The first wave of Lionsgate/Studio Canal Blu-rays, and the Criterion question

Contempt 

Hey, remember—when was it, last year?— when Criterion announced a Blu-ray of Kurosawa’s Ran, and every­one who had a Blu-ray play­er and was­n’t a putz who thought the format was designed to enhance the exper­i­ence of The Sixth Day thought, ooh, that’s gonna be sweeeeet, and then Criterion announced that they wer­en’t gonna do a Blu-ray of Ran because of “rights issues” and every­one got bummed out, espe­cially ’cause that Blu-ray of Kagemusha was so sweet, and every­one for some reas­on reflex­ively blamed Harvey Weinstein because they assumed he had the home video rights to Ran, and he sucked? Yeah, me too.

Well, among oth­er things, turns out Harvey had noth­ing to do with any of it. (Personal to HArvey: I don’t really think you suck. It was just a rhet­or­ic­al flour­ish.) Subsequent events, includ­ing the Criterion Collection los­ing the licens­ing for over twenty lib­rary pic­tures, the cur­rent edi­tions of which are going out of print, point to some­thing else hap­pen­ing: namely that the French pro­duc­tion and dis­tri­bu­tion con­cern Studio Canal (a sub­si­di­ary of Canal +, which is wholly owned by the U.S. con­cern Vivendi) seems to be look­ing to estab­lish itself as a viable brand in the man­u­fac­ture and mar­ket­ing of high-end home video. This was the joint that was effect­ing a Ran Blu-ray hol­dup. Various “Studio Canal Collection” Blu-ray titles have been creep­ing out on cer­tain European labels—I got a German ver­sion of Contempt and a British issue of Belle de Jour a little while and was favor­ably impressed with both. Those who fol­low video busi­ness were likely not sur­prised to learn that Lionsgate would be hand­ling the man­u­fac­ture and dis­tri­bu­tion of the “Studio Canal Collection” Blu-rays in the U.S., but they wer­en’t neces­sar­ily thrilled, either. The com­pany does some admit­tedly inter­est­ing things with the Studio Canal and Canal+ holdings—that Andre Techiné set has some fas­cin­at­ing films, and its Jean Renoir Collection con­tains abso­lutely invalu­able material…and I can go on. But look­ing through the product we find the requis­ite indif­fer­ent PAL-to-NTSC con­ver­sions and such. There was a recent Lionsgate débâcle involving John Huston’s The Dead, in which an entire reel was miss­ing from the film as presen­ted on DVD. Lionsgate fixed the prob­lem and issued a new version—they would have to, would­n’t they?—but that such a snafu happened to begin with did­n’t exactly inspire the solid­est con­sumer trust.

We should recall, how­ever, that high-definition video is a world­wide stand­ard, so the whole PAL/NTSC issue and all the bag­gage it brings with it (frame rate, which mutates film length, for instance), does­n’t apply. A high-def encode is a high-def encode, and you can region-code the fin­ished product if you want, but if it’s done cor­rectly to begin with, it will travel well. Hence, the first three Lionsgate “Studio Canal Collection” Blu-rays, hav­ing been mastered under Studio Canal’s super­vi­sion, are get­ting to American audi­ences in the form signed off on by Studio Canal. These titles are the afore­men­tioned Ran, the afore­men­tioned Contempt, and Alexander McKendrick’s delight­ful Ealing black com­edy The Ladykillers. And to get the basics out of the way, I con­sider all three releases to rep­res­ent very good news indeed.

Back in the late fall of 2008, when I was work­ing on my Blu-ray piece for Popular Mechanics, I vis­ited Criterion’s office and watched the com­pany’s digit­al res­tor­a­tion team touch­ing up the likes of Chungkng Express and Magnificent Obsession. It was thrill­ing to watch. The com­pany’s tech­nic­al major­do­mo Lee Kline took me into the com­pany’s pro­jec­tion room and showed me scenes from their high-def mas­ters of Days of Heaven (which is com­ing out on Blu-ray from Criterion soon) and Contempt (which is not, of course). Both pretty much took my breath away.We talked about what to look for when assess­ing a high-def pic­ture, par­tic­u­larly a col­or one. Flesh tones? Yeah, they’re import­ant, but they do vary from per­son to per­son. Better to con­cen­trate on cer­tain fixed qualities—the white of the paper of the cigar­ette that Michel Piccoli’s Contempt char­ac­ter lights up on the Capri set of the fic­tion­al film Fritz Lang is mak­ing. Or the white in the flecks of foam of the Mediterranean Sea itself. That sort of thing. This Contempt gets that, yes. And the details of the strands of Brigitte Bardot’s tor­tured blonde hair. It’s an out­stand­ing pic­ture and yes, a com­plete ana­log of what I got on the German Blu-ray I pur­chased a little while back.

I recom­mend that Blu-ray enthu­si­asts check out Gary Tooze’s exhaust­ive look at the Ran Blu-ray over at DVD Beaver. Tooze is (blame­lessly) obsess­ive about this film, and he got out the mag­ni­fy­ing glass to pin­point what he sees as the short­com­ings of this Blu-ray. And for all that, he allows that it’s the best video ver­sion of the film he’s ever seen. I took a bunch of snap­shots off of my plasma last night after I received these discs; I waited for a time of day when the reflec­ted ambi­ent glare off of my dis­play would be at a min­im­um. Below is a shot of what Ran looks like on said dis­play, cropped to include the dis­play itself:

Not bad, right? I mean, fif­teen years ago myself and a bunch of my friends might have killed, at least a sac­ri­fi­cial anim­al or some­thing, for a home ver­sion of the film that looked so good. And yet here we are in a new age of home theat­er look­ing for nits to pick. It’s grand to be alive. 

So don’t get me wrong, at all: both of these discs look very good indeed, and are highly recom­men­ded for the films alone (I haven’t had time to delve into the extras). The ques­tion that nags at me, and prob­ably nags at many who fre­quent home theat­er for­ums and the like, is, “Would Criterion have done it bet­ter?” Is there an extra mile that could have been taken, in terms of gath­er­ing of photo-chemical mater­i­al, digit­al cleanup, expan­sion of detail without the use of halo-creating edge enhance­ment, etcet­era, etcet­era? And is it just simple Criterion-induced drool­er neur­os­is that gives rise to the ques­tion, not to men­tion its insist­ent qual­ity? We will nev­er really know. Although if many of the titles that Criterion has lost come out in Blu-ray edi­tions via Studio Canal, we may have a clear­er idea.

I exper­i­ence no such qualms, of course, with The Ladykillers, which was nev­er a Criterion title to begin with. 

This is a fant­ast­ic­ally funny film, and if its Technicolor is not quite as sump­tu­ous as that of a Powell/Pressburger pro­duc­tion, well, Ealing was­n’t in the busi­ness of that vari­ety of sump­tu­ous­ness. I haven’t had the oppor­tun­ity to watch it in full, but the first twenty minutes were delight­ful as they’ve ever been and the high-def picture…transportive, as it were. Beautifully evoc­at­ive of the time and place of the film’s cheer­fully twis­ted creation.

UPDATE: My friend Joseph Failla speaks for many of us, I think, with this perspective:

I  don’t have any­thing per­son­al against Lionsgate, as they’ve man­aged to pick up a num­ber of desir­able titles that have gone out of print in the past. However, when it comes to RAN on Blu-ray, it’s all psy­cho­lo­gic­al. You yell Lionsgate and every­body says, “Huh? What?” You yell Criterion, and we’ve got a col­lect­or’s item on our hands. 

The prob­lem with RAN in par­tic­u­lar is that it’s had such a checkered past on home video. There was some con­fu­sion about its aspect ratio when Fox brought it to laser­disc, plus a pic­ture qual­ity that was­n’t up to the work Criterion devoted to oth­er Kurosawa films at the time. We all said, “If only Criterion could get ahold of this!” 

Lionsgate may actu­ally do a great job with the titles Criterion is los­ing out on, so I’m look­ing at these early releases with much interest. At the very least, they appear to be provided with good mater­i­al to work from. In the case of THE LADYKILLERS, I own the Anchor Bay Alec Guinness box set (which I have no inten­tion of part­ing with) but the new extras are very tempting. 

Just the same, I’m put­ting togeth­er a list of Criterions to search out before they’re gone.