[LEN-E] Nosferatu (The Ultimate Two-Disc Edition)

[Thomas Köhler]

 > I know! Things have really picked up here since we stopped talking 
about Leni. ;)

I'm not so sure whether we actually really stopped talking about Leni. 
All these discussions about silent films I guess are relevant. Hitherto 
we have tried to assess her position with respect to politics, 
propaganda, culture etc., but I have the strong feeling that you can't 
really see the specialness (and sometimes not so very specialness) of 
both Leni's and Fanck's films if you don't have a good knowledge of what 
was going on in the world of cinema around the time. And I don't just 
mean obvious influences like Eisenstein or so. So babble on! :-)



 > Well, I don't know if that's a European vs. American thing, but 
rather a manufacturer vs. manufacturer thing.

Okay, I would agree with that. But even if I look at major companies 
like Warner Brothers: their US versions of many of their dvd releases of 
old films (and I mean truly old, like from the 30s or 40s) often are 
double-discs with loads of extras, whereas the European versions often 
are only single discs with little or no extras.  And a lot of old films 
from major companies simply don't get released in Europe at all because 
they think there's no market for them.

 > indeed, in my own experience I would say that Masters of Cinema 
(Europe) and Criterion (North America) are both pretty well equal in the 
superior quality of their DVDs, with the only real difference being 
which films they choose to put out (for example, MoC put out "Diary of a 
Lost Girl", whereas Criterion put out "Pandora's Box").

Agreed of course, these are the two best companies in the world. You 
might add the BFI to the list, but only for their releases since about 
2005 or so. In Germany there is also now Edition Filmmuseum who also put 
out rare silent films among other stuff, but they are terribly slow in 
releasing them. But their editions are all very good, and they are not 
afraid to put out things even if the source material is in bad condition 
(in many cases, this can't be helped if there's just one remaining print 
of a film).
That Criterion released "Pandora" at all surprised me, they have very 
few silent films in their catalogue, and generally seem to shy back from 
them. MoC, on the other hand, only releases very few films made after 
1960 (unless they are Japanese). So these two labels seem very much to 
complement each other.

Best
Thomas