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:
Natural grain. No unnecessary processing, no artifacting. Occasional hard subs are lamentable, but looks great overall. From the Cinémathèque de Toulouse.
Clipped directly from the BD.
Strike runs at 19fps and is encoded at 24fps. New English video intertitles.
Watch the spot remover make the plane disappear. IN THE VERY FIRST SHOT.
Clipped directly from the BD.
The damage done, let’s look closer at the retouching:
Watch pieces and small details of the plane disappear:
Clipped directly from the BD.
Disappearing porthole:
Disappearing wall fixture:
Disappearing wall decor on upper right:
Freezing
By far, the worst repair is freeze-framing the ends of shots. It’s hard to watch when the video keeps freezing. I consider it unwatchable. The bulk of it occurs during the first half, but never completely goes away. Check out the lousy spot removal here, too.
Frozen Temporal Cloning
Interpolation
Interpolation here is often combined with spot repair. It’s not the worst, but grain still freezes, dissolves, becomes magnetic; damage sticks to surfaces, and there’s ghosting. Click to see them full screen.
Maybe you think the previous three don’t look visible in motion:
Clipped directly from the BD.
But notice how parts of the picture slow down, as if they got stuck in the mud. Without knowing anything, it’s easy to dismiss it as poor encoding or a streaming hiccup. However, these are intentionally introduced errors.
Clipped directly from the BD.
There’s some microlooping, but surprisingly sparsely used.
Additionally, the subtitles have major timing issues.
The English version looks much better, even though it suffers from aggressive spot removal, some dodgy stabilization, and wobbly masking. However, there wasn’t anything that made me turn off the movie or pause it to take notes.
For a 2013 movie, I expected this to look better. My guess is an inadequate camera. Look at that aliasing!
Clipped directly from the BD.
The running time is 141 minutes, not the 134 stated on the box.
Invasion (2017)
The first movie in the set that looks good.
Clipped directly from the BD.
However, the subtitles are horrible. There are typos throughout the set, but those for Invasion are the worst.
Later spelled “Daniel.”Plus inconsistent placement of quotation marks.
Careless Crime (2020)
Another nice transfer.
Clipped directly from the BD.
These are probably fascinating in Farsi, but I was bored, and not having any of it by the time I got to Careless Crime. All the walking, monotonous dialog, and reading was just too taxing. I would be very interested to see Invasion, maybe even Fish & Cat, dubbed in English.
