34 Andrei Rublev

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tenia
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Re: 34 Andrei Rublev

#426 Post by tenia » Thu Jul 05, 2018 9:05 am

I guess we'll just see once the first reviews come how is exactly each version.

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domino harvey
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Re: 34 Andrei Rublev

#427 Post by domino harvey » Thu Jul 05, 2018 9:51 am

Without question the worst part of this change is having to read pages worth of responses to it between now and its release

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tenia
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Re: 34 Andrei Rublev

#428 Post by tenia » Thu Jul 05, 2018 10:17 am

I doubt there will be many more posts about this, but it remains an intriguing technical change nonetheless.

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Morbii
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Re: 34 Andrei Rublev

#429 Post by Morbii » Thu Jul 05, 2018 10:55 am

The best part will certainly be Domino’s witty narration!

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JAP
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Re: 34 Andrei Rublev

#430 Post by JAP » Fri Jul 06, 2018 6:40 am

An UK release is a near certainty
Jon Mulvaney wrote:To the best of my knowledge, the Dietrich/von Sternberg set isn't yet on the schedule to be released on Region B Blu-ray. However, we do hope to release the upgraded ANDREI RUBLEV as a Region B Blu-ray in the UK. Each UK release requires a specific license and we're working to get as many released as we can.

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dwk
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Re: 34 Andrei Rublev

#431 Post by dwk » Wed Aug 15, 2018 3:31 pm


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Roger Ryan
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Re: 34 Andrei Rublev

#432 Post by Roger Ryan » Wed Aug 15, 2018 3:53 pm

The burned-in subtitles on the Passion cut is a bit of a bummer. I have to assume Criterion scanned that 35mm print which has been doing the rounds for the past decade or so that had the subtitles burned-in. The image on both versions is pretty much what I expected. I'm happy the Passion cut is in 1080p!

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hearthesilence
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Re: 34 Andrei Rublev

#433 Post by hearthesilence » Wed Aug 15, 2018 4:16 pm

This is what I figured, similar to what was discussed re: My Darling Clementine and what I found with Swing Shift. The restoration of the theatrical cut looks so good, the disparity in quality with the earlier cut is even more pronounced, though in this case it doesn't feel like a tragedy since Tarkovsky made his preference for the three-hour cut pretty clear. Personally, I would've preferred having the restored footage from the theatrical cut spliced into the longer cut wherever they overlapped - it's not something I'd find jarring (the jumps in quality in Swing Shift were a lot greater and yet it didn't feel too jarring there), but I understand that most people may not feel the same way.

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knives
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Re: 34 Andrei Rublev

#434 Post by knives » Wed Aug 15, 2018 4:22 pm

Don't the two edits use different takes in some cases?

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Roger Ryan
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Re: 34 Andrei Rublev

#435 Post by Roger Ryan » Wed Aug 15, 2018 4:27 pm

knives wrote:
Wed Aug 15, 2018 4:22 pm
Don't the two edits use different takes in some cases?
Yes, which is why it's not as simple as splicing in footage from the final cut. Also, the Beaver review notes that the soundtrack is different for both editions as well.

I'm assuming that since the Passion cut has burned-in subtitles, the print used was at least one generation down from the source used on the original Criterion DVD (which did not have burned-in subtitles)? Perhaps that original source was duped a few times as well, so we won't know for sure unless the liner notes specify the source. Certainly, current scanning standards and the HD presentation wipes out any concern over generation loss between the old Criterion and the new, but I'm curious about what options Criterion had to work with.

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hearthesilence
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Re: 34 Andrei Rublev

#436 Post by hearthesilence » Wed Aug 15, 2018 5:09 pm

Roger Ryan wrote:
Wed Aug 15, 2018 4:27 pm
knives wrote:
Wed Aug 15, 2018 4:22 pm
Don't the two edits use different takes in some cases?
Yes, which is why it's not as simple as splicing in footage from the final cut. Also, the Beaver review notes that the soundtrack is different for both editions as well.
I know, but this was the case for Swing Shift as well, so you would have to go scene by scene and figure out which takes are the same. Even then, you'll probably have the same take used, but a few seconds (maybe even less than a second) of additional or missing footage on the tail or head, so you'd have to edit accordingly. It's not as hard as you'd think (upgrading the footage on the director's cut of Swing Shift would take one less than a weekend, maybe even a long day, if done in one sitting) and different takes would probably be seen in only a handful of scenes, so it would be very doable and indeed for me vastly preferable over sitting through 200+ minutes of somewhat blurry footage.

As for the soundtrack, that's easy - don't change it. You'd actually want to retain the soundtrack on the long cut to act as your guide when splicing in the restored footage.

I can't stress how simple this would be if it were an editing gig because you're not sifting through a mountain of footage or making as many choices as would if you were editing a film from scratch. This is especially true with digital tools - any work you'd be doing would be around the actual splices in the cut, and anything else would be shuttling or skipping through the length of any given shot until you get to the next splice. So it's not the length of the film so much as the number of cuts that have the bigger impact of how long this would take. Trust me, I tried this myself.

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knives
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Re: 34 Andrei Rublev

#437 Post by knives » Wed Aug 15, 2018 5:42 pm

Have you ever edited before because that's still a hell of a lot of work. Just in terms of soundtrack syncing that would take an incredible number of hours.

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Re: 34 Andrei Rublev

#438 Post by swo17 » Wed Aug 15, 2018 5:51 pm

It would also be a little weird to have parts of the film with burnt-in subtitles and the rest not. I'm okay with the presentation looking consistent throughout, especially since it will still be a substantial improvement over the original DVD.

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hearthesilence
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Re: 34 Andrei Rublev

#439 Post by hearthesilence » Wed Aug 15, 2018 5:57 pm

swo17 wrote:
Wed Aug 15, 2018 5:51 pm
It would also be a little weird to have parts of the film with burnt-in subtitles and the rest not. I'm okay with the presentation looking consistent throughout, especially since it will still be a substantial improvement over the original DVD.
Subtitles would be an extra step - would have to lay them in on the restored footage and I guess leave them in on the burnt-in footage, so that may be a bit awkward but it wouldn't be a dealbreaker for me.

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hearthesilence
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Re: 34 Andrei Rublev

#440 Post by hearthesilence » Wed Aug 15, 2018 5:58 pm

knives wrote:
Wed Aug 15, 2018 5:42 pm
Have you ever edited before because that's still a hell of a lot of work. Just in terms of soundtrack syncing that would take an incredible number of hours.
Um, YES. For some it could be an incredible number of hours, but others, it would not, not by a long shot. I'm not one of the slow ones.

Also, soundtrack syncing in this case? You're working off a film that has already been cut. As mentioned, you KEEP the soundtrack for the long cut, we're only changing picture. Then if the picture takes don't match, you move on. If the takes do match, it's no trick getting the new picture to sync with the sound of the long cut because you already have a VISUAL cue that you can easily match to (which is the picture you're replacing), and maybe even a splice to match to. Set the ins at the right spot (which will be quick if you're good), have the snap feature on, drop the new footage in and boom you're done.

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Re: 34 Andrei Rublev

#441 Post by MichaelB » Wed Aug 15, 2018 6:12 pm

I've also reassembled alternative cuts for Blu-ray releases (in fact, I do this quite a bit for Indicator these days, as they're very keen on including multiple cuts), and it really doesn't take that long if you have all the necessary materials and know what you're doing. As hearthesilence says, soundtrack syncing is actually one of the easier tasks.

The tricky bit comes when your source materials are clearly wildly disparate in quality. The Stranglers of Bombay, for which I created two alternative cuts (the British theatrical release and an "integral" cut combining all footage found in the British and American theatrical cuts, which conveniently were cut by different censorship authorities with differing views about what was appropriate), worked out very well because although I had to use an original 1959 archival print of the British release version for all the footage that wasn't in Sony's HD master, we were able to scan, clean up and regrade the necessary footage in such a way that it more or less matched the Sony materials, to the point where it's not immediately obvious by eye that some footage is unavoidably down at least two generations. But for Blind Terror (the UK cut of See No Evil), I had no alternative but to use a standard definition video source for the unique footage - although fortunately there wasn't that much of it, so it was never too distracting (and if it was, we included an all-HD See No Evil).

But with something like the Rublev situation, I think I might have baulked at attempting a combined reconstruction, because I can't see how it would be anything other than significantly distracting for a fair amount of the running time.

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Re: 34 Andrei Rublev

#442 Post by hearthesilence » Wed Aug 15, 2018 6:21 pm

Yes, thank you Michael. And that's the one point I will concede on - the PQ will be noticeably different, but how distracting that will be depends on the viewer. I imagine for a lot of people that would be the case, but when I viewed my upgrade of Swing Shift (which switched from an excellent HD transfer of presumably the OCN to a poor VHS dub of the director's cut), it didn't bother me at all and I never found myself getting taken out of the film as a viewer. If I had to explain why, I'd say it's because the VHS dub is so poor that after a while, it's too much of strain to watch it. It's just too hard to make out the details, whereas you kind of relax with the HD material because everything's very clear and easy to make out. So even though there's a distinct change, it's for the better - you're not straining for two hours straight to make out all the material.
Last edited by hearthesilence on Wed Aug 15, 2018 6:26 pm, edited 3 times in total.

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knives
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Re: 34 Andrei Rublev

#443 Post by knives » Wed Aug 15, 2018 6:23 pm

To be clear I was only referring to Rublev and not all such attempts and my syncing comment was due to it being a comparatively easier task to some other choices when it comes to something like this. As far as I can tell your examples don't quite match up for the reason I'm eyeing this claim suspiciously as those edits were just that, variant edits. This on the other hand is more like two different films ala Rivette's stuff insofar as they are born out of different soundtracks and takes.

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Re: 34 Andrei Rublev

#444 Post by hearthesilence » Wed Aug 15, 2018 6:29 pm

Swing Shift had alternate takes and the soundtrack had changes even when the same picture take was used.

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knives
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Re: 34 Andrei Rublev

#445 Post by knives » Wed Aug 15, 2018 6:32 pm

I'm not saying this is impossible, just that its commercial attractiveness would not be good to Criterion because of the effort needed to produce it well.

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Roger Ryan
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Re: 34 Andrei Rublev

#446 Post by Roger Ryan » Wed Aug 15, 2018 6:38 pm

Of course, once the title is released, anyone is welcome to create their own "reconstruction" to suite their tastes. I've only seen the initial Passion cut of Rublev (all the way through - multiple times) and do not have a significant problem with the picture quality...of the 35mm print I've seen, that is. This Blu-ray looks like it pretty much replicates the look at that 35mm print, so it definitely won't be like watching a fuzzy VHS for three hours. I once pondered the idea of a version that combines (what I believe to be) the improved editing/take choice found in Tarkovsky's final cut with the material that was removed outright from the Passion cut, but now I think having the two versions as separate experiences is the way to go.

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Re: 34 Andrei Rublev

#447 Post by MichaelB » Wed Aug 15, 2018 6:49 pm

Roger Ryan wrote:
Wed Aug 15, 2018 6:38 pm
I once pondered the idea of a version that combines (what I believe to be) the improved editing/take choice found in Tarkovsky's final cut with the material that was removed outright from the Passion cut, but now I think having the two versions as separate experiences is the way to go.
Doing this commercially is an ethical minefield. We did it with The Stranglers of Bombay because we felt that there was enough evidence to back up our theory that the version that Terence Fisher originally signed off on back in 1959 was closer to our "integral" cut than either of the censored theatrical versions (there's no obvious reason why it wouldn't have been), and the footage didn't need a substantial rethink - I merely reinserted the unique footage from the British theatrical cut into the appropriate places in the Sony master. The only judgement call I had to make was regarding the positioning of the opening scene-setting title crawl, which was right at the start of the US version and after the opening credits of the UK version - but I reckoned that the UK version was most likely truer to Fisher's intentions, since there was a dissolve printed in which wasn't the case with the US version, and 1950s British audiences wouldn't have needed historical spoonfeeding right from the start, as they'd have been more familiar with the history of the British in India than a typical US audience.

However, while Powerhouse let me go ahead and reconstruct co-screenwriter Jimmy Sangster's original ending for The Snorkel after I realised that the final film contained all the necessary footage (it was a case of cutting stuff out rather than adding anything), they baulked at offering the option to play the entire film with that ending, because it had never been screened like that, and while Sangster never knew who vetoed his ending, he thinks that it could easily have been an internal decision at Hammer. And in any case, while my version matches Sangster's script, I have no way of knowing if it would have been edited or scored like that had it been filmed - in particular, I suspect composer Francis Chagrin would have reintroduced his pervasive main four-note motif right at the very end, which I couldn't do in my version as I only had the final recording to work from. So we presented it as a curiosity, but made it very clear that it wasn't any kind of "official" alternative cut.

And with Rublev, it's a far more complex situation because while some of the changes were imposed on Tarkovsky, it's also a fact that he substantially re-edited much of the rest of the footage (very much for the better, in my opinion, although that's coloured by the fact that I've seen the shorter version many times in 35mm and the longer one only on non-anamorphic NTSC DVD). So we have no idea what an "ideal" version would look like, because we don't know which shots Tarkovsky voluntarily deleted and which shots he was asked to remove.

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Re: 34 Andrei Rublev

#448 Post by dwk » Wed Aug 15, 2018 7:01 pm

Another thing to consider, Criterion may have been contractually forbidden from altering the Andrei Rublev master.

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Re: 34 Andrei Rublev

#449 Post by _shadow_ » Thu Aug 16, 2018 12:30 am

Regarding the burnt-in subtitles on the 205-minute cut, wasn't the budget blown out on the original laserdisc release (which was only of that cut) creating an entirely new subtitle translation, touted as being far more complete than any other? It was those subs that then appeared on the DVD ported from the LD master. It's funny that the new release, while upgrading the picture quality, has lost these subtitles. You can get a sense of the difference from the first DVD Beaver screengrab - there are two speakers subtitled in the 205-minute DVD while all the others only subtitle one speaker.

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Roger Ryan
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Re: 34 Andrei Rublev

#450 Post by Roger Ryan » Thu Aug 16, 2018 8:37 am

_shadow_ wrote:
Thu Aug 16, 2018 12:30 am
...It's funny that the new release, while upgrading the picture quality, has lost these subtitles. You can get a sense of the difference from the first DVD Beaver screengrab - there are two speakers subtitled in the 205-minute DVD while all the others only subtitle one speaker.
Although it appears that the first Criterion DVD screengrab is taken from a different part of the shot than all of the other screengrabs resulting in different dialogue altogether.

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