Is Paris Burning? (1966)

[James Luckard]

Is Paris Burning? Blu-ray

Coming soon from Kino Lorber:

Coming Soon on Blu-ray!

Digitally Restored in 2022 – From a 4K Scan of the 35mm Original Camera Negative by Paramount Pictures in Association with American Zoetrope and Francis Ford Coppola.

Is Paris Burning? (1966) Starring in Alphabetical Order: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Charles Boyer, Leslie Caron, Jean-Pierre Cassel, George Chakris, Bruno Cremer, Claude Dauphin, Alain Delon, Kirk Douglas, Pierre Dux, Glenn Ford, Gert Fröbe, Daniel Gélin, Georges Géret, Hannes Messemer, Harry Meyen, Yves Montand, Anthony Perkins, Michel Piccoli, Wolfgang Preiss, Claude Rich, Simone Signoret, Robert Stack, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Pierre Vaneck, Marie Versini, Skip Ward & Orson Welles – Shot by Marcel Grignon (Taxi for Tobruk) – Music by Maurice Jarre (Doctor Zhivago) – Screenplay by Gore Vidal (Suddenly, Last Summer) & Francis Ford Coppola (The Conversation) – Additional Dialogue by Marcel Moussy (The 400 Blows) – Directed by René Clément (Forbidden Games, Purple Noon, Joy House, Rider on the Rain).

Oscar Nominee: Best Cinematography & Best Art Direction-Set Decoration

This was one of the first films Coppola wrote, excited to see him involved in the restoration!



I really hope they include both the standard English audio track and also the French track, like the DVD had. If they also include the German track, that would be spectacular!!

This film is a bit like Paramount's The Tenant, filmed ten years later. It has a largely French cast, so those scenes play best in French, but there are significant chunks of the film in English, with American stars, so those scenes play best in their own language.

Much like The Tenant, playing the conventional American English track leaves probably 90% of the actors speaking dubbed.

In this film, there are also scenes with German actors. There's a German audio track, it's on the German DVD, but has never been released in the US.

Obviously, the ideal modern presentation would be everyone speaking in their own languages, nobody dubbed, but that wouldn't be accurate to the intent of the filmmakers in 1966, and I think there are a few scenes where characters speak multiple languages, so I don't know which track you'd use during those scenes.