Drunken Master (Eureka)

While the processing wasn’t egregious enough to make any notes, splices tended to be replaced by a combination of microloops, frozen temporal cloning, and interpolation. Still, a light hand overall.

Microloops

(Frame number in yellow.)

Mismatched cloning

Interpolation

Jackie Chan’s finger is stuck to the background and fine damage lasts an additional frame:

La fin du monde (Gaumont)

Taking a guess, it was de-grained, restored to death, then re-grained. It looks smeary and unnatural.

Clipped directly from the BD.

And check out those ugly grid lines!

Clipped directly from the BD.

Interpolation still shows under the layer of false grain.

Now, compare to Autour de la Fin du Monde (1930). There’s a clarity that comes through the softness when the picture is left alone:

Clipped directly from the BD.

Too bad it’s out of sync:

La fin du monde (1931) was processed by Gaumont, Eclair, and FPA France. This version is also available from Kino.

Infernal Rapist (Vinegar Syndrome)

Very nice video. No complaints.

Clipped directly from the BD.

However, it’s over-subtitled and the translation is lacking.

We don’t need the entire Lord’s Prayer subtitled. It’s a pretty standard execution scene. Just this line, ending with an ellipsis, is enough.

The Spanish word for “no” is “no.” Do not subtitle cognates.

The title character’s nickname (“El Gato”) should be “The Cat” in English. (Though, in this example, the cop simply calls him, “Gato.”) We say “Mack the Knife,” not “Mack Messer.”

Coloring the subtitles pale yellow is a nice touch. I approve.

Carmen (1918, Kino)

The Murnau Foundation put a ton of work into piecing the film back together. Then they had to go and blow two years of work by “restoring” it.

Editing errors

Carmen was reconstructed from multiple prints. Many, many gaps were filled in from lesser sources, often no more than a few frames. However, the technicians were a little sloppy, repeating frames they already had, resulting in added stutter, microloops, and reduced picture quality.

Frame number in yellow.

In this sample, the technicians appended three frames to the end of the shot. Two of the frames were already present, resulting in a microloop:

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