LoA is undying, timeless, ahead of its time, modern and most of this is because it can mean so much to so many different people. Everyone walks away with something slightly different and the man himself is a mystery so the performance, story and overall experience reflect what each individual sees in it.
For me it took years of reflection to understand how exactly I felt but I see it as nothing less than searching for the meaning of life itself.
It's that dichotomy that I can't quite fathom. He loves it. He hates it. He loves it. He hates it. When the man himself can't pin down why he does these things I just can't connect with him. Not that I need reams and reams of backstory (though some would've been nice) but this is what I mean about him being ultimately inscrutable, it's precisely because he literally veers from one extreme to the other that I feel I'm no closer to understanding him.
Loving this discussion though peeps. It's been very insightful.
I believe Lawrence thinks he is more intelligent, self-aware, and enlightened than he actually is.
[Show spoiler]I think the movie pretty much shows through Lawrence's own actions and words that while he may believe he is trying to help the Arabs, he also on some level sees himself as above them.
"Sherif Ali, so long as the Arabs fight tribe against tribe, so long will they be a little people, a silly people, greedy, barbarous, and cruel as you are."
"Nothing is written"
There is a prejudice to his character that I believe he is not aware of, that he thinks he is more civilized and intelligent. He talks about the Arabs being great again, but then talks down to them as well.
I believe Faisal is right when he accuses Lawrence of him believing the Arabs are something he can play with, but Lawrence doesn't see that.
Lawrence's lack of self-awareness also leads to him believing his own hype, that he may be a God.
Some of the back and forth that you describe also comes with some wake-up calls throughout the movie.
Some movies are perfect because the filmmakers knew exactly what fat to cut and no scene is superfluous.
There are arguably plenty of "good movies" that do have the scenes that either go on too long or not needed. You could say if they were trimmed a bit they would be even better.
PS: not commenting on Lawrence here, just in general. But LoA *IS* a long film that you have to dedicate your time to watch and appreciate - not on a whim.
LOA is in my top 20 list, probably top 10. There was no more intelligent epic ever made. The work of masters (Lean, Bolt, Young, Jarre, Coates, Box, O'Toole...).
I believe Lawrence thinks he is more intelligent, self-aware, and enlightened than he actually is.
[Show spoiler]I think the movie pretty much shows through Lawrence's own actions and words that while he may believe he is trying to help the Arabs, he also on some level sees himself as above them.
"Sherif Ali, so long as the Arabs fight tribe against tribe, so long will they be a little people, a silly people, greedy, barbarous, and cruel as you are."
"Nothing is written"
There is a prejudice to his character that I believe he is not aware of, that he thinks he is more civilized and intelligent. He talks about the Arabs being great again, but then talks down to them as well.
I believe Faisal is right when he accuses Lawrence of him believing the Arabs are something he can play with, but Lawrence doesn't see that.
Lawrence's lack of self-awareness also leads to him believing his own hype, that he may be a God.
Some of the back and forth that your describe also comes with some wake-up calls throughout the movie.
I think that comes back to why the film is as long as it is, the actual plotting is IMHO quite tight not showing much which is extraneous but the length of the piece is mostly the result of the focus on building up the epic scale of events and the environment.
That I'd say not just a case of wowing the viewer with visuals but in putting them into Lawrence's position, showing how this gives rise to his messianic nature. I would say really that's more what the film is about rather than looking into the particulars of Lawrence himself.
Last edited by moreorless; 06-22-2020 at 11:32 AM.
LoA is a special film. More often than not you may need to be in the right “focused” mood to watch it. As I said, it is no Indiana Jones that is targeted towards a much larger audience and one that can be watched irrespective of the mood/focus in general.
If your idea of a long film is a Titanic, Gone with the wind, Ben-Hur, etc., then Doctor Zhivago is Lean’s relatively more mainstream long film.
Some movies are perfect because the filmmakers knew exactly what fat to cut and no scene is superfluous.
There are arguably plenty of "good movies" that do have the scenes that either go on too long or not needed. You could say if they were trimmed a bit they would be even better.
PS: not commenting on Lawrence here, just in general. But LoA *IS* a long film that you have to dedicate your time to watch and appreciate - not on a whim.
David Lean trimmed the movie when they were putting the 1988 restoration together, not that he turned it into the Faisal and the Furious but even he removed a few bits to tighten it up some.
i've seen this movie long time ago on blu but didn't notice this... around 11:34~36, i think some frames have been missing, did anybody notice this? or was it just me? lol
i've seen this movie long time ago on blu but didn't notice this... around 11:34~36, i think some frames have been missing, did anybody notice this? or was it just me? lol
Yes I have noticed this, it's been there on previous releases like you mentioned, another one is at the start of part of 2, during the scene with Prince Faisal and Jackson Bentley.
Lawrence of Arabia (1962) 4K Dolby Vision review, US Sony UHD disc. HDR metadata: DCI-P3 colour primaries. Mastering display levels: 1000/0.0001 max/min nits. Disc 1 Maximum Content Light Level: 1289 nits. Maximum Frame Average Light Level: 364 nits. Disc 2 Maximum Content Light Level: 774 nits. Maximum Frame Average Light Level: 263 nits. Disc type: UHD100 + UHD66.
Lawrence, as anyone who's made even the most basic investigation of the tech specs or read the fabulous book that comes with the 6-movie Columbia Classics UHD should know, was shot on large format 65mm film. It had the grand name of Panavision Super 70 in the credits (70mm because that's the gauge the actual release prints end up as, to make room for the audio tracks) but was basically their version of the 65mm negative/70mm exhibition system as devised by Todd AO a decade prior, which is a standard for 65-70 filmmaking that remains in place to this day. Lawrence's negative has suffered badly since then, a victim of its own success like so many popular movies of the photochemical era and 65mm suffered more than most because 70mm prints were usually struck directly from the camera negative, unlike the protection afforded to 35mm via the IP-IN-print stages (a fat lot of good that protection did for some 35mm movies, but I digress).
What didn't help was the various rounds of re-editing that eat into the original 222-minute premiere version (minus overture, entr'acte and exit music) seen in December 1962. It got shortened by 20-some minutes shortly thereafter in early 1963, some say this was with director David Lean's blessing but others pin the blame firmly on the producer Sam Spiegel, and it was edited again in 1970, Lean agreeing to remove another 5 minutes but with a further 10 taken out for good measure, 15 minutes in total. The movie had suffered the proverbial death by not-quite-a-thousand cuts, ending up at 187 minutes which "emasculated" the picture according to restoration guru Robert A. Harris and had become the de facto version of the film. Harris estimated that by 1988 the negative had been run over 220 times to make the array of prints, interpositives and YCM separations that had been gleaned from it, with damaged original negative making way for poorer quality dupe negative as was the custom.
By the mid-80s the decision was made at Columbia to restore the film which is when Mr Harris enters the story, backed by the likes of Lawrence super-fan Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, and despite some typical studio wrangling at Columbia - Harris launching a lawsuit against the studio when they backed out of a deal with him, which no doubt steered them away from reteaming with him for the subsequent Bridge on the River Kwai restoration - the final product was as good as photochemical technology would allow. They located the material deleted from the original cut after a two month search in Columbia's vaults across the world, working with Lean and original editor Anne V. Coates to not just restore what was lost but to fine-tune what was there, to create a true "director's cut", bringing back most of the principle actors to redub certain scenes for which audio could no longer be located (the audio masters having been cut to match the shorter versions and the trims junked), resulting in a final length of 216 minutes (227 minutes including the overture, entr'acte and end credits).
Photochemical technology being what it was (and still is, in most respects) then most of the damage to the negative - warping, scratching, staining, tearing, literal cracking of the emulsion, you name it - remained in place, mollified by certain printing techniques like wetgates or using new dupe negative created from the YCM separations, but when finalising the new 65mm interpositive that would become the 'gold standard' element for the restored Lawrence the negative essentially 'died', opening up splices all over the place and tearing many valuable frames of original information. It was just too fragile to physically print from any more (the restored IP would be used to generate prints via the IN, as well as for home video transfer), so its life as a photochemical element had come to an undignified end. It would be more than two decades before technology was truly ready to attempt to restore Lawrence to his former glory.
To commemorate the 50th anniversary in time for 2012 it was determined that a new digital restoration be undertaken at Sony (who had purchased Columbia in the interim), this time utilising the original camera negative itself - though like the previous photochemical restoration it would take longer to create than it took to make the actual movie! The superb book that comes packaged with the Columbia Classics collection goes into detail about the process so you don't need all that regurgitated, but the basics are that the movie was scanned in 8K (with the raw 8K scans vaulted) and then downrezzed into 4K data where the actual restoration would be performed, taking what was a very badly damaged (though not badly faded, ironically enough, given that that was the fate of many a film before and after) negative and imbuing it with new life. The results were largely seamless in the 2012 editions of that new master, the 1080p Blu-ray looking crisp and colourful with very fine grain, and although some mild fluctations remained in colour and density they helped to remind us that this was - is - film. Sony returned to this same 4K restoration to use as the basis for their new 4K HDR edition of the film but I'd be lying if I said that it was 100% successful for usage in the HDR realm.
We're conditioned to think that large format film like 65mm or 8-perf 35mm is virtually grainless, and I've said it before that older film stock was a lot slower and more fine-grained than the many emulsions which have been used since, but the UHD of Lawrence unequivocally proves that even large format can't withstand being doused with HDR without setting off the grain, and whatever else is being hidden in SDR. The grade is about as respectful as a Sony catalogue HDR pass is going to get, still exceeding a thousand nits peak brightness in the first part of the film (less in the second) with an average brightness in the low hundreds, and yet even though it's not a total Light Cannon™ job the grain is rampant, especially in areas of open sky - which this movie has a lot of! It doesn't always seem to be of a particularly high frequency either, looking surprisingly coarse in many scenes. Could this be something to do with the extensive digital restoration, that it had to repair and replace so much of this damaged imagery - of which the desert-based 2nd unit stuff seemed to have the most cracking in the emulsion - that the grain field was altered as a result? There's definitely some extra RGB noise in some scenes as a result of the combination of the YCM seps to replace a damaged section. Or is it truly just how this vintage of film would react when HDR is applied, the typical effect of the extended dynamic range on brighter tones and highlights pulling out all this hitherto unseen grain which SDR just rolled off into its usual neutered highlights? Have they rolled off some of the HF detail in an effort to quell this intense graininess without resorting to DNR? I dare say it's a little bit of all three.
What the HDR definitely does is reveal artefacts from the restoration that were invisible in the previous 1080p disc, buried in the greatly compressed brightness range and softer grain of SDR but all too apparent now. The start of chapter 5 where Lawrence and his guide stop at the well is a case in point, the hazy horizon contains patches of frozen grain lolling about as well as a slight 'force field' effect of grain around the actors wherever they break the horizon line and have the blue sky behind them. This is not something that plagues all scenes to be fair, but for whatever reasons those specific kind of 'heat haze' wide shots really do seem to suffer with some very odd-looking grain. Vertical artefacts like columns of noise also come and go, most likely where scratches or cracks in the film have been painted over. Again, not a chronic problem but more visible now in HDR. For some of these shots then I wonder if it would've been prudent to return to the raw 8K data and rework them, given how iconic some are like the reveal of Omar Sharif. Sometimes we can look somewhere else in a scene to stop from seeing a certain artefact but when it's right where you're supposed to be looking then it becomes harder to avoid. A wetgate transfer would've undoubtedly been the optimal solution for 'filling in' many of these issues a decade ago, but although the Imagica XE scanners used for datacine at FotoKem had a wetgate option it was only for 35mm gauges as I understand it, with the special 'Bigfoot' 65mm gate lacking this ability at that time. But if it was available, then why on earth didn't they use it? FotoKem were adept at wetgate 65mm printing at that same period, creating a new IP from the negative of South Pacific in this way in 2006, but then that's not the same process as transfer to video.
There are several exterior shots which I still felt had a true 'large format' sheen to them but strangely enough it's the interiors where I felt this effect more and more, because they go much easier on the grain and look far glossier as a result. This itself runs contrary to accepted wisdom with film, that the thicker the exposure then the grain will be lessened, especially in sunny daylight exteriors, whereas darker scenes and interiors use less light and so grain is increased because it's the larger, more light-sensitive crystals being exposed and turned into actual image. But it's the darkest interior scenes that somehow look the glossiest of the lot on this Lawrence UHD, they're beautifully rich and detailed with minimal grain. It's interesting that the film doesn't have the kind of shallow depth of field we'd associate with modern large format usage either, for if you hit it with enough light and use wider lenses rather than longer ones - though the 500mm monster for the mirage shot was a notable exception! - then you'll have all the depth of field you need, even with slow old glass like this.
I'm of the opinion that there is no "edge enhancement" on this transfer as I don't see anything that looks like conventional video sharpening. It's possible that the filtering caused some slight ringing, but I don't see anything along the edges of the letterbox borders which usually indicates such a thing. There is still a gentle kind of halation around contrasting edges in the desert exteriors, to me and my eyes it still looks very much like a photochemical effect than anything electronic, akin to Mackie lines where the agitation of areas of hard contrast can bleed out slightly owing to the way they've been developed. Perhaps the heat of the desert affected the emulsion in some way, I don't know, but the interiors just don't carry this same effect. In any case it's very subtle and didn't interfere with my viewing at all.
Something that helps to maintain the general quality from scene to scene is that the movie was seemingly cut to Auto Select, Technicolor's single-strand version of an A/B neg cut which means that the fades and dissolves - of which there are very many - don't drop in quality like they do in some movies, like Lean's own Bridge on the River Kwai which has some horrendous drops in quality at such moments because of the poor quality optical process used to create the dissolves. On Lawrence they're using the camera negative which has been edited in such a way that puts both shots to be used in the dissolve onto the negative in sequence, so when printing from the negative back in the day they'd expose the first shot onto the receiving stock for however many frames, gradually turning down the printer lights to fade it down. Then they'd rewind the receiving stock and expose the second shot from the negative for the required amount of frames, turning up the printer lights as they did so. Simple perhaps, but so effective in bypassing the massive generational losses that optical printing had to contend with at the time because the optics themselves weren't great and neither were the duping stocks. And when you do a home video transfer of this Auto Select (and A/B) negative then you simply scan everything in and generate the dissolves digitally in the editing bay, using the cue sheet with all the timings on to determine exactly when and where the effect takes place. (As I've mentioned before, this is what caught out the restorers of 2001: A Space Odyssey in 4K when they missed a fade during one scene.) Edit: As with My Fair Lady, RAH opted to reconform the Auto Select negative into the more conventional A/B roll layout when doing the photochemical restoration of Lawrence.
Colour-wise I though this looked marvellous. The sunrise scenes in the desert burn with fiery intensity, blue skies run genuinely, deeply blue, and the splashes of red in the costumes are eye-catchingly vivid, all more saturated than they are on the 2012 Blu-ray. But this is not some simple global boosting of the colour as the skin tones actually appear slightly cooler than they do in the previous 2012 Blu-ray, losing that orangey tone and retaining more variance, and even the desert sands themselves have less of a ruddy tint, looking harsher and more foreboding on UHD. Interestingly enough the 2013 Japanese 'Mastered in 4K' Blu-ray release already made some of these changes to the grading, so what we see on the UHD isn't an intervention solely derived from the HDR pass. Lawrence's flowing white robes had something of a creamier hue on the 2012 BD but now look a purer white.
The HDR implementation is, as already mentioned, fairly restrained for Sony. I say "for Sony" because it still hits over 1000 nits peak brightness in the first part of the film and still has quite perky average brightness throughout, so it never looks too dim or dark unless it's supposed to. You don't really gain much range in the vast expanses of sky - apart from the restoration artefacts - because they're so broad and flat a lot of the time, looking either blue or a diffuse white. There's a little tickle of extra range there but it's mainly Lawrence's robes and other items of white clothing where the differences are more keenly felt. Again, you don't get masses and masses of extra highlight detail but the way that the light reflects off of the costumes adds so much nuance and texture to them, when Lawrence is admiring his reflection in his dagger his robes look bright but dull in SDR, while in HDR they're transformed. One of my favourite moments is when Auda sees that white horse on the train, the way that the horse's coat shimmers in HDR is almost mystical. I loved the black levels too, they're not so fierce as to destroy detail in the shadows in the exteriors but there are several interior shots inside tents and whatnot that have a sumptuously dense look, creating that truly glossy 'large format' feel at last.
Compression isn't always transparent, despite all the hoopla about this being split over two discs. The grain that's dancing about in the skies sometimes crosses the line into looking more like crunchy digital noise, separate from any restoration artefacts, and the Dolby Vision is of scant assistance as there's very little extra data there in the supposed 'Full Enhancement Layer'. How can this be, when the movie has been given 166GB over two discs? Firstly it's because Sony didn't come close to filling either of the discs, and secondly because they've stuffed FOURTEEN different audio tracks on there, five lossless and the rest lossy, and by my reckoning the two HDR10 base layers for each part have a combined file size of 94GB (no audio or subs), which makes a mockery of the supposed technical superiority vs the 111GB Kaleidescape download (inc only English 5.1 audio). I believe I said "suck it Kaleidescape" but I look like a tit now don't I? And for all the protestations from myself and others that a single-disc 100GB encode would be doable but perhaps not optimal, we've ended up with a video encode that when combined would fit onto a 100GB disc anyway, with just enough room for the main English DTS-HD MA 5.1 audio track. Indeed, remove that audio from the Kaleidescape version and it's got about 107GB dedicated to the video encode. I mean, if Sony had just filled the bloody discs then even with all 14 audio tracks the average video bitrate would be nearer 75 Mb/s for each part of the film, that's a massive increase on the middling 55 Mb/s they've used. Just...why?
I don't want to end this review on such a sour note but it's hard to shake the feeling it's not quite as good as it could've been. I realise I'm being incredibly churlish as it still looks tremendous considering the extensively damaged source material and the colour and HDR are nicely done, almost respectful when it comes to Sony (almost). But the 2012 restoration used for this UHD is left exposed, literally, by the application of HDR. Even if it's not a total Light Cannon™ job it's bright enough that the grain and the previously unseen restoration artefacts aren't done any favours, and they can look even more conspicuous when the occasionally mediocre compression is factored in - for which there was no reason at all to lowball the encodes as they've left almost 30GB on the floor! Bizarre.
Get swept up in the movie and all this becomes secondary of course, this is NOT some kind of disaster that assaults the eyes at every turn and is still one of the finest catalogue releases you're ever likely to see, all things considered. But if you're not enjoying the movie then your eye might start to wander...
I think Sony just likes to keep their total bitrate at around 80-85 mbps whenever possible. That would be fine if they didn't overload the discs with an insane amount of foreign language dubs. It's sad, really, that the baseball movie got a 70 mbps encode, while Lawrence gets shafted with a bitrate lower than you'd hope.
Split across two discs for optimal bitrate my ass. Just utilize the whole discs, fools.
I think Sony just likes to keep their total bitrate at around 80-85 mbps whenever possible. That would be fine if they didn't overload the discs with an insane amount of foreign language dubs. It's sad, really, that the baseball movie got a 70 mbps encode, while Lawrence gets shafted with a bitrate lower than you'd hope.
Split across two discs for optimal bitrate my ass. Just utilize the whole discs, fools.
Whatever imperfections Lawrence has, I'm not sure bitrate is the main problem though even if it seems odd.
Kinda makes you wonder just how much they plan in advance how much data they're going to put on the final discs. It's almost like the people doing the video encoding were told originally that they were going for a 100GB disc with a few audio tracks, then later management decided they'd cram as many audio tracks as possible to save time/money on separate international encoding configurations, and then they ended up having to split it into 2 discs to get all the data in there, but at that point the video encoding was probably more or less done, and so they didn't get any extra time to take advantage of the increase in total storage.
It kinda gives off the same impression as when other studios go with 100GB discs simply because they had two or three audio tracks that pushed the total size over the specifications of the 66GB discs, and then they leave 10-20GB untouched.
Yes I have noticed this, it's been there on previous releases like you mentioned, another one is at the start of part of 2, during the scene with Prince Faisal and Jackson Bentley.
David
thank you for confirming this, i thought i was high or something lol
The missing frames were a result of the negative having been recut then reconstructed. Every time a cut was made to the negative, at least one frame was lost at the cut point. I believe they discussed possibly "interpolating" new frames digitally to fill in the gaps back during the 2012 digital restoration, but ultimately decided to leave the film as-is since Lean had approved it, with occasional frame jumps and all, back in 1989.
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