1051 The Elephant Man

[swo17]

The Elephant Man



With this poignant second feature, David Lynch brought his atmospheric visual and sonic palette to a notorious true story set in Victorian England. When the London surgeon Frederick Treves (Anthony Hopkins) meets the freak-show performer John Merrick (John Hurt), who has severe skeletal and soft tissue deformities, he assumes that he must be intellectually disabled as well. As the two men spend more time together, though, Merrick reveals the intelligence, gentle nature, and profound sense of dignity that lie beneath his shocking appearance, and he and Treves develop a friendship. Shot in gorgeous black and white and boasting a stellar supporting cast that includes Anne Bancroft, John Gielgud, and Wendy Hiller, The Elephant Man was nominated for eight Academy Awards, cementing Lynch's reputation as one of American cinema's most visionary talents.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed stereo soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Director David Lynch and critic Kristine McKenna reading from Room to Dream, a 2018 book they coauthored
• Archival interviews with Lynch, actor John Hurt, producers Mel Brooks and Jonathan Sanger, director of photography Freddie Francis, stills photographer Frank Connor, and makeup artist Christopher Tucker
• Audio recording from 1981 of an interview and Q&A with Lynch at the American Film Institute
• The Terrible Elephant Man Revealed, a 2001 documentary about the film
• Trailer and radio spots
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• More!
• PLUS: A booklet featuring excerpts from an interview with Lynch from the 2005 edition of filmmaker and writer Chris Rodley's book Lynch on Lynch, and an 1886 letter to the editor of the London Times concerning Joseph Merrick, the "elephant man," by Francis Culling Carr Gomm, chairman of the London Hospital at the time

[movielocke]

A little bit surprised they didn't include editor Anne Coates' reminiscences on working on Elephant Man she did at an Academy event back in 2009, on the other hand, they weren't super flattering of Lynch, so he'd probably nix them off the release if they did include them.

[FrauBlucher]

Get a hold of the clip on the page. Oh my! It's stunning.

[bluesforyou]

Looks like they are going to keep putting out BDs for films that already have 4K releases.

[dwk]

Paramount doesn't license UHD rights, so even if Criterion were releasing UHD, they couldn't release this one. So you'd expect them to ignore 90% of the market, for what?

[EddieLarkin]

Licensing issues aside, the Criterion UHD situation is becoming increasingly odd considering the company's mission statement:

Since 1984, the Criterion Collection has been dedicated to publishing important classic and contemporary films from around the world in editions that offer the highest technical quality and award-winning, original supplements. No matter the medium—from laserdisc to DVD and Blu-ray to streaming—Criterion has maintained its pioneering commitment to presenting each film as its maker would want it seen, in state-of-the-art restorations with special features designed to encourage repeated watching and deepen the viewer’s appreciation of the art of film.

In this particular example we have a newly remastered film, scanned and finished in 4K, and more importantly graded in HDR under the supervision of the director himself. This natively 4K HDR graded remaster is available in several European editions, all of course with no region coding (and encoded by David M. no less).

I appreciate Criterion are going to care little about the tiny amount of sales they might lose to these alternative releases, but it seems to me they are perhaps losing something more important.

For those who feel BD is good enough anyway (Lee Kline, I'm looking at you), and especially if one feels HDR surely offers little benefit to a B&W film, I strongly recommend reading GeoffD's in depth and technical review:

https://forum.blu-ray.com/showpost.php? ... tcount=369

[TMDaines]

It’ll still sell to the wacky C festishists.

[swo17]

Is the StudioCanal 4K release a limited edition like their Carpenters were?

[Ribs]

The Carpenters were released again in standard editions, though - as I assume the Elephant Man with its somewhat gaudy packaging will probably will as well.

[EddieLarkin]

Yes all of these StudioCanal LEs have so far received standard editions 6 months later.

[RitrovataBlue]

The StudioCanal UHD of The Elephant Man is a definitive release. If CC wanted its release to even be in the same conversation as that one, it would be a UHD. At least their redundant FWwM served as that film’s only solo release. This is just for Criterion completionists, ultimately.

[yoloswegmaster]

This is just for Criterion completionists, ultimately.

Or you know, for people who haven't gone region-free (so most people) or for people who haven't gone 4K yet (so again, most people).

[Ribs]

4K releases are all region free, actually.

[yoloswegmaster]

4K releases are all region free, actually.

But are most people going to spend a lot of money importing it?

[Ribs]

That’s not what you said. Yes, we know that most people are going to buy this release despite inarguably better options being available. We’re disappointed Criterion is no longer interested in even making an attempt at the definitive version - in my mind, if they are not creating the best AV presentation in the world or more or less equaling it, they shouldn’t expend their limited resources on it when there are so many other things that is actually possible for. The fact this was coming out in 4K was readily apparent for a long time, and Criterion has appeared to make no effort to account for their producing an inferior version. This coupled with continued “cheapest option possible” releases that should very easily be on two or more discs compromising the only BD release we are getting of some of these movies worldwide (an issue NONE of the other labels seem to have, as well) really calls to question what’s expressed in the mission statement above.

Also importing fees have never been a serious stumbling block in my experience, at least before the COVID times when everything’s jumped a bit. More the mental thought of importing is what stops people then the actual process which is really no more difficult then buying anything else online.

[yoloswegmaster]

Also importing fees have never been a serious stumbling block in my experience, at least before the COVID times when everything’s jumped a bit. More the mental thought of importing is what stops people then the actual process which is really no more difficult then buying anything else online.

It might not be serious for you but for me it is. The 4K UHD for Elephant Man costs around $90 CAD on Amazon UK (for reference, the John Ford set from Indicator cost about the same). Even though I've gone region-free, I am not willing to spend $90 on 1 title and I assume it's the same for a lot of other people. So no, it's not really the mental thought that stops people from importing, but rather the costs that are associated with it.

[Ribs]

The cost isn't really the question - I, personally, really struggle to rationalize buying or watching a release that is very plainly not of a tier with the best available (if that makes sense?) So I just can have absolutely no interest in this release even if I have no immediate plans for the StudioCanal either - whereas I'd definitely prefer a Criterion release in principle due to not having to deal with importing, confidence in extras, etc. If you want to just ignore that things that are more expensive don't exist that's fine but the cost will go down (partially due to it being replaced by a standard edition for £20 less, partly due to COVID hiking the shipping rates) and this release will still exist, inferior to the release that preceded it by months. Criterion is not putting the best presentation of a movie (a goal they should strive towards!) as something they're pursuing, and that's why people like me are peeved.

[RitrovataBlue]

I got my Elephant Man UHD steelbook from Zavvi for around $40 USD. It doesn’t come with the booklet, but it also doesn’t take up exorbitant shelf space. The standard edition will likely retail around $30 USD with shipping included - less than ordering this edition direct from CC.

[tenia]

As I wrote multiple times here and there, some have been gripping at Criterion for not splitting content over (most often) 2 discs but it's not the issue. Actually, it'd most certainly be a bigger better change for their encodes to change their encoding house than to split material (except the odd extreme examples like Tokyo Olympiad).

For instance, it wouldn't have changed much for The Great Escape : they gave more space to the movie than the MGM disc by adequately compressing the extras and yet managed to yield a blockier encode. They also have discs at 30 Mbps showing blockiness too.

As for Elephant Man, the movie encoded around 30 Mbps would weigh 29 Gb, leaving enough space for the extras (that would need to be adequately compressed, but almost all of them are SD anyway). The SC disc encoded by David has a 30 Mbps AVB (but has 2 dubs Criterion won't have), but by the look of it, the Criterion encode will probably hover around this but still show the usual Pixelogic LEGO-grain. This is plenty enough, but they just don't know how to handle properly new 4k sources, while others like David or French authoring houses like Hiventy's, Eclair's or VDM's can get a better result even at 25 Mbps.


This however doesn't change that I agree this delay in at least testing the waters with UHD seemingly clashes with their mission statement, though I admit I'm very understanding with labels, small or big, being extremely cautious with this format considering the sales figures attached to it.

[MichaelB]

Criterion has historically been very, very cautious. They took ages even to offer anamorphic enhancement on DVDs, and didn't get into Blu-ray until it was certain that the format war had been won. And UHD is currently a very, very expensive proposition for a single-territory label in terms of manufacturing costs, which is why so few indie labels have taken the plunge - hell, even Arrow hesitated until this summer.

[TMDaines]

Criterion has historically been very, very cautious. They took ages even to offer anamorphic enhancement on DVDs, and didn't get into Blu-ray until it was certain that the format war had been won. And UHD is currently a very, very expensive proposition for a single-territory label in terms of manufacturing costs, which is why so few indie labels have taken the plunge - hell, even Arrow hesitated until this summer.

I remember there was a consensus on the forum telling us to shut up and stop moaning, when Criterion dropped the ball on finally releasing Rosselini's War Trilogy in the best quality available, but only with some of the thickest picture-boxing you could ever imagine on a NTSC disc. In the HD era, they were literally publishing discs that were designed for poor quality equipment, rather than those who were correctly displaying the full image.

[MichaelB]

This isn't Criterion, but the thickest pictureboxing I've ever seen was on the National Film Board of Canada's otherwise astonishing Norman McLaren box. I understand why they did it, because with McLaren you really do want to be certain that the entire frame is visible and the transfers were created in the CRT era, but I really hope that gets a proper HD upgrade at some point with no overscan - I'd gladly buy it again.

[The Pachyderminator]

The brutal fact is, the vast majority of blu-ray consumers are still making do with region-locked HD players. This release has a sizeable audience, including not just completists, but most of the North American market that wants a disc they can actually watch. Precisely because I'm not a Criterion completist demanding that every release be aimed squarely at me, I'm perfectly fine with this.

As for the film itself, though, it doesn't quite work for me. The filmmaking, as beautiful as it is, comes off as sensationalistic in context, such that it ultimately seems disrespectful to Merrick. The elephant rape sequence alone is a disaster that makes it hard to trust the film going forward.

[MichaelB]

The elephant rape sequence alone is a disaster that makes it hard to trust the film going forward.

That interpretation of Lynch's impressionistic treatment of the legend of the Elephant Man's origins (later verbalised within the first fifteen minutes as "this creature's poor mother, struck down in the fourth month of her maternal condition by an elephant, a wild elephant") is a disaster that makes it hard to trust your judgement going forward.

Seriously, did you not stop for a moment to think "hang on a minute, is this actually a bestial rape sequence that I'm watching, or am I letting my over-fevered imagination run away with me?"

I haven't had sight of the screenplay, but producer Jonathan Sanger describes the first of Lynch's own personal additions as:

...an opening that might have come from Merrick’s dreams. It is the image of his beautiful mother, first in a small still picture and then in a frightened scream as she is physically knocked down by a charging elephant. We see and hear elephants in close-up bellowing in anger as one swings his enormous head and ears back and forth. The next cut is an image of smoke being pulled into its source, looking like the cauliflower folds of skin on the adult man’s back, as we hear the crying of a newborn child. This signifies the horrifying birth of the man as he might have dreamed it and as the patter of Bytes, the man who exploits him, expresses it.

[tenia]

I thought my cousin thinking the segments in Sin City were all with the same character reincarnating in various forms couldn't be beaten, but that comes extremely close.