Possession (1981)

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It is just worth pointing these things out, because people seemed convinced LCQF just did whatever and it was wrong and the Mondo Vision warm color timing was right. But as you can see from this, quite a massive amount of research from all different sources went into the color timing of the LCQF to make it as close to what appears to have been intended by the director as possible. People actually might not like it despite it being more on-target, but that isn't too uncommon when you watch a film with the same look for 20 years and then this new version comes along that looks a lot different; that doesn't make the new version wrong or worse though, and technically it might just be more accurate than the one you thought was accurate all along. Audio Commentary - co-producer Frederic Tuten recalls his work with director Andrzej Zulawski on Possession and offers his interpretation of the film's complex message. (The Polish director views Possession as an autobiographical film, but Mr. Tuten's take on it is rather different). There is plenty of interesting information about the trips that were made to West Berlin, where the film was shot, Isabelle Adjani's performance and her image in Europe after the film was screened at the Cannes Film Festival, etc. Mr. Tuten also shares some very interesting information about a project with Nastassja Kinski that never materialized, etc. Also contributing to this commentary is biographer Dan Bird. In English, not subtitled. A commentary-free look at how much or how little the Berlin locations used in the film have changed in the 31 years since the film was made. This film can confuse those who have never experienced life on the other side of the Iron Curtain. This is where Andrzej Zulawski, who directed it, came from. He started his career in Communist Poland where his early films were censored and banned by the red apparatchiks because they did not like their subversive tone. In the early '70s, the frustrated Zulawski moved to France where he has been living ever since. Possession is the Polish director's fourth feature film and without a shadow of a doubt his most disturbing one. some extremely clever disc author has offered in Hebrew until you select each individual entry, at which point they

The color grading people seem to like are the releases that used the old 2K master. The releases that used the new 2020 4K master (LCQF 4K UHD, Umbrella 1080p Blu-ray) people have not liked as much. But Umbrella insists their upcoming 4K release is sourced from the only director-approved 4K transfer that exists (which may or may not be the exact same LCQF used). Other releases may tweak that master, and people may even like those tweaks better - but since the director has passed its hard to argue that any tweaks to the sole 4K director approved restoration wouldnt be more revisionist than the aforementioned director approved 4K transfer untouched. setting. If The Exorcist tried to frame everything within the arcane liturgy of the Catholic Church, The I know there's been controversy with this film in the past. Weren't there two distinctly different HD grades supervised and/or approved by the director or am I misremembering? What sells this even at its most fraught is a pair of boldly brilliant performances from Sam Neill and Isabelle Adjani. Perched on a fragile ledge on the brink of madness, they wrestle with their confusion and inner pain and bellow into the abyss without ever breaking the delicate tether that binds them to reality. Such acting requires a rare blend of fearlessness, raw talent and faith in the director, a willingness on the part of both to push themselves further than logic would normally dictate in a manner that electrifies every encounter between them and transforms their solo scenes into often memorable set-pieces. The most justifiably famous of these is Adjani's explosive subway breakdown, where distress mutates into wild and ultimately orgasmic hysteria and a climactic expulsion of something whose true form and intent we can at this point only guess at. Adjani is genuinely astonishing here, hurling herself headlong through the emotional meat grinder in a performance that bagged her the Best Actress César, but apparently took her some years to fully recover from. I would think that David M. is probably the ultimate authority on how it should look, since according his post linked above, he actually sat down with Zulawski in Poland to finish off the grading of the previous transfer.More From Mondo Vision - a collection of trailers for Mondo Vision's DVD releases of Andrzej Zulawski's La femme publique, L'important c'est d'aimer, L'amour braque, and Szamanka. In French and Polish, with imposed English subtitles where necessary. (11 min). shots where something suddenly juts out from the side of the frame unexpectedly. But like the Hebrew on the disc's her money that Bernie Madoff made off with), as well as their two emotionally roiled daughters who are not responding kind of silly, there are some genuine scares scattered throughout the film, usually dependent on good old devices like Our recent post about the colour-correction of POSSESSION has prompted a lot of interesting discussion here and elsewhere. Our post facility have been working with director Andrzej Zulawski on a shot-by-shot basis, so here's some more detail;

Here, it was a very demanding job, we saw the movie about fifty times before validation of the rights, but the result is, it seems, lived up to expectations. Many thanks to Sébastien and Mathieu for their work. been opened! It's just patently ridiculous, an insult to both folklore and religion in one fell swoop. folktales that caught my eye was one that none other than Leonard Bernstein adapted into a ballet in the mid-thinks Dad is abusing little Em, but you just know in your heart of hearts that after a few long, doleful looks, she'll As a portrait of a relationship collapsing into madness the film would be strong enough meat, but underscoring the drama are a number of potent metaphoric strands whose purpose and interrelationship require at least two viewings to untangle and fully appreciate. Chief amongst these is a fascination with duality, appropriate in an ideologically and physically divided city (this choice of location was a deliberate political statement on the exiled Zulawski's part), which is most literally realised in the figure of warm and kind-hearted schoolteacher Helen, who bonds with the couple's young son Bob and is an idealised dead ringer for Anna and at one point looks set to replace her in the family unit. It's uncertain whether this visual similarity to Anna is actually the product of Mark's own loneliness and wish fulfilment or a genuine doppelgänger whose male equivalent is slowly taking shape in Anna's bedraggled apartment, a creature born of Anna's unhappiness and neurosis (given disturbingly gooey shape by master creature creator Carlo Rambaldi). It's a concept that was successfully road-tested by David Cronenberg two years earlier in The Brood – no surprises, then, that the broken relationships in both films were autobiographical in origin and the product of the directors' hostility towards their respective ex-partners. So it seems as if like LCQF essentially did what Second Sight is going to do, which can still be as accurate as anything the director would have or could approve. Yes.