Women In Love 4K UHD (1969) (BFI)

[BarnDoor]

Coming in July:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0F7XK554X

4K (2160p) UHD Blu-ray presentation in Dolby Vision (HDR10 compatible)
A British Picture: Portrait of an Enfant Terrible (1989, 49 mins): Ken Russell’s documentary on his life and career
Interview with Alexander Verney-Elliott (2025): newly recorded interview with Ken Russell’s son
ATV Today (1968, 10 mins): interviews with writer and producer Larry Kramer and actors Alan Bates and Jennie Linden on the set of Women in Love
Billy Williams OBE BSC in conversation with Phil Méheux BSC (2015, 49 mins): in-depth interview with the Oscar winning cinematographer
Audio commentary with director Ken Russell (2003)
Audio commentary with writer and producer Larry Kramer (2003)
Second Best (1972, 27 mins): short film starring Alan Bates based on the short story by D H Lawrence
The Guardian Lecture: Glenda Jackson interviewed at the National Film Theatre (1982, 77 mins, audio only)
The Pacemakers: Glenda Jackson (1971, 14 mins): a documentary profile in which the actress speaks of her performance in Women in Love
Stills and Collections gallery
Original theatrical trailer
**FIRST PRESSING ONLY** Illustrated booklet featuring new writing by Matthew Melia and Lisi Russell, and archive essays by Michael Brooke, Claire Smith and Vic Pratt

[grahams76]

Nice.

[ste71]

Good news for Ken Russell fans - of course we are still waiting for another film of his, I can't quite remember the title though

[bergman864]

We're finally gonna see all that naked wresting in 4K glory.

[drush9999]

Originally Posted by bergman864

We're finally gonna see all that naked wresting in 4K glory.

I like the anecdote from Oliver Reed where he admits helping nature along so he had a bigger part.

[dallywhitty]

"Draft" artwork.

[DaylightsEnd]

Oh Hells yes! The 4k hits just keep coming.

[Nitroes]

In for it love a bit of Russell and in 4K too.

https://www.rarewaves.com/products/5...en-in-love-uhd
https://hmv.com/store/film-tv/4k-ult.../women-in-love

[Jorvic]

Watched my Blu-ray a few times but can move it on now and get the 4K.

Still the best Lawrence adaptation out there.

Originally Posted by ste71

Good news for Ken Russell fans - of course we are still waiting for another film of his, I can't quite remember the title though

Mahler?

[ste71]

Originally Posted by Jorvic

Watched my Blu-ray a few times but can move it on now and get the 4K.

Still the best Lawrence adaptation out there.



Mahler?

You must be a mind reader!!!

[Jorvic]

My copy of is on its way from Rarewaves.

Look forward to revisiting for the first time in a while.

[DaylightsEnd]

Yaaaassss, mine just shipped too. Inbound from Atomic. Can't wait for a rewatch in 4k.

[Dubstar]

Damn it, as of yesterday Orbit had it in stock and now it's sold out (aarrgh) just ordered it from Atomic instead.

[nicwood]

Holy sh*t, this one looks phenomenal! The BFI didn’t just repurpose their 2015 4K master, they actually made the effort to do a completely new scan of the negative and have the rest handled by Silver Salt. Grading was done based on what DP Billy Williams supervised in 2015.

The master is excellent. Beautifully graded, HDR is tasteful and encoding by FiM shows no issues. This is clearly one of the best remasters of a color film released this year.

Audio is the 2015 mono mix which was sourced from the original tracks but I’m not 100% sure if it’s free of tinkering as dialogues sound a bit rolled off. I hope that doesn’t detract anyone from a purchase as the visual upgrade is a sight to behold!

Hope this does well for the BFI.

[HundredYearLurker]

Buying this now.

[JohnCarpenterFan]

Originally Posted by nicwood

Holy sh*t, this one looks phenomenal! The BFI didn’t just repurpose their 2015 4K master, they actually made the effort to do a completely new scan of the negative and have the rest handled by Silver Salt. Grading was done based on what DP Billy Williams supervised in 2015.

The master is excellent. Beautifully graded, HDR is tasteful and encoding by FiM shows no issues. This is clearly one of the best remasters of a color film released this year.

Audio is the 2015 mono mix which was sourced from the original tracks but I’m not 100% sure if it’s free of tinkering as dialogues sound a bit rolled off. I hope that doesn’t detract anyone from a purchase as the visual upgrade is a sight to behold!

Hope this does well for the BFI.

I wouldn't assume so for a film of this age. There's much bigger films that came out after this one where original audio elements no longer even exist or are too far gone to use as any kind of source. Outside of AI, I'm not sure how a lot of those tracks could even be restored to the point where they'd have something resembling the entire frequency range.

There probably are cases where tracks are unnecessarily attenuated, but I feel the backlash against tracks which show any signs of rolloff or whatever (especially to the point where people won't buy the release) is a bit too much. I think it's like the "teal" conspiracy where there's two labs doing consistently problematic work but it results in every release perceived/accused to have "teal" getting treated with suspicion or outright disdain and sensationalist outrage even in the face of valid evidence supporting its look.

The high frequencies are usually first to go, so the SNR is reduced and the noise floor is made more noticeable as time passes. I see posts from people wanting this to all be captured and presented on home video but this would in no way be a purer audio experience. Well, it would be purer in the sense that an unrestored negative scan would be "purer" than the scan after it had been digitally restored with all dirt/damage removed, but who would want that over a beautifully restored presentation? I can't see much difference with audio; it's a degraded source and not representative of how it was originally. There's tools there to remedy/try and fix these issues and sometimes they are necessary in order to get something to sound close to how it did originally.

I know people took issue with the mono track for the UHD of The Searchers; unfortunately a composite mix was all that survived IIRC so only so much could be done, but I still feel the UHD sounds more authentic than the VHS some preferred. To me the VHS sounded harsh and artificial, and if I remember correctly the frequency range was highly suspect for a film of its era. This leads me to wonder what sort of "tinkering" is considered acceptable considering home video masters commonly sound noticeably different from the original optical tracks; is it fine to cook the audio but not noise reduce it?

[nicwood]

Originally Posted by JohnCarpenterFan

[Show spoiler]I wouldn't assume so for a film of this age. There's much bigger films that came out after this one where original audio elements no longer even exist or are too far gone to use as any kind of source. Outside of AI, I'm not sure how a lot of those tracks could even be restored to the point where they'd have something resembling the entire frequency range.

There probably are cases where tracks are unnecessarily attenuated, but I feel the backlash against tracks which show any signs of rolloff or whatever (especially to the point where people won't buy the release) is a bit too much. I think it's like the "teal" conspiracy where there's two labs doing consistently problematic work but it results in every release perceived/accused to have "teal" getting treated with suspicion or outright disdain and sensationalist outrage even in the face of valid evidence supporting its look.

The high frequencies are usually first to go, so the SNR is reduced and the noise floor is made more noticeable as time passes. I see posts from people wanting this to all be captured and presented on home video but this would in no way be a purer audio experience. Well, it would be purer in the sense that an unrestored negative scan would be "purer" than the scan after it had been digitally restored with all dirt/damage removed, but who would want that over a beautifully restored presentation? I can't see much difference with audio; it's a degraded source and not representative of how it was originally. There's tools there to remedy/try and fix these issues and sometimes they are necessary in order to get something to sound close to how it did originally.

I know people took issue with the mono track for the UHD of The Searchers; unfortunately a composite mix was all that survived IIRC so only so much could be done, but I still feel the UHD sounds more authentic than the VHS some preferred. To me the VHS sounded harsh and artificial, and if I remember correctly the frequency range was highly suspect for a film of its era. This leads me to wonder what sort of "tinkering" is considered acceptable considering home video masters commonly sound noticeably different from the original optical tracks; is it fine to cook the audio but not noise reduce it?

I appreciate your response and definitely understand your arguments from a philosophical standpoint. I’m with you in not necessarily considering particularly harsh-sounding high frequencies pleasant to experience for the reasons you mentioned. On the other hand, if there’s global filtering / limiting across the entire track, it’s not helpful either similar to applying noise reduction to the images or performing heavy automatic clean-up that removes picture information. For example, Arrow and Bad Princess struck a good balance with "For a Few Dollars More" when they included two mono tracks on the disc - one with the highest of frequencies intact, the other one that carefully rolled them off without taking away other sonic information in the process. I actually chose the latter for my viewing experience and preferred its sound to the other mix. Unfortunately there’s often very little information available about audio remasterings in restoration notes other than "sourced from XYZ and pops, clicks etc. were removed". While it won’t convince every single (potential) buyer similar with the "teal" cases, with more information we could at least categorize what we have in front of us a bit easier without relying on too much guesswork.

I wish I knew what’s the case with Women in Love, so hopefully someone else more skilled at analyzing audio attempts a comparison between some of the other releases at some point.

[JohnCarpenterFan]

Originally Posted by nicwood

I appreciate your response and definitely understand your arguments from a philosophical standpoint. I’m with you in not necessarily considering particularly harsh-sounding high frequencies pleasant to experience for the reasons you mentioned. On the other hand, if there’s global filtering / limiting across the entire track, it’s not helpful either similar to applying noise reduction to the images or performing heavy automatic clean-up that removes picture information. For example, Arrow and Bad Princess struck a good balance with "For a Few Dollars More" when they included two mono tracks on the disc - one with the highest of frequencies intact, the other one that carefully rolled them off without taking away other sonic information in the process. I actually chose the latter for my viewing experience and preferred its sound to the other mix. Unfortunately there’s often very little information available about audio remasterings in restoration notes other than "sourced from XYZ and pops, clicks etc. were removed". While it won’t convince every single (potential) buyer similar with the "teal" cases, with more information we could at least categorize what we have in front of us a bit easier without relying on too much guesswork.

I wish I knew what’s the case with Women in Love, so hopefully someone else more skilled at analyzing audio attempts a comparison between some of the other releases at some point.

I listened to the mono track without the curve applied for FDM and was expecting a lot worse given the note on the menu, but it didn't sound harsh or noisy to me. I did listen to parts of the mono with the curve applied and I will say that it does sound more period-accurate, but I'd probably be content with either track if they only decided to include one of them.

I'm thinking more about elements that sound rougher than that does, and ones which I wouldn't expect to hear on home video without some noticeable management. I feel I see far too many comments implying that whoever is working on these audio remasters are just noise reducing the crap out of them because they hate analog artifacts native to the medium it was recorded on, or that they're just idiots who don't know what they're doing. Considering I've seen some of these comments made regarding films from the '50s, I am fairly certain that the reasoning behind some (or perhaps a lot) of these tracks showing signs of management is much more nuanced and also a lot more subjective than some may think. My point is that if these elements have degraded to the point where genuine high frequencies are gone and the perceived noise floor is higher, then there's only so much that can be done without using something like AI. Just capturing the degraded audio and leaving it as it is isn't any more "authentic" than a negative scan without any repair/cleanup IMO.

I assume The Searchers is one such case as a composite source was used for the UHD. The frequency range on such a source, and especially from that era, is going to be limited. I believe frequencies above 8kHz were rolled off which is probably why I thought it sounded like a good optical track for a film of its era. The VHS whose mono was seen as superior on the blah-ray site has a frequency range that exceeds even that of the original recording medium which is bizarre and sounds incredibly harsh and brightened to me. It's also because of this that restorers will tend to find a printmaster of a film to use as reference instead of home video tracks because we usually don't know what exactly those tracks were sourced from or what decisions were made during mastering (such as eliminating low end due to bass reproduction limitations of CRT TVs).

[Dubstar]

I watched the British Picture bio-pic short film last night and It's so "Ken Russell" illuminating, bizarre and entertaining

[CelestialAgent]

Not sure if this is a new part of the style guide for MGM licenses, but while the spine uses the current MGM logo and the copyright is Metro Goldwyn Mayer, the back cover uses the Amazon MGM Studios logo. Obviously it’s the current iteration of the company and this comes from the UA library, but it feels a little anachronistic.