Buster Keaton: The Shorts Collection (1917-1923)

[AgentOrange]

Originally Posted by jazzbo

Yeah these are the Lobster Films restorations, part of the "Buster Keaton Project" which was a kickstarter last year. Presumably these are the blu rays you get if you backed that (or from other regional distributors.) DVDs of the restored versions have gone out to backers, and reviews have been good. My understanding is that they are going for as complete versions as they can. They have been some reviews on nitrateville, and apparently the blu ray may end up having even more restoration done than is on the DVDs.

Unfortunately, Kino hasn't had a good track record lately with silent releases, so we'll have to wait and see how the blu-rays come out.

In addition, Cineteca di Bologna has been working for some time on separate restorations with Cohen Films of all of Keaton's silents (shorts and features). They have been showing some of their work at screenings, but I haven't heard about home video releases for those yet.

I was thinking this was going to be Cohen release. Kind of disappointed it's Kino, to be honest.

Though as far as I know nothing was particularly wrong with any of their previous Keaton releases... and actually I thought the full length films were mostly pretty good. I have them all. The shorts on the other hand... were in more dire shape, or at least highly inconsistent in quality. Now I know part of that was them lacking restoration, but I always suspected that something could have been done with them and Kino pretty much just dumped whatever on to disc. I mean some of them had stretches that were completely unwatcheable. Are these going to be better repaired? Hopefully so, if some of the most severe print damage can be cleaned up via a proper new 2K restoration this would be a no brainer double dip. If the damage remains even after a brand new pass at a 2K restoration, then I guess it is what it is.

Are you saying that Cohen is also working separately on these same shorts (difference source?) - or just Buster Keaton in general? I know they acquired a huge film library that has Keaton and Douglass Fairbanks Jr... so I was hoping for some blu-ray upgrades (and in fact, Kino's Douglass Fairbanks DVD's and even Black Pirate on blu are going OOP - so I'm thinking those might be coming up soon from Cohen). Hopefully Cohen has plenty in the pipeline for blu-ray out of that library, including (if not especially) silents.