Tag Archives: Kino

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.

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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Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers (Part 2)

For part 1, click here.

Disc 2 is a lot better, but not without errors.

Hypocrites

Pulldown error. Corrected to 60fps.

Sunshine Molly

Pulldown error. Corrected to 60fps.

Too Wise Wives

Microloop. Clipped directly from the BD.
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Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers (Part 1)

Kino’s set is a mixed bag. Some movies look great. Others are restored to death. I’ll be focusing on the latter. I give lots of examples, but this post is by no means comprehensive.

Mixed Pets (1911)

Editing error:

Corrected to 60fps

Frozen, splotchy, misaligned cloning. Terrible in every way:

Some shots are untouched, but frozen cloning is pervasive:

Intertitles look super fake, but this one has an erroneous line peeking through:

Processed by Library of Congress and Dayton Digital Filmworks.

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