If you buy this and begin to watch, do not expect to see anything as remotely beautiful as a Warner Archive 4K scan and restoration of a Black and White 1939 movie.
Warner will have made a scan of an original nitrate neg, and access to a multitude of other elements - interpositive, fine grains etc - which enable, simply perfection.
Neither the original neg, nor any first generation element of Renoir’s 1939 La Règle du Jeu has survived. The most recent restoration which is presented here had to be scrounged from much later elements and we are left with a less than perfect composite.
Putting on this new 4K UHD delivers a series of shocks. Never before has the exact quality of the surviving elements been so nakedly on display. What you are seeing, thanks to the optimum resolution and quality of the UHD format is as close to 35mm projection as possible. It is in effect the same. Then you begin to notice how much “darker” is the image, after the last Blurays. And that’s where this new disc really takes off. Sharpness is variable, as it must be and always was given the appalling condition of the elements. But composition and depth are here in spades. HDR has been applied with great skill to extract every last grain of grayscale, shadow detail and degrees of light as they can exist in the 35mm format.
Whether you think this exercise is worth it or not is a quandary. I vote yes, but others may not. Criterion/Janus is one of the stakeholders in this 4K release and when/if they choose to release this in 4K is yet to be seen. The French disc from ESC label only carries a short extra, with none of the plenitude of supplements on the older Criterion (and BFI) blus.
I may have more to say after a second viewing.
Without knowing who on earth would not think such loving attention to one of the greatest cinematic ghosts of all time is worth it, this is one film, among perhaps a half-dozen others, for the ages - a film that was first hobbled by draconian cuts that Renoir himself had to make to please his producers (who were only trying to make as much money as possible) and then consigned to oblivion by the war and 4 years of the total German/Vichy disgrace called the Occupation, its physical elements presumed destroyed and nearly forgotten until, as everyone knows by now, the miracle of its rescue from oblivion by Jean Gaborit and Jacques Maréchal took place in 1956. The film's negative was lost when the lab where it was stored was bombed in 1942. Gaborit & Maréchal got the rights to the film and located fragments of it stored in boxes in the bombed-out lab. From these fragments they restored the film to within three minutes of its original length. This new digital transfer is only the latest stage in the film's new lease on life. Who on earth would not think such an enterprise is "worth it" is quite beyond me.
But there is something else to this comment that I found rather chilling. If, to conceive the inconceivable, Renoir had been working in the complete safety of America, an ocean away from the war in Europe, and had made a film in 1939 that someone regarded as of some value today, all a restorer would have to do is find out in which vault the film's extant elements were stored, collect them and go to work. But when Hare suggests that even the finest restoration of Renoir's film would not - could not - come close to the perfection of a Warner Archive 4K scan, I wonder if he is attesting to the difference in the quality of the reproduction or of the difference in quality of any old Warner Brothers film from 1939 and La Règle du Jeu. The joys of the latest digital reproductions of 35mm films are indeed dizzying. What you are looking at when you watch a 4K Blu-Ray copy of a film made 83 years ago is as close as one could possibly get to the condition of the original 35mm film when it was exhibited for the first time in theaters.
I once asked what answer Hollywood had in 1939 to La Règle du Jeu, or indeed what answer it had to Les Enfants du Paradis in 1945 or to Smiles of a Summer Night in 1955, to L'avventura in 1960, 8 1/2 in 1963, or The Battle of Algiers in 1968. The answer, in every case, in any comparative qualitative sense, was nothing.
Renoir fled France in 1940 when the Germans invaded and found work in Hollywood. He made five films there, not one of which comes close to his best films in France. His last Hollywood film, The Woman on the Beach, was mishandled by RKO and Renoir was required to cut the film and reshoot scenes to make it presentable for release. Is anyone attempting to restore it to its original release version? Or does anyone think it's worth it?
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