pubs
I’m watching the restored version of Nosferatu. It’s not quite as impressive as the Metropolis restoration, on a few fronts.
Though some of the source material is startlingly excellently great, other bits are really irreparably grungy.
The translation is a bit weird and literal, with a few grammatical errors for extra flavor.
The new English intertitles they generated based on the translation are cheap-looking and far from seamless; I could have done better in half an hour in Photoshop.
For some reason they chose not to motion-estimate missing frames, so the film still occasionally skips a bit.
There’s a really long written intro that babbles on about the restoration; it’s distracting and a bit wanky.
Though it’s fantastic that they located and recorded and overlaid the original score, the original music is often not really appropriate to the mood of the images. It’s weird. There’s a horrible, creepy thing on the screen, and the music is all majestic violins.
All of that said, this is the best version to date; these are small criticisms compared to every other version on DVD. And what’s more, just as with Metropolis, the new version makes it possible to follow and appreciate the story! Before, it was just a weird dreamlike drip of images. Now it feels like a finished, sophisticated film.
I haven’t seen Nosferatu, but the Kino restoration of Metropolis was such a revelation when I saw it at the Brattle. I guess reuniting it with the original score worked in that case because Metropolis had such a fantastic original score–it was a crime that nobody heard it for so long! Not to mention that ability to finally tell what was supposed to be going on and what all the characters’ motivations were.
While it may have little to no factual basis, I’m beginning to think the more shameless self-promotion a video restoration project receives, the lower the quality the result will be.
It may very well just be that excessive self-promotion makes the faults stand out, but I cannot think of any situation where such a project was not flawed.
Is the skipping from missing frames either annoying or common?
It’s pretty frequent, and often a little jarring due to the overall quality of the picture. Sometimes I can understand why they were left in, when enough frames are missing that reconstruction wouldn’t work well. Other times, a character will be tottering forward and there’s a jump of one or two frames. Why on Earth not patch things up where it’s possible? I could understand if these guys were the “film only” restoration purists, but the project is fully digital. Ah well.
Overall, the quality is really really good. That’s why these little things jar so much. It’s almost flawless, yet there are all of these little superficial things that take away from the result. Some of it I blame on Kino (those horrible English intertitles); some of it is just weird.
If you watch the (included) German version, there are subtitles for the original intertitles. Which seems bizarre, but in this case it’s probably preferable.
Yes, Metropolis is really something. It’s amazing how much sense the movie makes, when presented properly! I also love what they did, creating new intertitles to explain the missing material. It’s such a simple solution, yet kind of genius in a way.
And the quality — it looks like A Hard Day’s Night!
There are some clever bits to the Nosferatu score. It’s certainly timed well, for one thing; there are all kinds of orchestral jabs to go along with the action. It’s just that the tone is so weird.
Nosferatu has probably the most haunting imagery of any horror movie I’ve seen. It’s a bit of a B-movie compared to Metropolis, but lordy is it ever lulu.
I guess Caligari must be next in line? I don’t think that’s ever been dressed down properly. At least, I’m not aware of a decent version…