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:
Criterion transferred The Unknown at a little under 23fps and encoded at 1080i. The motion should be perfect, right? Wrong! Somebody messed up and used a 24fps timeline, then exported at 1080i60. Notice how the motion stutters in the top sample below. The whole reason to use 1080i is to prevent that!
After deinterlacing, we can easily see the uneven, broken pulldown, worse than most silents authored at 24fps. Below screenshot is of a tool I wrote to help delete duplicated frames. What you see on the right is a long list of frame numbers. All frames highlighted in red are duplicates and can be safely deleted.
Encoding silents to 1080i60 applies its own unusual pulldown. So, the result of working in 24fps and exporting at 1080i60 is that two different pulldown patterns compounded to create terrible stuttering.
Microloops galore. Nearly every shot begins with a microloop. Microloops frequently occur mid-shot, too. Duplicated frames are separated by one or two frames, never breaking persistence of vision. You won’t see them all, but you’ll definitely notice some of the ones that happen mid-shot. They are very hard to demonstrate. In these samples, I put the repeated frames next to each other, with the frame number on top, so you can see that these are the exact same frames.
Frozen cloning isn’t a huge issue, but it still happens, and it’s crude and ugly as sin:
The Flying House – Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend
My complaints with this interesting re-working are solely on technical issues (though no one should call this a restoration, ever).
Pulldown issues. Stuttering, like a speed-corrected silent encoded at 24 fps…
Frame number in yellow.
…and dropped frames, like a poor PAL-NTSC conversion:
Intertitle that loops a handful of frames for its duration. I hate it in new versions of silents, and it definitely shouldn’t happen when an artist has complete control on reworking an old work (still image sample):
Your Face / Guard Dog
In contrast to the feature, the two shorts look great. I didn’t see any restoration artifacts when spot-checking, whereas I came across multiple artifacts at every spot I looked at in The Tune.
About the disc itself…
I hate fancy disc menus. The BD menu has a short loop FROM THE CLIMAX of the film that plays over the entire menu. Heaven forbid you need more than a few seconds to make a selection. I rushed for the mute button.
Zoom shit:
I don’t care how interesting the interviews are, I’m not watching Zoom meetings. They’re low-effort and look like garbage. Look at that screenshot. They didn’t even agree on horizontal or vertical. Yeah, low budget, blah, blah. But you could, like, you know, EDIT. And FRAME. And CROP. We don’t need to watch a 10 GB hour-long video of this.
The Tune, Your Face, and Guard Dog were processed by Academy Film Archive.
The New Beverly just ran a 35mm print from 2008, still in very good condition and with excellent color. Eclair’s restoration, on the UHD from Carlotta, has completely messed-up color. In screencaps here, you can see how it’s now tinged yellow and blue. Snow and geisha makeup should be white, not urine-colored. HD Numerique has a comparison between the UHD and Criterion BD here. Eclair’s skin tones veer purple (yikes!). In every instance, the Criterion disc has color that is a good approximation to the print that I just saw.
De-grained by Q-Tec. The de-graining itself is kind of impressive. It leaves a significant amount of cel dust, film dirt, and doesn’t really destroy lines. In a way, it’s less destructive than many “faithful” restorations.
However, Q-Tec failed to de-grain every frame. For almost every shot, the first and last frames have intact grain. Shots begin with grain, but then melt into smeariness. It’s as if it constantly goes in and out of focus. Going from grain to no-grain also looks a lot like interpolation.
