The Tragedy of Man (2011) is a movie that absolutely needs to be dubbed. Gorgeous animation, but the constant dialog means that my eyes are always at the bottom of the screen.
Add to that, impenetrable King James-style dialog:
Dialog is flying by while everything onscreen is moving, flashing, or doing some interesting thing. Add in this stilted olde English, and it’s impossible to keep up.
When movies were subtitled in the nitrate era, not every line got translated. I’ve seen prints where a single line covers entire scenes. We should return to that.
Then there’s the ridiculous vocabulary:
You can do pretentious writing in a spoken translation. That is, in a dub. It’s unreadable when put into subtitles.
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.
Processing on Eolomea (1972) was so bad that it deserved its own post. See here.
The Silent Star (1960)
I found a tiny bit of interpolated cloning while looking for a sample, but it’s minor. Looks good overall. The only feature in the set that didn’t have any jarring repairs.
Clipped directly from the BD.
Signals (1970)
Filtering leaves residue from previous frames:
Bad splice handling that uses Interpolation, microloops, and appalling pixelation. How is this better than visible cement splices (which are mostly masked out during film projection)?
Frame numbers in yellow.
General interpolation and misalignment:
In the Dust of the Stars (1976)
There’s some weird masking and screen tearing going on, but I can’t tell if it’s original. Overall ok.
Edit: Turns out, some of the weirdness I was noticing is AI upscaling dreck. Lots of examples in this thread at Blu-ray.com. Deaf Crocodile’s disc apparently is better. Maybe I’ll get it. Still…
Sloppy repairs are few, but present:
Frame numbers in yellow.
Love 2002 (1972)
Very rough, but natural.
Edit: Or is this also an AI upscale? I initially thought the source was 16mm, but those edges and the dull color is very suspicious.
Clipped directly from the BD.
The Robot (1968)
The best looking film in the set.
Clipped directly from the BD.
Pleasingly, the features aren’t overly scrubbed, which makes the repairs all the more frustrating. There are enough remaining flaws that no one would have noticed their presence had they been allowed to remain.
And a pet peeve: these features don’t have end credits, but DEFA added new end screens immediately upon fadeout, destroying what I consider a cool effect, akin to seeing a play without a curtain call. How often do you see movies without end credits?
EDIT 11/17/25 – I just got the Deaf Crocodile release and did a quick spot check. Signals actually looks like 70mm this time, as opposed to Eureka’s grainy 2.35:1. In the Dust of the Stars is the same bad restoration. Grain is poor, looking like video noise. De-graining is frequent.
There’s typical frozen temporal cloning. The bigger problem is that there are about 100 freeze frames. Some have negligible clone repairs, but usually the picture simply freezes.
Frozen picture. Yellow number indicates frame number.Picture is mostly frozen, with some misaligned cloning.
The shorts got worse processing, especially at splices.
Let Us Get a Dog (1974)
Freeze frame:
Interpolation:
Frozen cloning, screen tearing, misalignment:
Can you spot it?
Where is the Limit? (1975)
Frozen cloning:
Screen tearing:
Interpolation:
This interpolated frame includes a microloop.
Restoration processing by Hungary National Film Institute Filmlab.
Samm Deighan’s irritating uptalk-filled commentary approaches the movie with the assumption that animation is for children. It sounds like a dry book-report academic lecture, instead of someone who is an expert in Hungarian cinema. Skip it.
