Tarkovsky's Mirror

This summer is a hot one for exciting new releases.  It had been a bit of a dry season this year, but my last couple of posts have been new releases, and believe me, they're gonna keep on rolling for the next month and beyond.  For today we've got Criterion's brand new and long awaited release of Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror from 1975, my personal favorite, and probably his objectively best film (though I'd hear arguments for Andrei Rublev).  2021 is finally taking off!

Update 8/24/24: Update Week 2024 winds to a close, but not before we squeeze in one more vintage DVD edition.  Today we're including the original US DVD of Mirror from Kino Lorber to our comparisons.  I had already discussed their alternate color timing in relation to the Ruscico and Criterion releases, so it's good to finally have shots of it on the page.

It's certainly his most simple and focused story, without the artier abstractions of Sacrifice or the mystifying sci-fi of his most famous films, but deeper than his Ivan's Childhood or his early works.  Well, I guess on paper it could be seen as a lot to work through. You've got the film traversing through two distinct timelines at once: the protagonist's adult age with his ex-wife, and his childhood age with his mother, who's (mostly) played by the same actress.  And you've got dream sequences, black and white scenes and documentary footage providing historical backdrop.  So if you watch movies by scrolling through socmed on your phone and sporadically glancing up at the screen, yes, it's very easy to get completely lost.  But if you're paying proper attention from beginning to end, the film actually keeps you clued in the whole way, even to the point of following the film's first dream sequence with a character explaining on screen that he'd just had this dream.  This is no Inland Empire; you shouldn't be guessing at interpretations or opaque meaning.  It's a very straight-forward emotional journey.

And a damn enriching one.  All of Tarkovsky's films are great, but none are quite so flawless.  Like, Nostalghia is a beautiful movie, but it feels a little "back to the well" with its imagery, Some of its overt artistic statements feel pretentious (and that's an allegation I'll almost never lodge at a piece of art), and Domiziana Giordano's character feels like a clumsy chauvinist attempt to write a female character.  Mirror on the other hand, is written with real empathy and maturity.  If you had to boil his whole body of work to one piece, this is the quintessential masterpiece.

Mirror has been available on a fairly maligned, barebones DVD from Kino Lorber since 2000.  I was quick to replace it with the highly touted Ruscico international special edition that came out in 2013.  Then in 2016, Artificial Eye released it on blu, and I've been tempted to upgrade again, but rumors floated for years about Criterion putting out a better edition.  I almost broke down before it was finally officially announced, this summer they were putting out a 2-BD set with a new 2k restoration from the 35mm original camera negative. 

1) 2000 Kino DVD; 2) 2013 Ruscico DVD; 3) 2021 Criterion BD.

Mirror was always an Academy Ratio film, so Kino's 1.32:1 and Ruscico's 1.34 weren't too far off the mark.  Criterion tweaks it to 1.37:1, though, and each new scan actually pulls out to reveal extra a little extra information along all the edges.  The main drawback of the DVDs is that they're both interlaced, and of course that's been cleared away in this film's journey to HD.  Criterion's image is sharper and clearer, better retaining its filmic origins.  But honestly, the old Ruscico disc didn't look too bad, with similar brightness levels and color timing.  Kino's color timing, on the other hand, is decidedly different, as you can see.  Now, I have read a few criticisms of the highlights on Criterion's disc, occasionally being blown out.  The first set of shots has bluer skies on the old Kino transfer.  But the clouds aren't totally flared out to pure white here; you can still just barely make them out still (try lowering the gamma if you don't see them as is).  Even if they have gotten it wrong, it's the kind of thing to turn an A rating to an A-; but honestly, I'm not sure this isn't just how it should look.  It's certainly striking and compelling as they have it here, and again, pretty aligned with how Ruscico had it a decade earlier.

Another thing about Ruscico's DVDs: they're always great with language options.  They have the original Russian mono track, and in a fit of over-ambition, a 5.1 mix, but with optional English, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Russian, Japanese, Swedish, German, Portuguese, Hebrew, Chinese and Arabic subtitles.  And the same subs apply to all of their special features.  Kino unfortunately opted to burn in their subtitles, though their Dolby mono track is pretty similar to Ruscico's... maybe a little muddier.  Criterion drops all the foreign stuff, but keeps the removable English subs and bumps the mono track up to a more robust LPCM.

So Kino's DVD is completely barebones, not even the trailer, but Ruscico's DVD was a pretty full special edition, although it feels a little desultory in what it includes.  The star inclusion is a lengthy on-camera interview with Tarkovsky's co-writer, who's got a lot of great memories and anecdotes about their work together.  After that, there's a ten-minute interview with Grigory Yavlinsky about Tarkovsky, but you'll probably spend most of it being distracted trying to figure out who this guy is (apparently a Russian economist?) and why he's being interviewed here.  Then there's vintage stuff from Russian television, like a 3 minute featurette on Nikolay Grinko.  He's an actor who has a bit part in Mirror, but this TV piece never mentions it, just some of his other work.  There are slightly longer but otherwise  very similar ones for bit players Anatoliy Solonitsyn and Innokenty Smoktunovsky, and again their TV pieces focus only on other, unrelated works.  More on topic is an 20-minute interview with composer Eduard Artemyev, but even here he's talking more about other Tarkovsky films, and it doesn't seem like this was conducted with Mirror in mind.  Finally, there's a ten minute tribute to Tarkovsky, which sets interlaced, non-anamorphic clips from his films to music, and the trailer for Solaris. 

Andrei Tarkovsky: A Cinema Prayer

Most of that stuff's not uninteresting, but hardly fitting, so I wasn't surprised to see Criterion chuck it.  Thankfully, they did hang onto the screenwriter interview, and they've conducted their own, new talk with the conductor that does focus on Mirror.  But oh, there's so much more.  There's a feature length 2019 documentary about Tarkovsky made by his son, which happily focuses on his work rather than drab biographical details (as in all that trite "he grew up in a shack with a handmade camera and a dream" stuff), making for a very engrossing overview of his career.  Then there's another excellent, hour-long documentary on Mirror itself, which divides itself between interviews with surviving cast and crew members and critical experts.  It's really smart and well made, with some particularly keen insights from Tarkovsky's sister.  Then there's a third documentary, this time on the film's DP, Georgy Rergerb, which is another surprising delight, thanks in part to what a character Rerberg apparently was.  There are also two brief, vintage interviews with Tarkovsky and a whopping 98-page booklet that reproduces the original screenplay and 1968 film pitch, along with a new essay by Carmen Gray.

So this is a pretty definitive release in my book, and the documentaries rise above the level of special features to works worthy of our collections in their own rights.  In other words, even if you're perfectly satisfied with your previous edition of Mirror and don't feel inclined to replace it, you should still get this just for the other docs.  But this is also a fantastic edition of Mirror, looking and sounding great; a real must-have from Criterion this summer.  You might want to hang onto your DVD, just for the odds and ends; but if you don't already have it, I wouldn't seek it out.  This is all you need.

Viy: Spirit of Evil

Privet, comrades!  Let's stick with 1960s Russian cinema based on classic literature.  Today we've got a great little horror treat called Viy, or Spirit of Evil, based on an 1835 novella by Nikolai Gogol.  They've been having a lot of success with at least two series of Viy films over there in recent years (Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jackie Chan were in the last one), but this is the original film adaptation from 1967.  Fans have been demanding this film on blu for a long time, but word was the film elements were no longer available to bring this film to HD.  But then, in 2016, it came out on BD in Japan.  Was it just an upconvert or what?  Well, it wasn't English friendly anyway, so it really didn't matter.  But maybe it actually was a legit HD version, because Severin have just released an English-friendly blu here in America.  And they're always reliable, right?

The story's about a young seminary student traveling through the country who stays one night in an old woman's barn.  She turns out to be a witch who rides(!) him through the skies before he can finally beat her nearly to death and flee.  He feels free and clear when he returns to school, until the witch's family writes to his headmaster and personally requests the student return to read her last rites in a ceremony that lasts for three nights in an old, wooden church, just him and the body.  And as you might imagine, this dead witch isn't content to just lie still for her murderer.  She might even call out to Viy, the most ancient evil spirit in all the world.

Viy's a lot of fun: fast paced with creative visual effects, funny characters, great dark atmosphere and entertaining camerawork.  Mario Bava took a lot of influence from this film and other works of Gogol, and along with Equinox feels like a dead-on precursor to Sam Raimi's Evil Dead films.  The frantic camera, spinning and diving, even taking on the role of a great evil spirit's POV racing towards the protagonist - a protagonist who's a bit of a dunce, not unlike our beloved Ash.  The cynical conclusion and in particular, the abandoned windmill scene in Army of Darkness and the woodshed fight with the old hag in Drag Me To Hell particularly feel like they share spirits with Viy.

Ruscico released this on DVD in the US back in 2001, distributed by Image, in a nice little special edition.  Pretty much the same disc seems to have been later distributed through most other regions around the world, albeit with different distributors and cover art.  So that's been the default go-to version of this film pretty much forever, until that eventual Japanese blu.  Like I said, it had no English language options, so it wasn't much use to any of us who couldn't understand Russian or Japanese, but it definitely put the bug in our collective ear of a possible HD release in the future.  And Severin have finally delivered on that, releasing a limited edition blu this July, which I believe has already sold out, with a general, standard release due later in the year.

1) 2001 Ruscico/ Image DVD; 2) 2019 Severin BD.

Happily, this is clearly not just an upconvert of the old DVD!  I was a little worried, because their announcement, webpage and even the back of the case evade the question of transfer's origins.  Is it 2k, 4k, from the original negatives, a print or what?  Questions like "is this a newly sourced transfer" have been left frustratingly unanswered on their facebook page.  All we're told is that it's 1080p full HD, and that this blu is "Remastered In HD For The First Time Ever" (so maybe the Japanese blu was an upconvert?).  Oh well, whatever this is, it looks heaps better than what we've had before.  The framing is slightly shifted from 1.31:1 to 1.37:1 and the colors are far richer.  The DVD also had a very serious interlacing problem, which of course is cleared up, and that makes a world of difference.  The level of detail isn't hugely different, but we can make out subtleties that the DVD's SD compression smoothed away.  Grain is light but discernible, its free of any harmful tinkering (i.e. artificial sharpening, edge enhancement or any of that) and both versions have light print damage, but it's all in different places, so this must've been taken from a different source.  It's a bit soft, but that could be down to the original film.  At any rate, this is a far more attractive presentation of this film than we've ever had before, and presumably ever will in future.

Ruscico are terrific when it comes to language options.  They gave us the original Russian - albeit remixed to 5.1 - plus English and French dubs, also in 5.1.  And they provide English, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Japanese, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish subtitles.  Severin dials all that down, but doesn't lose the key elements: the original Russian and the English dub, now in lossless DTS-HD, plus English and English HoH subs.

Ruscico are also pretty good in the supplements department, giving Viy a nice little archival package of historical extras.  They include a vintage biographical documentary (from roughly 1940) on Gogol, which gives some great background to this film.  They include three classic, silent Russian horror films: Satan Exultant (1917), The Portrait (1916) and Queen of Spades (1916).  The Portrait is particularly relevant, as it's also based on a Gogol story.  And they have not just the trailer for Viy, but for six other classic horror and fantasy Russian films.  Plus an insert.  It all makes for a very informative context.

Now, when my Severin disc arrived, I was happy to see it included even more bonus features than were listed on Severin's pre-order page.  First, let's look at what they did tell us about.  They have new interviews with Richard Stanley (who's quite eccentric but equally informed) about the  of Gogol's legendary spirit, and John Leman Riley, who attempts to cover the entire history of Soviet sci-fi and fantasy film.  He knows his stuff, but it was overly ambitious to try to cover that large a topic in a single chat.  They also have the trailer, and the limited edition comes in a very cool slipcover.  That's what we knew about.

But it was a pleasant surprise to see that all three silent films from the old Ruscico DVD have been carried over as well!  The DVD played some silly, artificial projector noise over all three films, which Severin smartly forgoes.  Otherwise, they seem to use the same transfers, but they've gained some ground by giving it some de-interlacing, which softens the thing up and still leaves some ghosting, but definitely looks better.  Here's a quick comparison for all three (you can still click each shot to see 'em full sized), with DVD left and BD right:
It's no surprise Severin's limited edition sold out so quickly, this is a very cool release of a great film that had been crying out for a good blu.  I was worried going in, but while this might not be the fresh 4k scan of the original camera negatives one might've hoped for, this is still a quality HD presentation, with some nice extras to boot.  Owners of the original DVD might want to hang onto it for that Gogol doc, but if you missed it, you should still be quite happy with what you get here.

The Grand Epic, War and Peace

This is an upgrade I've been aching for since long before it was announced: Criterion's new blu of Sergei Bondarchuk's truly epic War and Peace (1966).  This is possibly the biggest film production ever, and also a movie that's long struggled to get a proper, HQ release - and we'll delve into why - so it was somewhat predetermined that this BD was going to be a bit of a compromise.  But having the two previous home video iterations - which we'll look at, too - it was also painfully obvious how badly in need it was of any kind of upgrade it could get.  And I have to say, now that I've got it, while it might be disappointing to imagine what an ideal 4k restoration of the original 75mm original camera negatives might've been, this is still quite a satisfying leap forward from anything we've had before.

Usually when people talk about how big a film's production is, they start defining it by budget.  Titanic spent X amount, Avengers spent Y.  Of course inflation makes that a lot more complicated.  But it's uniquely impossible to quantify in this case, because the entire Soviet government was behind this film.  War and Peace was years in the making, and I doubt you'll ever see larger armies in any battle scene ever.  At least in terms of real human participants as opposed to CGI cartoonery.  But we'll never know the costs, because the film was given all of this for free.  All of the country's museums were compelled to give up anything in their production, from paintings on the wall to vintage military equipment.  In the scene where Napoleon flees the country on his sled (spoilers for anyone who skipped out on history class), that's the actual sled the real Napoleon fled away in.  The army spent months and months playing the role of soldiers, providing tens of thousands of extras, real general organizing the military units, and even more military serving as the crew, building towers and flying helicopters for the filmmakers.  For free.  So I don't know how it could possibly be pinned down definitively, but I daresay this might not only be the greatest epic spectacle ever filmed, but the grandest that ever will be filmed.

And that's definitely reason enough to watch this film.  That scene in Aquaman was cute, but it's another viewing experience entirely when you know you're witnessing something that actually took place in front of the cameras.  But what makes War and Peace so much more impressive, and something greater than just novelty of its scope, is that it's a great little film at its core, with memorable characters and meaningful writing.  Of course, it helps when your source material is Tolstoy's greatest novel.  And the fact that this is film is over seven hours long (it's divided into four parts, so you don't have to buttathon it) allows it to stay faithful to the novel and history in a way that the previous American adaptation with Audrey Hepburn could never even have attempted.  So while yes, the battle scenes, and the thrilling depiction of the burning of Moscow are powerful and impressive, the memories that stick with me the most are the little moments with Natasha and her servants or Bondarchuk's surprisingly relatable performance as Pierre.

So War and Peace debuted on DVD as a 3-disc set from Kultur Video in 2002.  They actually still sell it on their site to this day.  It's fullscreen and completely barebones.  So audiences were more than ready to double-dip for a restored widescreen version from Ruscico, and distributed by Image, the following year.  It was a still troubled, but for its time pretty sweet 5-disc, anamorphic widescreen special edition (there's also a 4-disc version, which is similarly packaged but chucks the bonus 5th disc of extras.  It was packed with interviews and documentaries, but you'll see from the comparison below why we were still excited to finally hear of an updated version, with Criterion finally releasing the film in HD this summer.

1) 2002 Kultur DVD; 2) 2003 Ruscico DVD; 3) 2019 Criterion BD.

The screenshots speak pretty clearly for themselves here, but I'll detail the differences.  Kultur's DVD, of course, is fullscreen at 1.30:1.  It's faded with print damage that's been cleaned up in the later restorations (note the dirt on the general's cheek in the second set of shots.  It's also interlaced, but the softness of the transfer that looks to be taken from a tape master almost covers it up by smoothing away all the fine detail, including the combing.  So then Ruscico comes along and restores the film... Now it's widescreen (at a slightly windowboxed 2.29:1), the dirt's cleaned up, the colors are more authentic.  Honestly, if it wasn't terribly interlaced, it would still hold up fairly well for a DVD.  Criterion fixes that, of course, while also matting things just a little tighter to a more traditional 2.35:1 AR.  The colors are also more vibrant and the standard def compression is also cleaned up, but detail is definitely not what one might've hoped.  This is a new 2k scan of the 35mm elements that Mosfilm restored, but it's a sad case of the original negatives being unavailable.  War and Peace was a rare 70mm film, but they had to use "multiple partial 35mm negatives from various archives," so this should be a really impressive spectacle of fine, filmic detail alongside films like 2001 and Lawrence of Arabia.  But instead it just looks like a respectable, attractive but low budget feature presentation.  Grain is fairly well resolved, though it gets soft at times, but you can see why they didn't even bother scanning this is in 4k.

Kultur gives us a pretty simple, but clean, Russian mono track in Dolby with burnt in English subtitles.  Ruscico gave the track a new 5.1 mix, plus threw in English and French dubs, also in 5.1.  And they provided optional English, Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish subs.  Criterion reigns that in a bit, giving us the Russian and English 5.1 mixes in DTS-HD with optional English subtitles.  Unfortunately, the original mono track has pretty much been ditched.

So Criterion's blu naturally renders the previous DVDs obsolete, except for one.  The fifth bonus disc in the Ruscico set includes a little treasure trove of extras, almost none of which made their way to the new release.  There are some great, in-depth interviews with Vasili Lanovoy, DP Anatoly Petritsky, composer Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov (who gets a little long-winded with his opinions on his whole career and all the filmmakers he's worked with besides just the War and Peace stuff) and the head of Mosfilm, Karen Shakhnazarov, who shares some great information on the history and current state of the film, and the hows and whys of their restoration.   There's a short clip of actress Irina Skobtseva giving a talk (probably before a screening) about working with Bondarchuk and her time on the film.  Then there are several vintage, Russian featurettes (made for television?) about Bondarchuk, Tolstoy and the novel, all of which are actually rather good and fairly informative.  Finally, there's a substantial, also vintage, 'making of' documentary that's full of fascinating behind-the-scenes footage that gives very welcome insight into the fascinating story behind this film.

From the doc: the camera crew has actually caught on fire at this point.

Criterion includes this documentary (in fact, there version might be slightly more complete), but all of that other great "Bonus" content has been lost.  Fortunately, however, there's a whole bunch of new stuff in its place.  There's a second vintage, making of doc; this time a German one, that borrows a lot of footage from the first one, but also has enough new content to make it worthwhile.  There's a new interview with Petritsky, where he's refreshingly candid (seriously, watch this one), and an interview with Bondarchuk's son.  They uncovered a somewhat insightful, but also somewhat silly, 60's television special about Ludmila Savelyeva, and finally one of the excellent, trademark Criterion academic video essays, this time by historian Denise J. Youngblood.  Also included is a poster/ booklet with a notes by Ella Taylor.

So this is an absolute must-own release of a truly essential film.  Yes, it's disappointing that we're not getting the full 70mm experience Bondarchuk's work deserves.  It's easy to conjure up a breathtaking 4k Ultra HD experience in one's mind, and then measure this disc as lacking in comparison.  But, uh, you go to Russia and dredge up the original negatives.  Until then, this is the best we can get, and honestly, it's still a very impressive and rewarding watch.  And if you're a real enthusiast, you might also want to track down a Russico set for that fifth bonus disc.  The two sets of extras really compliment each other and add up to great special edition.