111 / BD 4 Electra, My Love

Discuss releases by Second Run and the films on them.
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tenia
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Re: 111 / BD 4 Electra, My Love

#26 Post by tenia » Mon Sep 26, 2016 1:09 am

otis wrote:Beaver
I should receive my copy soon and will be able to judge by myself rather than with unreliable caps, but these look way too bright and quite waxy.

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Bikey
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Re: 111 / BD 4 Electra, My Love

#27 Post by Bikey » Mon Sep 26, 2016 9:17 am

"Comparisons can be made to Fellini, to Sergei Parajanov and (quite seriously) to Busby Berkeley. These, though, are imprecise reference points: Jancsó was his own man, with a vision all his own and this is one of his most singular achievements, a movie that shows how cautious most cinema is"
James Oliver at MovieMail on ELECTRA, MY LOVE
Last edited by Bikey on Mon Oct 03, 2016 7:08 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Bikey
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Re: 111 / BD 4 Electra, My Love

#28 Post by Bikey » Mon Sep 26, 2016 10:08 am

... and 10% off at MovieMail - enter MONDAY at the checkout (valid until 27th September)

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Bikey
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Re: 111 / BD 4 Electra, My Love

#29 Post by Bikey » Thu Sep 29, 2016 9:07 am

"Eye-popping... a stunning and overwhelming experience not to be missed"

Mondo Digital

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Bikey
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Re: 111 / BD 4 Electra, My Love

#30 Post by Bikey » Tue Oct 04, 2016 6:45 am

"This is bold political allegory and spellbinding cinema of the first order."
says Ben Nicholson at CineVue

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jsteffe
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Re: 111 / BD 4 Electra, My Love

#31 Post by jsteffe » Fri Oct 07, 2016 12:38 pm

I received the Blu-ray in the mail today, and I think it looks good. Compared to the DVD, the enhanced resolution and color depth allow for a more precise and subtly delineated image that adds impact and depth on a large screen. As Mondo Digital notes, the restoration appears to use a bit too much grain management, but in my opinion it's not a major issue. Certainly, it's not as bad as some of the Polish restorations discussed elsewhere. For what it's worth, Kende signed off on the restoration. I am also increasingly convinced that some of the softness in the image may have to do with the resolving power of the zoom lens that Kende used for the film.

The booklet and especially the video interview with Kende are enlightening. If you haven't seen a Jancsó film before, this Blu-ray is a good place to start. Now let's hope that the new digital restoration of The Round-Up gets a Blu-ray release somewhere, to say nothing of The Red and the White, Silence and Cry and Red Psalm. What a brilliant director Jancsó was!

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repeat
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Re: 111 / BD 4 Electra, My Love

#32 Post by repeat » Sat Oct 08, 2016 12:50 am

jsteffe wrote:If you haven't seen a Jancsó film before, this Blu-ray is a good place to start. Now let's hope that the new digital restoration of The Round-Up gets a Blu-ray release somewhere, to say nothing of The Red and the White, Silence and Cry and Red Psalm. What a brilliant director Jancsó was!
Electra is one of his finest works for sure - but I think what is needed even more urgently than Blu-rays of those well-known films would be a) the original, undubbed cut of La Pacifista and b) proper English-friendly releases of the best post-1975 work (especially L'Aube). What is really amazing about Jancsó is the incredible consistency throughout his oeuvre from start to finish, a fact which tends to get obscured by disproportionate attention given to the canonized 1960s works (not to say they don't deserve it, masterpieces as they are of course). Really happy that Second Run has brought this film to a wider public, looking forward to replacing my MaNDA DVD with the Blu-ray!

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Bikey
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Re: 111 / BD 4 Electra, My Love

#33 Post by Bikey » Sun Oct 09, 2016 6:25 am

"The always excellent Second Run have surpassed themselves with this offering"
Herald Scotland on ELECTRA http://www.heraldscotland.com/arts_ents ... ychomania/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

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Bikey
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Re: 111 / BD 4 Electra, My Love

#34 Post by Bikey » Mon Oct 17, 2016 11:16 am

"Electra, My Love mesmerises from the very beginning... treats the viewer to a rich and thoroughly enjoyable spectacle, not wasting a second of its 71-minute runtime."
Electric Sheep

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Bikey
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Re: 111 / BD 4 Electra, My Love

#35 Post by Bikey » Mon Oct 17, 2016 12:30 pm

"Jancsó's avant-garde take on the Electra myth is thoroughly mesmerizing."
Eric Cotenas on ELECTRA, MY LOVE at DVD Compare

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Bikey
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Re: 111 / BD 4 Electra, My Love

#36 Post by Bikey » Sun Oct 23, 2016 1:26 pm

"This Blu-ray upgrade paves the way for the film to be experienced as a bold statement of art, theatre and dance it really is. Recommended to anyone who enjoys the surreal pleasures of seventies cinema as art in its purest form, this is a fine attempt at restoring at least part of the legacy of one of Hungary’s most powerful filmmakers of all time. Thoroughly recommended."
An eloquent and epic appreciation of ELECTRA, MY LOVE by Kat Ellinger at Diabolique Magazine

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Ribs
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Re: 111 / BD 4 Electra, My Love

#37 Post by Ribs » Wed Dec 07, 2016 12:36 pm

For some stupid reason I ignored Second Run until they've made the transition to BD and I've been slowly diving into some of their Hungarian releases over the past few months for no reason in particular but watching this and realizing I've been just sitting idly by instead of supporting stuff like this being released makes me super regretful. I'm a total convert now, if the generally amazing quality of the other films I've tried so far hadn't convinced me yet. This is just mesmerizing, a movie that makes you never want to blink. To have it on BD feels wrong, weirdly, like it's just too far removed from pretty much every other commercial releases I have, filling out a niche interest I didn't really know I had. More, please!

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MichaelB
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Re: 111 / BD 4 Electra, My Love

#38 Post by MichaelB » Wed Dec 07, 2016 1:18 pm

I know more than one person who normally buys everything on BD but makes a special exception for Second Run.

And if you liked 'Electra', 'The Confrontation' and 'Red Psalm' also have very impressive transfers even if they are DVD-only.

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Ribs
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Re: 111 / BD 4 Electra, My Love

#39 Post by Ribs » Wed Dec 07, 2016 2:01 pm

As I said, I arbitrarily decided to dive in with Hungarian releases, so I've gotten 10 of the 14 releases thus far. I just for some reason needed them to start releasing on BD for me to pay attention to their DVDs. But if they were to release more BDs that'd be cool too.

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Bikey
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Re: 111 / BD 4 Electra, My Love

#40 Post by Bikey » Thu Dec 08, 2016 11:43 am

"A swirling ballet of pastoral splendor... And it's stunningly beautiful... how magnificent an experience it is to behold.
This Blu-ray edition is a gift of some magnitude."
Clydefro Jones at Digital Fix raves about ELECTRA, MY LOVE


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domino harvey
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Re: 111 / BD 4 Electra, My Love

#42 Post by domino harvey » Mon Apr 03, 2017 7:00 pm

I liked this a lot, especially when seen as a playful reconciliation of the Cambridge School approach to myth. I was also taken by its total absence of sets, with the only structure an open stable (or granary?) scarcely used-- it called to mind the decidedly non art house western the Tall Texan, which likewise was set entirely outdoors. I appreciated this as a work of spectacle and choreography (some of those roving set-ups must have taken forever to block in advance) more than anything deeper, though!

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zedz
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Re: 111 / BD 4 Electra, My Love

#43 Post by zedz » Tue Apr 04, 2017 4:24 pm

I'm glad you liked it. The familiar mythic basis of the film does tend to make the visual spectacle the main attraction with this film (and also makes it a good entry point for Jancso), but in other films of the period like The Red and the White, The Round-Up, The Confrontation or Red Psalm Jancso's use of space and choreography of the human (and equine) form are much more clearly integrated into his political and social content. All those films deliver a similar aesthetic frisson, regardless of the content.


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jbeall
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Re: 111 / BD 4 Electra, My Love

#45 Post by jbeall » Sun Dec 10, 2017 12:44 am

Leaving aside for a moment the mythological subject matter, this remarkable film is a great companion piece to Red Psalm. The temptation to read vaguely de-historicized political content (yes, I'm aware of the Hungarian folk elements) to one's present moment is always an issue, but I'll leave it aside here and just add that I thought the stylized staging and dialogue combine to powerful effect. The ending may be less traumatic than a similar moment near the end of Red Psalm, but I still found it affecting.

Finally, the interview with Kende is incredibly interesting in situating Jancso's career in light of technical advances, and does a lot to contextualize a big chunk of Jancso's early work. I usually don't have the time/patience to sit through ~30-min. interviews, and this one was really engaging and informative. The film itself is great, but the extra is probably indispensable for Jancso fans.

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Re: 111 / BD 4 Electra, My Love

#46 Post by Q Pete Mitchell » Sat Apr 09, 2022 2:23 am

Is the upcoming Kino Jansco set, which claims to be 4K restos, different to the source material used for this BD? This BD is the best the film has looked on home video, but even then, I concur with the reviews noting a lack of grain, and various artifacting.

The turquoise fringing in this early scene, for example, was so pronounced in motion, it prompted me to check the settings on my display, as well as reference various online images:

https://caps-a-holic.com/c.php?a=3&x=79 ... 0&i=0&go=1

As others earlier in this thread have wondered, perhaps this is built into the negative due to lenses or other technical reasons. In fact, I seem to recall that the same take moves to shoot directly into the sun and features some stunning lens flares, which if not planned were some kind of on set magic:

https://caps-a-holic.com/c.php?d1=15549 ... =1&l=0&a=3

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jheez
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Re: 111 / BD 4 Electra, My Love

#47 Post by jheez » Sat Apr 09, 2022 8:05 am

I am not an expert on this film, but I'm a photographer. It very well looks like the first screenshot could be lens aberrations from a poorer quality lens. It looks like it might have been shot wide open, with a low depth of field which could accentuate the problems, especially in higher contrast areas and towards the corner of the frame. Usually the worse the quality of the lens, the more fantastic the lens flares tend to be, so the second part also checks out.

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MichaelB
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Re: 111 / BD 4 Electra, My Love

#48 Post by MichaelB » Sat Apr 09, 2022 8:36 am

You'd think from the insanely elaborate choreography and long takes that Jancsó pre-planned his shots to within an inch of their lives, but in fact they were all devised on the day specifically to take advantage of this kind of serendipity.

The reason why his films are invariably post-synched is because this method demanded that he talk pretty much all the way through the shoot, like an old-fashioned silent-movie director, in order to make sure that everyone ended up where they were supposed to be at the right time. People who witnessed him in action said that it was an extraordinary spectacle because he was effectively creating the film before their very eyes.

To quote one of them (the writer Gyula Maár) directly:
It all starts with Jancsó not knowing. He doesn't know the angle for the take. This, according to the norms of conventional film-making, is an unpardonable sin; the principal way in which one recognizes a dilettante. Not long ago one would have sacked a director who, on the spot, in the cross-fire of actors and staff, in the midst of urgent expectation evidently "doesn't know." What's more even today when improvisation has already received an internationa licence, this dilly-dallying can only be accepted from a director who has a serious cover for it. Who soon afterwards "does know."

Why doesn't he look at the script? He doesn't look at it, he hasn't the slightest intention of doing so; it's not from that direction that he expects the solution. His imagination is got going by the field, he stops, he thinks, he walks on – then the result makes it evident that at such times space is set into motion in front of him. It comes alive, it inspires the building up of the moment. That's what happens then, as seen by an outsider. The choreography of the scene comes into being suddenly with extraordinary speed – so fast that one is inclined to think that the earlier "I don't know" was merely a mannerism. Then one realizes: Jancsó thoroughly knows the vision which he wants to fix within the objective world, and what is at most in he seems unsure about is that he does not know the solution for that moment.

The Soviet actors wait for instructions. What is more, not merely those which they are given and which tell them no more than where to move and at what pace. They expect other sorts of directions: the kind that concern the psychological characterization of the figures that are portrayed by them. But there is no question of this: Jancsó says nothing, what he says is always some kind of physical instruction. He only keeps an eye on the dynamics of the scene, he considers the actors as a part of these dynamics too.
(The reference to Soviet actors establishes this as a report on The Red and the White, but I've seen nothing to suggest that his working methods were any different for any of his Hungarian films from The Round-Up to Electra My Love.)

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