"Dead" sexy

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• Tony Dayoub says:

  November 23, 2010 at 9:07 am

  This release may have to be my first dip into the for­eign Blu-ray pool.
  Maybe I missed it in your review, but have any of these under­gone sub­stan­tial res­tor­a­tion? Reason I ask is because, as I’ve dis­cussed with you before, I caught a restored ver­sion of “Toby Dammit” at Tribeca two years ago. However, the crew which worked on it only worked on that seg­ment. So I’m not sure if the oth­ers were brought up to par as well.

• Glenn Kenny says:

  November 23, 2010 at 9:11 am

  @ Tony: As I men­tioned in the review, the trans­fer IS from the ori­gin­al neg­at­ive, and GORGEOUS.

• Fabian W. says:

  November 23, 2010 at 9:17 am

  Sorry to get off-topic, but when you write “And-Really-Ought-To-Watch-The-Intimations-Of-Anti-Semitism-When-He-Makes-TV-Chat-Show-Appearances”, what event are you refer­ring to?
  And sorry to get even more off-topic, but do you plan to write some­thing about that BHL-Godard-HuffPo-thing?

• Glenn Kenny says:

  November 23, 2010 at 9:39 am

  Last time I was in Paris, 2007, I recall a slight uproar over Delon going on a chat show and caus­ing an mild uproar by giv­ing voice to some fairly reac­tion­ary notions, some of which car­ried the above-mentioned tinge. News of this did not make it to the States, where Delon fever is long past. In any event, my obser­va­tion was more con­cern­ing Delon’s pub­lic image than hav­ing to do with want­ing to con­demn him as an anti-semite, but I was­n’t really think­ing about wheth­er that mini-scandal had much registered in the English-speaking world.
  No, I’m not going to write about the BHL-Godard-HuffPo thing. It’s a bit of a vexed issue that I no longer feel intel­lec­tu­ally pre­pared to com­ment on. For me the point is no longer wheth­er or not Godard is an anti-semite, but just what an anti-semite is, and what it means when one is dis­cuss­ing Godard, or any oth­er artist. Too many times I’ve seen Godard’s ostens­ible anti-semitism brought out as a cudgel to de-legtimitize him as an artist ENTIRELY; and the charge car­ries such a pro­found emo­tion­al weight there’s no real get­ting around it. So that’s one reas­on I opt out of the dis­cus­sion for the time being.

• Kent Jones says:

  November 23, 2010 at 12:13 pm

  The Levy series at HuffPost is a curi­ous under­tak­ing, presen­ted as a leg­al brief to “exon­er­ate” Godard; in real­ity it’s Levy’s memor­ies of the abor­ted three-way col­lab­or­a­tion between JLG, him­self and Claude Lanzmann. I’ve always found Godard’s beef with Lanzmann and SHOAH a non-issue, i.e. claim­ing that Lanzmann favors the word over the image because of what he does­n’t show, which, by redu­cing the film to a series of neg­at­ive choices, wholly ignores what he DOES show. There’s a fas­cin­at­ing moment where Godard rumin­ates on his fath­er and the fact that he “may or may not have known” about the camps, and then says that “this ques­tion” (of his fath­er, of why the camps happened) obsesses him daily and hourly. It’s rel­ev­ant that he was recently plan­ning a big budget adapt­a­tion of THE LOST by Daniel Mendelssohn. I guess it’s equally rel­ev­ant that both were among his many pro­jects that nev­er came to be – the ques­tion is doubt­lessly too immense for him to con­front dir­ectly. Which is why he addressed it from anoth­er dir­ec­tion in the HISTOIRE(S) (there’s anoth­er inter­est­ing com­ment, from Godard to Lanzmann: “It took us the same amount of time, you to shoot Shoah, and I, Histoire(s) du cinema”). Anyway, it seems to me that the ques­tion of anti-semitism has been con­ver­ted by the press into yet anoth­er call for a quick, defin­it­ive mor­al judg­ment. Once you’re in that ter­rit­ory (or as Levy calls it, “the cli­mate of inquis­i­tion”), guilt is more or less estab­lished a pri­ori and…then what? Burn Godard’s neg­at­ives? Shoot him at sun­rise? Expunge the offend­ing pas­sages, like the Meir/Hitler jux­ta­pos­i­tion in ICI ET AILLEURS? It’s all pretty point­less and takes us far, far away from the films them­selves. Which, on this par­tic­u­lar ques­tion, are always unsettled, often uncom­fort­able and apt to veer into the myth­ic, some­times per­plex­ing, always pro­voc­at­ive (in some cases pro­duct­ively so, in oth­er cases not so much), and fre­quently arriv­ing at pas­sages that are breath­tak­ingly vast, monu­ment­ally haunt­ing. Anti-semitic? As in heap­ing the world’s eco­nom­ic troubles on the shoulders of the world Jewish pop­u­la­tion and endors­ing the final solu­tion? Not on your life.

• Sal C says:

  November 23, 2010 at 12:14 pm

  Techie Blu-ray ques­tion – if it’s region-free does that mean it can play on any old Blu-ray play­er or does the whole PAL/NTSC thing still enter into the equation?

• Glenn Kenny says:

  November 23, 2010 at 12:30 pm

  Hear, hear, Kent. My sen­ti­ments pretty much exactly.
  @ Sal C: WIth Blu-ray, the PAL/NTSC incom­pat­ib­il­ity is a moot point, as HTML is an entirely dif­fer­ent stand­ard that’s the same the world over. Region cod­ing on High-Definition discs is applied (willy nilly, it seems) by pro­du­cers and man­u­fac­tur­ers, where­as PAL and NTSC are dif­fer­ent tech­no­lo­gic­al pro­cesses. So, yes, you will get superb res­ults on a “Spirits of the Dead” Blu-ray on a region‑A locked PS3, a region-free OPPO, or what have you.

• Tim Lucas says:

  November 23, 2010 at 3:28 pm

  One pesky thing about region free PAL is that it is still PAL. Hence, when spot-checking my INFERNO set from Arrow, the Blu-ray disc played fine… but the stand­ard second disc would not play in my Blu=ray deck and had to be moved over to my multi-standard deck for playback.
  Thanks for the namecheck in your SPIRITS review, Glenn. This has always been a sem­in­al title in my movie-going his­tory and it’s been my priv­ilege to make the English soundtrack (evid­ently not a con­cern of the film’s own­ers) avail­able now to two dif­fer­ent releases: the Image laser­disc and now the Arrow Blu-ray.

• Norm Wilner says:

  November 23, 2010 at 6:03 pm

  Sweet heav­enly crap, Amy Adams is going to play Jane Fonda someday.

• That Fuzzy Bastard says:

  November 23, 2010 at 6:28 pm

  So any­one else out there like the Malle seg­ment best? Toby Dammit is fun to look at, but I find the Malle the only one that’s genu­inely enga­ging and enter­tain­ing. Perhaps because I nev­er cease being amused at the dop­pel­gänger being the good one.

• Uncle Kenny says:

  November 23, 2010 at 11:27 pm

  Imagine my sur­prise, when I went to buy a copy of this blu-ray, to dis­cov­er that Amazon US is not list­ing it. It is lis­ted in Amazon UK only. Arrow Films on their site [BluRay – £16.99 Cat No: FCD436] http://www.arrowfilms.co.uk/index.php?tle_id=470
  spe­cific­ally does NOT say that it’s any par­tic­u­lar region, where­as Amazon UK says this:
  Format: Colour, PAL
  Region: Region 2 (This DVD may not be view­able out­side Europe. Read more about DVD formats.)
  Number of discs: 1
  Classification: 18
  Studio: Arrow Films
  at http://www.amazon.co.uk/Spirits-Dead-Blu-ray-Terence-Stamp/dp/B0038AL7M4
  Very frus­trat­ing. Perhaps you might amend your lovely post and straight­en out the confusion.

• Glenn Kenny says:

  November 24, 2010 at 5:26 am

  @ Uncle Kenny: What can I tell you; Amazon UK info is not unim­peach­able. The disc plays per­fectly on my Region‑A locked PS3 and Hitachi plasma. I’ve watched it twice…at least! See also this DVD Beaver review, which states “Region: FREE! (as veri­fied by the Momitsu region FREE Blu-ray player)”:
  http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film3/blu-ray_reviews52/spirits_of_the_dead_blu-ray.htm