Also recall that there was an issue with a few DVDs using the incorrect aspect ratio, which was quickly corrected. Despite this, the DVDs were based off the work their archive did for the prints, right down to the new subtitle translations (which alone is an amusing story - I'm sure I've posted about it here before).

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Re: Ingmar Bergman's Cinema

#256 Post by MichaelB » Sun Oct 21, 2018 11:56 am

I also remember the UK edition of the MGM titles having hard of hearing subtitles instead of straightforward translation ones.

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tenia
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Re: Ingmar Bergman's Cinema

#257 Post by tenia » Sun Oct 21, 2018 12:10 pm

RobertB wrote:
Sun Oct 21, 2018 10:26 am
I am not questioning that they can do a restoration. Nobody has complained about the previous releases. But you have repeated that it's the same team doing the new ones. And I am frankly not convinced. This would explain why they don't look the same. More than one team can do a restoration in Sweden. The old ones didn't say SFI, the new ones do.
(I think) I every time wrote "it probably comes from the same team". Of course it might be coming from someone else (and I'm eager to get the exact credits to be sure).

But considering Chimney have handled entirely Summer Interlude, Summer with Monika, Persona, Fanny & Alexander, Autumn Sonata, Wild Strawberries & The Seventh Seal, and have performed the scanning for Summer Interlude and Cries and Whispers, it doesn't seem too far fetched to assume the SFI might have gone local to get these movies restored again.

That's why I assume it to be the most likely possibility, but I might be wrong.
RobertB wrote:
Sun Oct 21, 2018 10:26 am
Nobody has complained about the previous releases.
I don't think they should, nor I suppose should they complain about the new ones. I think these are different results more than one being wrong and the other right.

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domino harvey
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Re: Ingmar Bergman's Cinema

#258 Post by domino harvey » Sun Oct 21, 2018 12:11 pm

Pepsi wrote:
Sun Oct 21, 2018 5:54 am
Bergman titles not in this set but available with English subs
Eva (Screenplay only) Tartan R0 PAL UK DVD
Face to Face (Theatrical version only) R1 Olive
It Always Rains On Our Love Artificial Eye RB Blu-ray
Music in the Darkness Tartan R0 PAL UK DVD
Prison Tartan R0 PAL UK DVD
Torment (Screenplay only) Criterion Eclipse R1 DVD / Tartan R0 PAL DVD
I apologise if this has been mentioned before but:

The Image Makers (Bildmakarna)(Tartan video) DVD UK (Together with The Phantom Carriage)

Is also out with English subs.
Thanks, I've updated the post!

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domino harvey
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Re: Ingmar Bergman's Cinema

#259 Post by domino harvey » Sun Oct 21, 2018 5:41 pm

Sole extra for the Serpent's Egg is Away From Home, which was also on the MGM DVD. Colors again an issue, but who cares with this movie

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knives
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Re: Ingmar Bergman's Cinema

#260 Post by knives » Sun Oct 21, 2018 6:20 pm

I care

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domino harvey
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Re: Ingmar Bergman's Cinema

#261 Post by domino harvey » Sun Oct 21, 2018 6:22 pm

Classic knives. I do like that they paired this with the Touch, though-- very apt!

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Re: Ingmar Bergman's Cinema

#262 Post by phoenix474 » Sun Oct 21, 2018 9:20 pm

domino harvey wrote:
Sat Oct 20, 2018 6:17 pm
The new extras for Shame:
The extras consist of Shame in the News which runs about 5.5 minutes and is a news item that shows director Ingmar Bergman and some of the cast and crew of Shame before filming began. It was originally broad cast on Swedish television on September 9th, 1967. In the next supplement, Ingmar Bergman talks about Shame in a 1/4 hour excerpt of an interview recorded for the Swedish television program Forum, originally broadcast in September of 1968. Criterion has included a new (2018), 21-minute, interview with Liv Ullmann discussing Bergman and Shame. A significant extras if the 1 1/4 hour an Introduction to Ingmar Bergman documentary produced in 1968 for New York's WNET public television station and filmed by Gunnar Fischer, host Lewis Freedman visits director Ingmar Bergman during the production of Shame. They discuss some of Bergman's major works leading up to Shame as well as the just-released Hour of the Wolf.
Looks like a promising stand-alone release for those who opt out of the set, all the extras sound great. Shame is imo one of Bergman's best and should be discussed alongside masterpieces like Persona and Cries and Whispers. I know he didn't feel the same way though

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Re: Ingmar Bergman's Cinema

#263 Post by Zack567 » Sun Oct 21, 2018 10:33 pm

RobertB wrote:
Sun Oct 21, 2018 10:26 am
I am not questioning that they can do a restoration. Nobody has complained about the previous releases. But you have repeated that it's the same team doing the new ones. And I am frankly not convinced. This would explain why they don't look the same. More than one team can do a restoration in Sweden. The old ones didn't say SFI, the new ones do.
I think the real issue is whether the person/team supervising the transfer has any real knowledge of how the film was supposed to look upon its release. Bergman and Nykvist are gone, so obviously they couldn't be consulted. But ideally a surviving member of the camera department - someone who was present during dailies and would have overheard the discussions about the intended look - or a lab technician who was present during the grading sessions for the release print would be involved. A record of the timing lights used for the finished corrected print would be helpful, but since those lights would be specific to the printer in use at the time they would be far from definitive.

Another helpful option would be to refer to a properly stored archival print as a reference - though only if was possible to screen that print optically in a properly set up screening room. This might be less than perfect for color films from the 1970's, given how prone to fade such films were even under archival storage conditions, but B+W acetate film is remarkably stable and fade-free.

But in the absence of such knowledge, it's a real crap shoot. Simply going back to the original camera negative generally tells you relatively little about what the finished film was supposed to look like, and camera negative on a telecine can be manipulated to look just about any way the operator wants it to!

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RobertB
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Re: Ingmar Bergman's Cinema

#264 Post by RobertB » Mon Oct 22, 2018 11:37 am

This is a main job for SFI (Swedish Film Insitute). "In our collections we hold more than 67 000 elements on over 29 000 films." They archive and restore films. They have 2 cinemas, and they have a photochemical filmlaboratorium for doing restorations themselves. And they do digitalization.

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Re: Ingmar Bergman's Cinema

#265 Post by movielocke » Mon Oct 22, 2018 1:47 pm

Even with the same colorist doing the same film a few years later, you're going to get a different result because Color is both incredibly subjective and incredibly sensitive.

(and we all know there's a long and error prone history of nearly two decades of screencaps vs color grading)

So many things could subtly tweak a colorist's decision even within the same room, with the same colorist, with the same approvals person, maybe they've switched scopes from tectronic to software based, maybe they've switched their grading monitor from HD 709 to 4K rec2020, maybe they've changed out their client monitor from Plasma to LCD or from Plasma to projection, maybe they've changed projectors from HD to 4K, maybe they've changed the screen the projector's use to a different reflectivity. Maybe the grading suite has a new paint job. Maybe they've had a tune up calibration to any of the above. Maybe they switched software from Baselight to Resolve. Maybe they're working from a harvest in 12 bit color instead of 8 or 10 bit color, maybe they have a full 12 bit or 10 bit workflow or a full 4k workflow rather than working within a down-rezzed workflow.

And all or any of those could account for color shifts seen on many of these titles (well the passion of anna MGM is clearly wrong, as all the grays have an unnatural digital magenta push on them) and all of that could be before actually turning any "dials" when adjusting the grading of a shot. And ultimately, in taking on a new color grade, even the same person revisiting the same film, referencing the same materials is going to make slightly different decisions than they made before and those slight differences can easily accumulate to the changes we're seeing.

And of course, the repeatability of digital has made this all worse: that is to say, the consumer expectation that film look the same every time all times in every iteration and representation. Having seen, for example Lawrence of Arabia in five different theatres over the years, I can say the color NEVER looked the same in any of them, subtly different based on the projection bulb brightness, color temperature, throw distance, screen color, screen reflectivity and of course the fact that it was probably a different print every time. And I never had an expectation that the blues skies had to look exactly just so as previous versions, because that's crazy talk. It's fine if it looks different, theatre to theatre, country to country, lab to lab, print to print, each time the film was shown the color is going to appear a little bit different.

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Re: Ingmar Bergman's Cinema

#266 Post by MichaelB » Mon Oct 22, 2018 1:50 pm

I've only seen what I know as A Passion just once, a good 25 years ago, but the colour scheme of the Criterion definitely looks closer to what I remember. Same with The Magic Flute, which I saw several times in the 1990s.

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Re: Ingmar Bergman's Cinema

#267 Post by Zack567 » Mon Oct 22, 2018 5:48 pm

knives wrote:
Sun Oct 21, 2018 6:20 pm
I care
IMHO, The Serpent's Egg is quite underrated. It's got significant flaws, but I also find much of it genuinely disturbing. It helps to think of the entire film as a very upsetting dream; if you do so, the various plot ellipses and implausibilities become irrelevant. Just as with The Touch, however, the film is badly undercut by Bergman's bizarre choice for an American leading man. David Carradine's performance just doesn't mesh with the world that Bergman was trying to create.

The extras packaged with the MGM DVDs were generally completely skippable, but oddly enough the one exception is Carradine's commentary track on the Serpent's Egg DVD. It's too bad this wasn't ported over to the Criterion disc; Carradine is quite honest about Bergman's increasing loss of confidence in him as an actor. One morning, according to Carradine, Bergman came up to him as they were getting ready to shoot and asked, well, Mr. Carradine, what amusing faces will you be making for us today?

Carradine also mentions that Bergman insisted on that he wear many of Bergman's own clothes on-screen. This strengthens an idea that I've long had that Bergman actually ended casting Carradine (after his initial choices fell through) because Carradine looked a lot like him. Bergman may have been exploring some particularly personal demons through the selfishness and destructiveness of Carradine's character in the film.

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Re: Ingmar Bergman's Cinema

#268 Post by knives » Mon Oct 22, 2018 7:13 pm

I like that reading of Carradine's casting. I actually like his performance, but also in general I like this sort of gauche demons of WWII narrative ala The Damned and Salon Kitty. That there is that nightmare flow to the movie ala David Lynch doesn't hurt either.

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Re: Ingmar Bergman's Cinema

#269 Post by bunuelian » Mon Oct 22, 2018 7:46 pm

movielocke wrote:
Mon Oct 22, 2018 1:47 pm
It's fine if it looks different, theatre to theatre, country to country, lab to lab, print to print, each time the film was shown the color is going to appear a little bit different.
It's funny that digital has turned the filmic experience on its head, where it used to be that analog inserted a range of noise (used flabbily here to encompass color variations) and folks found the differences interesting and charming, but now there's an expectation that the one true image be presented without fail.

These color discussions are interesting, anyway. Given that the "right" choice is essentially foreclosed to anyone other than the original makers of the film, it's all the more important that these decisions be made by those filmmakers before they pass on.

Makes me wonder if people making movies in the film era expected their work to endure for the sort of lifetime that digital has made possible, or if they expected that time would gradually swallow up their films.

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Re: Ingmar Bergman's Cinema

#270 Post by tenia » Tue Oct 23, 2018 3:53 am

bunuelian wrote:
Mon Oct 22, 2018 7:46 pm
It's funny that digital has turned the filmic experience on its head, where it used to be that analog inserted a range of noise (used flabbily here to encompass color variations) and folks found the differences interesting and charming, but now there's an expectation that the one true image be presented without fail.
We've been fed by years of marketing about how digital would precisely allow for a 1:1 replication while analogic was generating fluctuations that, while acceptable or sometimes even interesting, were pushing us away from the wanted photography. It's only logical then that this set expectations about being able to faithfully reproduce once and for all the original wanted photography, but instead, it allowed for tons of variations, including some that we (and the industry) should know better about since it definitely looks like a repeat of the "all-around-magenta-push" that was happening in the DVD era.

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Re: Ingmar Bergman's Cinema

#271 Post by Orlac » Tue Oct 23, 2018 7:16 am

Disapointed that The Magician still looks bad.

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tenia
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Re: Ingmar Bergman's Cinema

#272 Post by tenia » Tue Oct 23, 2018 8:05 am

It doesn't look bad per se, but it just is a now-obsolete restoration made from a 35mm fine-grain master positive on a Spirit DataCine. These aren't aging well.

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Re: Ingmar Bergman's Cinema

#273 Post by shadowofdreams » Tue Oct 23, 2018 9:19 am

bunuelian wrote:
Mon Oct 22, 2018 7:46 pm
Makes me wonder if people making movies in the film era expected their work to endure for the sort of lifetime that digital has made possible, or if they expected that time would gradually swallow up their films.
To go a bit further, I wonder how some of them would react to the incredible level of precision current technology has allowed restorers. In a time where the hope was that the print looked good enough when it got copied 6 times, I wonder how they would manage to choose between 4.56:3.25 or 4.57:3.25 Black to White contrast ratios. Part of why I think its great that Criterion is championing Director-Approved restorations is that theres a lot of stuff that people don't know they can do and don't know they like until they physically see, so the ability to bring in a director, show them what they can do, and ask them what they want allows them to fully utilize whats available.

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Re: Ingmar Bergman's Cinema

#274 Post by mteller » Tue Oct 23, 2018 5:33 pm

The Svetenth Seal

Tooze seems to have slowed down, nothing new since Serpent's Egg.

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Re: Ingmar Bergman's Cinema

#275 Post by Robespierre » Tue Oct 23, 2018 7:13 pm

Svet just can't ever be proven wrong, can he? This new release looks head and shoulders better than the last one and yet he sill rates the old one better.

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