Powerhouse Films

[MrBarlow]

Originally Posted by Demdike@Cult Labs

Sorry i meant Arrow sales

Think possibly 2020 after lockdown was the last time I bought something from a sale

[Trashforcash]

Got ab email from amazon saying my Michael J Murphy set is delayed- no new release date specified. Does anyone know what's happening with this? Is this set going to turn up? Or do I have to become a youtube physical media influencer to get this?

[Rob4]

Originally Posted by Trashforcash

Got ab email from amazon saying my Michael J Murphy set is delayed- no new release date specified. Does anyone know what's happening with this? Is this set going to turn up? Or do I have to become a youtube physical media influencer to get this?

PH will keep you informed; they are good communicators. As far as I know only one film announced and one film teased by PH have not been ultimately released and they were studio films and the issues were beyond PH's control. As I understand it the MJM set is a PH project so I'm sure it will turn up eventually. Patience should be observed with boutique labels... they are small operations of largely film geeks trying their best to bring you the best possible product.

[Michael Brooke]

Originally Posted by Trashforcash

Got ab email from amazon saying my Michael J Murphy set is delayed- no new release date specified. Does anyone know what's happening with this? Is this set going to turn up? Or do I have to become a youtube physical media influencer to get this?

Don't worry - there was an official announcement about this yesterday, and it's still very much on the way, but the new release dates are now 12 December (UK) and 13 December (US).

This is by some distance the most logistically complicated box set that any of us has ever worked on (and the team includes veterans of Arrow's Borowczyk box and the BFI's Alan Clarke box), the problem being not just the sheer quantity of films (26, mostly feature-length) but also the fact that they sometimes existed in multiple variants, with source materials ranging from 16mm originals to analogue telecines of now-lost film materials (sadly, Death Run and Avalon, amongst others, only exist as SD telecines because a storage fire destroyed the film elements) to... well, some of the fragments of the very early films only survive because in the 1980s Murphy filmed them with a VHS camcorder being projected onto a wall; the VHS tape has since vanished, so all we have is a low-bitrate MP4. But it's either that or nothing.

Restoring them presented all sorts of technical challenges, not least the question of how far to go - for instance, while we certainly cleaned up spots and scratches on the visuals and pops and crackles on the soundtrack as per usual, there were quite a few cases where we had to ask ourselves whether or not we should intervene more directly, or would this cross the line into revisionism?

For instance, Invitation to Hell exists in two director-approved versions - the shot-on-film original that formed the basis of the early 1980s VHS release, and a 2008 DVD where Murphy decided to add glowing red "demon eyes" effects from time to time. We only had the compressed DVD as a source for these shots (the original mastering materials are long gone), and so they looked absolutely terrible when blown up to HD (and distractingly so, given that these are psychologically important moments) - so we hired a VFX person to replicate the effects on the HD master.

Which created another dilemma: Murphy's effects were crude in the extreme (presumably an unavoidable by-product of the software that he had access to fifteen years ago), so should we improve on them, and, if so, by how much? (The answer was "slightly" - for instance, while Murphy just plonked two blobs of pure red in front of an actor's eyes, the blobs being smaller than the still-visible iris, our version colours the entire iris red and retains the highlight reflected in the eyeball so that it looks more three-dimensional.) But, in the interests of purism, the viewer will have the choice of watching the film with or without the red eyes.

And in some cases we had no choice - as supplied, his early feature Secrets contained ten minutes' worth of blank patches on the soundtrack, which would be intolerably tedious for the viewer, so I had to pad them out with music taken from elsewhere in the film. (Fortunately, there didn't seem to be any important dialogue, and on the evidence of how he treated similar dialogue-free sections I suspect I did what Murphy always intended to do, but just never got round to doing before his untimely death.)

Anyway, even though the discs are now at the QC stage, technical issues are still coming up (the involvement of two fresh pairs of eyes always made this likely), to the point where it became clear that hitting even the revised release date wasn't realistically going to happen, at least without cutting corners that we very much didn't want to cut, given how much effort has gone into the project thus far.

And indeed expense - we anticipated that some people would react negatively to the box's announcement (there's a certain type of film snob who'd prefer not to even acknowledge the existence of films like this), but a couple of people played a rather unpleasantly cynical card that went "well, Powerhouse has clearly decided to sell out completely - this box must have cost all of 50p to put together".

Literally nothing could be further from the truth - the budget of this project is properly eye-watering, not just in terms of the unprecedented volume of original 2K scanning, cleanup and grading of umpteen films but also SDH subtitling (mostly by ear; substantially more expensive than working from an existing script or transcript) and of course legally unavoidable BBFC fees for, as the box promises, 34 hours of material. And indeed staffing costs, given that none of us is doing this for charity, we're putting in hours far in excess of what was needed for any previous Indicator box set, and we have bills to pay and families to feed. So we have every interest in getting it released as soon as possible!

Anyway, TL;DR - it's still on the way, we're all very proud of it, and we can't wait until it's out in the wild. (I'm horizontally relaxed about its reception now!)

[Trashforcash]

Thanks! It looks like the release of the year to me. Can't wait!

[The Reaper Man@Cult Labs]

Excellent!

Even nearer Christmas.Cracking pressie.

[J Harker]

Email this morning from Deborah at Powerhouse, apologising my sale order placed on the 15th still hasn't been dispatched due to problems in the warehouse.

Sent from my SM-G780G using Tapatalk

[Mojo]

Got the newsletter this morning.
No mention of Jean Rollin as yet

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Originally Posted by Mojo

Got the newsletter this morning.
No mention of Jean Rollin as yet

Nothing stood out to me as a purchase other than that Richard Widmark western

[Susan Foreman]

'Irreversible' (2002) - Blu-ray pre-order available from Powerhouse direct - £12.99

Release date: January 16

"Perhaps the quintessential exemplar of New French Extremity, Irreversible amazed and outraged audiences across the world upon its release in 2002 with its harrowing scenes of rape and violence. Now Gaspar Noé’s nauseating, thrilling, ingenious masterwork returns in a new 2K restoration, both in its Original Theatrical Cut and a potent new Straight Cut, assembled in 2020"

INDICATOR STANDARD EDITION 2 x BLU-RAY SPECIAL FEATURES

• 2K restorations supervised by writer-director Gaspar Noé
• Two versions of the film: the 2002 Original Theatrical Cut (98 mins); and the 2020 Straight Cut, which re-assembles the events in chronological order (90 mins)
• Original 5.1 surround sound and 2.0 stereo audio tracks
• Audio commentary by Gaspar Noé on the Original Theatrical Cut (2003)
• The Irreversible Odyssey (2019, 44 mins): retrospective documentary featuring interviews with Noé, actors Monica Bellucci, Vincent Cassel and Albert Dupontel, cinematographer Benoît Debie, and others
• NFT50 Q&A (2002, 49 mins): archival audio recording of a post-screening Q&A session with Noé, Bellucci and Cassel, recorded at London’s National Film Theatre
• The BFI Masterclass with Gaspar Noé (2009, 90 mins): archival audio recording of the filmmaker in conversation with programmer and critic David Cox, recorded at BFI Southbank during the London Film Festival
• SFX (2003, 8 mins): visual effects supervisor Rodolphe Chabrier discusses his team’s work on the film
• Time Destroys All Things (2021, 15 mins): video essay examining the two versions of Irreversible by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, author of Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study
• Deleted scene (1 min)
• ‘Stress’ (2002, 5 mins) and ‘Outrage’ (2002, 5 mins): Thomas Bangalter music videos, directed by Noé
• Intoxication (2002, 5 mins): documentary short by Noé featuring filmmaker Stéphane Drouot
• Original theatrical trailers
• 2019 Venice Film Festival trailer
• Teaser trailers
• Image gallery: publicity and promotional material
• New and improved English subtitles