Ah-well-a everybody's heard about the bird...

6 Comments

• craig keller. says:

  October 21, 2008 at 10:16 am

  (I’m cross-posting this from the com­ments sec­tion over at The Auteurs’ Notebook…) –
  Glenn, the two minutes of “miss­ing” foot­age are appar­ently noth­ing but some shots that Franju had later elim­in­ated upon tight­en­ing up a reel, but which had remained on a print of the film that had some­how cir­cu­lated for a spell and which had been tele­cined some­where along the way. Jacques Champreux, grand­son of Feuillade and scen­ar­ist of Franju’s ‘Judex’ (not to men­tion co-scenarist, and one of the stars, of Franju’s excel­lent ‘Nuits rouges’, which is also included in the MoC release) wrote Nick Wrigley a few weeks ago on the issue, say­ing he has no idea where that extra foot­age had come from, that it was indeed some excess fat on a reel and as such was not meant to be. There was dis­cus­sion about this over at the Criterion Forum board, under the ‘Judex / Nuits rouges’ thread in the MoC section.
  Champreux’s let­ter in full:
  ===
  Dear Mr. Wrigley,
  I’m very sur­prised by your mail. I’ve nev­er heard about anoth­er ver­sion of « JUDEX » with a dif­fer­ent cut like this.
  I can affirm that the French DVD and MoC DVD is abso­lutely con­form­able to the ori­gin­al neg­at­ive as cut by Georges Franju him­self and Gilbert Natot and kept in the lab Éclair.
  The ver­sion of « JUDEX » you can see in the DVD is exactly the same as the one that Franju approved and saw in 1963 at the Cinémathèque Française, at the time of the first offi­cial screen­ing in the world of that film.
  Since, noth­ing has been changed.
  I sup­pose that, before this offi­cial screen­ing, a print was nor­mally estab­lished and next after see­ing it, a refin­ing out of the cut­ting of some sequences was decided. And then that refused print has been com­mer­cially exploited, without Franju’s know­ledge. There are no neg­lect­able sav­ings for the producers
  It seems to me that the res­ult of the cuts you indic­ate is to improve the rhythm of the con­cerned sequences.
  With my best regards
  Jacques CHAMPREUX
  ===
  Could you let Tim Lucas know about this? I don’t have an email address for him, but Nick and I would like to make sure that the record is set straight on this, to avoid any con­fu­sion or mis­giv­ings, or doubt that the release is ‘not’ Franju’s integ­ral ver­sion of the film.
  best,
  craig.

• Glenn Kenny says:

  October 21, 2008 at 10:57 am

  Thanks for the update, Craig. Tim stops by here fairly reg­u­larly, so there’s a good chance he’ll see this. In the mean­time, there are three e‑mail adresses for him on the con­tact page of the Watchdog web­site, here: http://www.videowatchdog.com/home/home.html

• bill says:

  October 21, 2008 at 12:52 pm

  I put up a com­ment over at “The Auteurs” about the Franju film, and after await­ing mod­er­a­tion for sev­er­al hours, it was appar­ently rejec­ted. I’ll admit it was­n’t any kind of intel­lec­tu­al barn-burner of a com­ment – I basic­ally just stated my enthu­si­ast­ic wish that more Franju would be released in the US – but jeez.

• Glenn Kenny says:

  October 21, 2008 at 1:10 pm

  That’s weird. They’re really eager for com­ments over there—must have been some glitch. I’ll look into it when I get a minute.

• bill says:

  October 21, 2008 at 1:24 pm

  Thanks, but don’t get your hopes up. It’s really not much of a com­ment to go to the mat for.

• Glenn Kenny says:

  October 22, 2008 at 10:15 am

  The com­ment is up now, Bill.