Nostalgia

I would really really love to watch this, but the subtitle lag time is so significant that when people are in dialogue it's very hard to identify who's speaking.Also, Tarkovsky ties his dialogue to his images. When the translation comes 30 seconds later after the image is gone, it kinda ruins everything.If the subtitles get fixed, this jumps to 5 stars... but right now it's unwatchable.

Crazy idea, right? How bizarre to have subtitles, but not actually time them to when people speak. Yeah, let's wait thirty seconds of dialoged and then do it all real quick. Turned what was a hopeful watch of my second Tarkovsky into five waisted minutes. Going to torrent it or buy it somewhere else.

Fast , clean , good price

Nostalgia del passato, un passato che ci colloca nel presente ed allo stesso tempo ci proietta in un futuro, ci proietta verso il nostro percorso nella spiritualità... Verso la morte

The film is great, and like many Tarkovsky films, it has a relaxing meditative quality. The 'candle' scene at the end demonstrates a kind of tension that I have not encountered before. This seems to lead to the final scene which shows the central character seemingly having consolidated the Russian and Italian cultures, but is this only in death? Who knows! Ambiguity is part of Tarkovsky's appeal.I originally had the A.E. version with just the female translator pictured on the cover. As with a version of Stalker I reveiwed, the sound quality on that version is pretty dire, with crackles sounding as though it was taken from a vinyl record. Whilst such crackles can sound warm and nostalgic (pun intended) on music tracks, they don't lend themselves to an artist of Tarkovsky's stature. In short, the Curzon A.E. version with the cover shown here is best.

This is the sixth of Artificial Eye’s complete Tarkovsky feature films on blu-ray for the Region B market (see also my reviews of Ivan’s Childhood, Andrei Rublev, Mirror, Solaris & Stalker).The usual excellent booklet is there again, plus interviews with co-writer Tonino Guerra and with Tarkovsky’s sister Marina, though the latter is already included on the Andrei Rublev blu-ray. Regular readers may have noticed that, up to now, I have made no mention of the Mary Wild contributions. As these items are presented as a part-series, I thought it best to wait until I have viewed them all, so an appraisal will appear with The Sacrifice once it is issued.My initial hope for Nostalghia was that AE would have gained access to the Region A Kino Lorber transfer which, whilst not absolutely perfect, is an excellent filmic experience and miles better than any DVD currently available. Alas, this AE blu ray is a somewhat poor relation.It has been cleaned up – a lot. Dynamic Noise Reduction (the plague of film restorers world-wide) is apparent throughout. The grain has disappeared, as has some facial detail and texture, so the experience is now a digital one, rather than that of a film. There are also some strange digital artefacts concomitant with DNR which suddenly appear, for instance a close-up of the sacristan in the early church scene reveals a double image of his nose as he moves.But, of course, there is more detail than the original AE DVD, the colour is much more natural, and it is somewhat brighter than the Kino Lorber edition, which is a positive in some scenes.There are other positives too: the aspect ratio is as it should be, a nice 1.66, the dream sequences are all in black and white, not sepia, and I was heartened to see subtitles which encompass fuller translations, particularly of the opening song, and the church prayers, despite the oddity of ‘sacristan’ being translated as ‘sexton’ when ‘sacristan’ will serve unchanged in both Italian and English, and the presence of far too many ‘gonnas’ (for my taste). The sound is a reasonably clean and dynamic LPCM 2.0, again a big improvement.I suppose if you never notice whether you are watching a feature recorded on digital memory or on film, this restoration may be viewed as a big improvement on the original DVD – but I imagine that Tarkovsky devotees will want his films to look like film, so I really can’t understand why AE have made do with this. Ok, Stalker is bad, but at least there is no question that we are watching a film, and the film quality is there in spades for all the other releases to date. It almost feels as if we are being paid back for what seemed to be a universal condemnation of Stalker: thus, on the scale of restoration, Stalker = not enough, and Nostalghia = too much. Let us hope that for The Sacrifice, we return to the centre ground.