Welles on Criterion Laserdisc

[mteal]

You got lucky, Sled. My Ambersons LD is riddled with rot too, but I didn't transfer mine in time. Oh well, good excuse to buy the DVD. And I did transfer all my other Welles Criterion LDs in time, including their indispensable OTHELLO.

[A Sled in Flames]

You got lucky, Sled. My Ambersons LD is riddled with rot too, but I didn't transfer mine in time. Oh well, good excuse to buy the DVD. And I did transfer all my other Welles Criterion LDs in time, including their indispensable OTHELLO.

Oh, that's really unfortunate. My condolences, mteal.

About Welles's Criterion Laserdiscs, what did people think of the Kane laserdiscs? Are any of them really worth getting for reasons other than nostalgia? I'm specifically curious if there's anything special about the transfers... for instance, some interesting flaw that restoration foolhardily removed; special features not ported to BD would be of interests as well.

[Glenn Anders]

A Sled in Flames: I've always thought that Laser Discs, granted without "bells and whistles," have a certain . . . solidity that DVD's often lack -- at least for me. I thought the transfer of CITIZEN KANE excellent. No hidden Mercury players revealed prematurely. Of course, as I've mentioned, a slight tinker with the "blackness" adjustment on one's TV Set will usually cure those problems.

Glenn

[tadao]

Might be of interest to Sled and others, I looked further into disabling the auto-pause on CAV discs. Post-1993 a lot of Pioneer players have a function called PSC (Picture Stop Cancel). It can be toggled on/off by holding down the Pause button on the player (not the remote) for a few seconds, the text PSC ON or PSC OFF will display on screen. With PSC ON the player will bypass the autostops, with PSC OFF it will respect them as normal. It works on my British CLD-2950 (equivalent, I think, to the US CLD-703). Try it with your player(s) and see if you can enjoy the Ambersons side 4 without interruption!

Another vaguely Welles-related release I'd recommend is Disney's CAV set of Saludos Amigos/Three Caballeros. There's no commentary, but there's documentary material and radio broadcasts on some of the analogue tracks. Welles and It's All True get passing contextual mention, but it's interesting to see a contemporary sister production under the good neighbour programme that was so financially successful for the Disney studio that they didn't need to take Uncle Sam's dollar after all, and based on the success put together their own sequel, Three Caballeros (that didn't do so well); also interesting to compare and contrast the content and structure of Disney's package films to the mooted and reconstructed forms of It's All True. There's some info on the release at the Laserdisc Database here:
http://www.lddb.com/laserdisc/06559/5716-CS/Three-Caballeros-The/Saludos-Amigos-(1944)

I've found that the market's really loosened for LDs, I suppose it's to be expected now that it's not one but two generations back as far as home entertainment media goes, and that people are dumping their collections to 'make space' or because their LD player died and they don't want to spring for an increasingly expensive quality used machine (discs seem to be getting very cheap, players seem to be getting quite costly); also where there are less and less LD exclusive feature films now that aren't available as DVDs, BDs, paid downloads, TV airings or bootleg posts on YouTube or other platforms. I've really increased my collection and picked up plenty of nice discs for $5-$10, and some great job lots as low as $3 each.

Although I've been a big DVD fan since they came out, I'm finding I really like the unprocessed analogue look a lot of older LD releases have. Especially for pre-1960 material that's TV aspect ratio and that's 'challenging' to digital compression, (grainy, smoky, flickery and otherwise atmospheric). Blu-ray is a great format, and well able to handle challenging material, but for those I'm noticing that some of the studios are now making very poor decisions and running the transfers through too much digital reprocessing, which is now just a computer based filter in the workflow - they've got the strong tendency to choose to 'correct' the film to try to make it look like it was shot with modern equipment; overstabilising, grain-reducing to the point that faces are waxy and movement leaves trails (Universal, j'accuse), colour-'correcting' which can wreak havoc on Technicolor features especially, and (my biggest pet hate of all), dropping the original sound mix in favour of a 5.1 upmix.

Later LDs do start showing injudicious application of grain reduction and colour regrading, so as far as that's concerned it's not the format itself but the (ab)use of technology available at the time; but if the source transfer is the same on the LD and DVD, I feel that LD handles poor quality source material more gracefully than DVD does.

I have mixed feelings about studios using the camera negative to create the Blu-ray - on one side, it's amazing to see old movies look so pin sharp, but on the other, it doesn't look like anything anyone ever experienced in a theatre in 1941 or whenever. The LDs often maintain the atmosphere of a print seen in a revival theatre or on television in a way that's really pleasing to me. I'm finding that I prefer some good, honest film artefacting and audio crackles/hiss to the macroblocking and mosquito artefacting on DVDs, and the overprocessing used by some film studios (looking at you again, Universal) on their recent DVDs and Blu-rays where they'd do better to leave a film-like transfer unmolested.

In the last year, I've expanded my collection from around 30 discs where the LD has unique content, to upwards of 300, initially for discs that had variations in colour timing, sound mix, or other minor points; through discs where the LD is a fraction of the price of an out-of-print or MOD DVD, and now increasingly to favourite films where I have a perfectly good DVD and / or BD already, but it's just nice to have the packaging and the film-look on the LD, and at the moment the LDs are in very regular rotation. Last weekend I watched 10 titles from my latest haul. I've had very little bad luck with rotters so far; very sorry to hear of your losses here. My hope is that for discs that haven't yet rotted in their 15-30 year existence, they're not going to start now... At any rate, I'm keeping my fingers crossed....

[Glenn Anders]

Thank you again, tadao, that we are in agreement, this time about LD's.

And if I ever have to explain to Todd Baesen an arcane matter in technical terms, I shall call upon you!

BTW, I've never found "a rotter" among my LD collection 300 strong, now at least twenty-five years old. My big problem, since I have trouble bending over to reach my Pioneer turntable, is to get my Giant Son Guy to do it for me. He's already leapt ahead to Livestream and "threads." He can't be bothered with old clunky discs that I make him turn over periodically.

One day soon, all this stuff will be just run through our heads.

Glenn

[atcolomb]

I started collecting laserdiscs in 1990 and now have close to 400 including 148 Criterions and very happy to have them now and once a month or so i will play Ambersons or The Trial or original release of Touch Of Evil. I started to buy vhs tapes and one day i saw Siskel and Ebert talk about laserdiscs and The Criterion Collection especially Citizen Kane and Blade Runner on one of their shows...they talked about the extra features and seeing the origianl aspect ratio of the movie so i got a player and started to rent the discs and soon to buy them. Laserdisc maybe be a dead format but to me and others it's still alive and like the LP record it can survive in a all digital world.

[Glenn Anders]

Excellent.

You will have to post a URL for your Shakespeare production, if it becomes available.

Glenn

[mteal]

I started collecting laserdiscs in 1990 and now have close to 400 including 148 Criterions and very happy to have them now...Laserdisc maybe be a dead format but to me and others it's still alive and like the LP record it can survive in a all digital world.

That’s the spirit, Atcolomb, just as long as you’ve got the room to store them. I used to have about 400 LDs, but now I’ve got about 100 after running out of room and donating most of them to the local library (God knows where they wound up after that – probably in a landfill). I also had about 1,000 LPs, now I’ve got about 200 left. Only my absolute favorites survived the periodic massacres, but I’m glad I kept some, if only for nostalgia’s sake. Some of them have become collector’s items, especially when they have special features that are unique.

I remember way back in the mid-80’s being absolutely stunned by the first Criterion CAV edition of CITIZEN KANE, so much so that I’d be curious to see how a bootleg DVDr of it would stack up today against the Kane DVD or even the new BluRay. I agree with Tadeo, that the best LDs retain the look of a brand new print, whereas the BluRays sometimes have an artificial, overly sandblasted look to them. Almost like watching a video of a stageplay instead of a film.

But just as CDs, and especially Mp3s, leave Lps in the dust in terms of convenience, so DVDs do the same with LDs. I remember the first time I saw a DVD, back in the mid-90’s. The local LD shop – yes youngsters, there actually were such things as “LD shops” back then – had GOOD FELLAS playing on two TVs, side by side. One played the LD, the other the DVD. There was no discernable difference in picture quality between the two, and I remember the look of amazement mixed with concern on the face of the store owner, who knew he would soon be out of business unless he started adapting immediately.

You could see the same look on the faces of all the customers too. We knew that our beloved LD collections had suddenly become worthless overnight. The same scenario would be repeated a few years ago when the DVD began to give way to the BluRay. But having invested so much money in VHS, LD, and DVD, (not to mention LPs and CDs) only to see all of it become what Welles called "technologically passe", I have yet to buy a BluRay player. With five DVD players already, I don’t have the room or the money, or frankly, the inclination to amass yet another collection in yet another medium. I do have some film buff nephews however, who do have a big 1080p TV and BluRay player, so I think they could probably use a nice MACBETH BluRay for Christmas. I’ll let them do the BluRay era, while I just wait for that video brain-implant era that Glenn mentioned.

[Glenn Anders]

Frankly, Mike, before my home theater was ruined by the fire in our apartment buil ding, I can remember sitting down with my friend, Bambo-Bambo Christianson, to watch CITIZEN KANE on LD. We were knocked out by the beauty and truth of the film. A couple of years later, I bought the new DVD of Orson Welles' early masterpiece, and feeling being a bit depressed that the rendition was not quite up to the LD. There is something about the space devoted to the electronic transfer on the LD which is not captured on the DVD.

At least not to this old mind.

As Welles taught us, age and time are a continuous process of loss. Even in Art, which shores us up against that process.

Glenn

[mteal]

Sorry about the home theatre, Glenn. I know the feeling. I still get wistful when I think of the huge A/V setup I had during the LD era. Over the years I've gradually scaled down the size of my home theatre drastically, one by one replacing my big electronic machines (when they break down) with much smaller ones. Maybe because it's more portable that way, maybe because I no longer think big at home. Your brain-implant idea made me recall another half-forgotten dream of mine: a little "video theatre" that would use large state-of-the-art home video equipment in a strip mall space. How about a chain of "Wellesnet Art Houses"? Maybe make it a coffee shop too. But I digress...

I wish I had a good DVDr of the ’84 Criterion CAV KANE, because the only real drawback of that LD set was the fact that the film was split into 5 parts on 3 different discs, like unconnected reels of film. This marred the film’s wonderful, symphonic sense of continuity, something that doesn’t happen on DVD. I never bought the ’84 KANE because our local LD store rented them, so I just made a VHS tape of it, which actually still looks quite good; and also restores the continuity. I rarely ever see the '84 KANE for sale on Ebay.

I suppose at this point the optimal thing to have would be a BluRay recorder with a large hard drive on it. That way, old LDs could be pieced together without losing any picture quality. I guess they are starting to make them, although the ones I saw on Amazon looked pretty expensive (over $1,000). Good machine for the Wellesnet coffee house, though.

[Glenn Anders]

Mike: As a Wellsian character might say, this could be the start of something big!

Anyway, let's keep working on it.

Alex