Image of the day, 5/8/11

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• colinr says:

  May 8, 2011 at 4:07 pm

  Mr Kenny, what do you make of the now blue tin­ted sequences of the Blu-ray? (Now match­ing the Ruscico version)

• jbryant says:

  May 8, 2011 at 11:46 pm

  Yummmmm…cultural veget­ables!

• That Fuzzy Bastard says:

  May 9, 2011 at 9:19 pm

  Is this a snap from the Blu-Ray? I don’t remem­ber the walls being that green even in the 35 mm prints I’ve seen.

• Victor Morton says:

  May 9, 2011 at 10:39 pm

  Hence … their import­ance as cul­tur­al vegetables

• Glenn Kenny says:

  May 10, 2011 at 10:55 am

  @ TFB: It’s from the stand­ard def of the new transfer.
  @ Colin R. : I am not quite sure what to make of these, but note that the blue tint is not uni­ver­sally applied—it’s there in some B&W shots but not in all. Clearly a good amount of delib­er­a­tion was done. I’m invest­ig­at­ing but I am not yet “out­raged.” As far as how they look/play, my short answer is “fine.”

• That Fuzzy Bastard says:

  May 10, 2011 at 12:53 pm

  So here’s a ques­tion… With a film like SOLARIS, how do you decide if the col­ors are right? I mean, that screen­cap looks way more sat­ur­ated than the prints I’ve seen at Anthology, MoMA, and Lincoln Center. Then again, the prints I saw there were all suf­fi­ciently dam­aged that I would­n’t vouch for their author­ity. Vadim Yusov is still alive, but I don’t know if he was involved with the disc. Meanwhile, I’ve always thought of SOLARIS as a fairly desat­ur­ated movie, but… maybe I’m wrong? Glenn, you’ve been very much on top of review­ing pic­ture qual­ity of these kinds of non-Hollywood releases, so how do you make that call?

• warren oates says:

  May 10, 2011 at 1:11 pm

  @FuzzyB
  Kino’s remas­ter of THE SACRIFICE is com­ing soon and the blog­ger below, also a film­maker in his own right, helped to pro­duce the new ver­sion. He explains how they judged the prop­er col­or tim­ing from mul­tiple sources, includ­ing an ori­gin­al release print.
  http://www.bretwood.blogspot.com/

• Glenn Kenny says:

  May 10, 2011 at 2:24 pm

  @TFB: I don’t think “Solaris” was inten­ded to have a quite-so-desaturated look the way much of “Stalker” did. The best-looking (clearest, least dam­aged, most fresh-looking) print of the film I ever saw was one of the egre­giously cut U.S. release ver­sion, com­plete with the Columbia logo at the front, at Cinema Village way back in the ’80s. I did get a chance to look at a good sol­id chunk of the Blu-ray this morn­ing and it felt very sat­is­fy­ing and right, var­ied tin­ted scenes and all. As for what to look for in terms of col­or “accur­acy,” I always check whites first, then flesh tones, then…other things. In “Solaris” today I paid spe­cial atten­tion to the Brueghel repro­duc­tion and the stained-glass win­dow in the lib­rary of the satel­lite. Both looked fine.

• That Fuzzy Bastard says:

  May 10, 2011 at 2:36 pm

  Thanks, GK and WO—fascinating stuff! Tarkovsky has always struck me as a real head-scratcher for restor­ers, thanks to his delib­er­ately limp­id col­ors and fre­quently arbit­rary (or at least hard-to-systemitize) shifts between col­or, tin­ted col­or, and b/w. But it had­n’t occurred to me that his fre­quent inclu­sion of exist­ing art­works provides an excel­lent place to start evaluating!
  Terrifying to think, from Bret Wood’s link, that col­or prints from the 80s are so import­ant, con­sid­er­ing their appalling tend­ency to go pink (I saw a print of THE MIRROR at Anthology that was so pink they apo­lo­gized before­hand). I remem­ber see­ing CREMASTER 2 at Anthology many years ago, and it was shock­ing to see an 80s print that had­n’t passed in front of a hun­dred lamps—the col­ors were as rich as when it was first struck, and it made me away of how few 80s films I’ve seen in their ori­gin­al, inten­ded form.

• nrh says:

  May 10, 2011 at 3:38 pm

  A good num­ber of Russian films from the early ’70s have sim­il­ar shifts between col­or, black and white, and tin­ted black and white; I always heard this was due to lim­ited film stock, but that may be apocryphal?

• colinr says:

  May 10, 2011 at 4:19 pm

  According to a piece at Nostalghia.com from 2002 -
  http://people.ucalgary.ca/~tstronds/nostalghia.com/TheTopics/newsCriterionOnSolaris.html
  – Criterion had checked with Vadim Yusof before put­ting out their first DVD ver­sion of Solaris with the scenes in black and white, although it seemed strange due to the blue tint­ing on the Ruscico ver­sion. It seems that Criterion may have real­ised that just pure black and white was not quite cor­rect, maybe by not prop­erly inter­pret­ing Yusof’s responses, and have rec­ti­fied this for this new edition.
  There was a small debate on the Criterion for­um back in 2007 about the tint­ing. I have linked to page 3 of the dis­cus­sion thread about the film, and the tint­ing talk takes place a little way down that page:
  http://www.criterionforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=120&start=50