In them he talks about what inspired the respective stories and what he was trying to say with each film, including how violence is consumed through media by an audience. On each of the three discs Criterion includes the film’s respective trailer alongside interviews with director Michael Haneke, all recorded in 2005 for other DVD releases and running around 17, 21 and 23-minutes respectively. The only caveat there is that it appears the material is mostly pre-existing stuff. ![]() If that is a line they’re going down with this title and their new Mai Zetterling set (which would be great if only to get more titles out quickly) they thankfully don’t skimp on the extras as they did with the Eclipse line, spreading features across all three discs. When in hand the set ends up feeling a bit like one of Criterion’s Eclipse DVD releases in that it has a no-frills look and feel when it comes to the packaging, the three discs packaged together in a standard 3-disc Scanavo with simple artwork. In the end all three films would clearly benefit from new scans and restorations but these presentations are still more than solid in the end, much better than I was expecting and very clear upgrades over Kino’s previous DVDs. Black levels are also rather good but the shadows do end up being flattened out a bit, limiting delineation and depth within them. Colors also look to be nicely saturated, though the “colors” are limited mostly to blues and grays, a look Haneke goes over in one of the included interviews. 71 Fragments features a couple of bigger stains that pop up for a frame or two, but outside of that most of the source issues that remain come down to minor bits of dust and whatnot. I feel a lot of this is baked more into the master but it’s possible the encode comes into play as well.Īt the very least the restoration work has cleaned up much of the damage and I can’t say there is much worth pointing out. Banding can also pop up, and while I would say it’s an incredibly minor issue and easy to ignore much of the time, I found it a bit more problematic during the opening of 71 Fragments with the added issue of blocking patterns popping up as well. Even then, tighter details and patterns do lead to other artifacts, such as shimmering effects and minor jaggies on occasion. This, along with the lack of any obvious filtering, leads to a strong level of detail throughout all of the films, finer ones managing to stick out. It doesn’t look entirely natural, featuring a bit of buzzy look a lot of the time, but it’s clearly baked into the supplied master and Criterion’s encode keeps it reined in. ![]() ![]() I’d say the end presentations do feature a decent film-like quality in the end thanks to grain being reasonably managed. It wasn’t a surprise to see Criterion is using older masters for all three films, almost certainly DVD-era ones, but the good news is that the end results still come out looking very good for what the base masters ultimately are, a few hiccups aside. Seventh Continent is sourced from a 35mm interpositive while the other two are sourced from the 35mm original negatives. All three films are presented with 1080p/24hz high-definition encodes. Each film is presented in this set (aptly titled Michael Haneke: Trilogy) on an individual dual-layer disc in the aspect ratio of 1.66:1. The Criterion Collection groups together three of Michael Haneke’s early feature films forming a loose trilogy: The Seventh Continent, Benny’s Video and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance.
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