I am Josh Polonski's Brother -- Vision 200T super 8 feature

Santo · Post by **Santo** » Sat Sep 27, 2003 3:46 pm

Has anybody seen this film? I'm really curious. The director has an active continuing career, the film had decent reviews, has distribution, and it was shot all on super 8 Vision 200T in gritty New York and then blown up to 35mm.

http://www.mk2.com/josh/lesite.html

and here it was better reviewed by jury than a lot of big name films:

http://www.tchitchaaa.com/lla2001/lla-films.html

description from this website and pro8:

Title: I Am Josh Polonski's Brother
Year: 2001
Country: USA
Directed by: RaphaÃƒÂ«l Nadjari
Written by: RaphaÃƒÂ«l Nadjari
Cast: Richard Edson, Jeff Ware, Meg Hartig
Plot: When Josh Polonski's is gunned down, his brother Abe goes on a journey in a quest to determine why he was murdered. Shot entirely on super 8 (vision 200T) then blown up to 35mm.

When i find these things it shows how much potential there is in using the new negative super 8 stocks -- a feature film potential that never existed before. Very exciting.

Post by **LastQuark** » Sat Sep 27, 2003 8:06 pm

I'm looking for the DVD myself. I can't find it in Ebay or Amazon. This movie was filmed entirely in Super 8. It will be interesting to see how it will show out when seen on a big screen TV. Vision 200T supposedly produces sharp and fine grained negative and I would like to compare it with K40.

Post by **setori** » Sat Sep 27, 2003 8:41 pm

the second movie of Nadjari was better (for the picture, i mean). Josh'Polonski brother was not a so good exemple of what can be done with S8 : a little picture in the center of the screen, very bad picture, grey, a bad exemple. The second movie was greatly better (always S8) plain screen, gorgeous colours, big grain (just like 16 mm 30 years ago), a ggod materials for people who don't like too clean and pretty movies. Marvellous. just a "hand made film" look.
I don't how he managed with sound (Beaulieu are very noisy) and i would like to read something about it, really.
It seems to me he did a screen telecine (just like mine but better of course). Fine experience, anyway.

Setori

Post by **robbie** » Sat Sep 27, 2003 10:42 pm

i remembeer when jp brother was released few years ago. i asked local art houses to consider booking the film which didnt happen. dont really care to see it on dvd as i know most quality will be lost regardless of whatever transfer is used. now hoping to see the new film that i just discovereed thanks to this thread. anyone know if its out on 35mm print and the distributor? i attempted google, but didnt find anything with quick search.
wanna try the local venues again withthis one.

Post by **Scotness** » Sun Sep 28, 2003 4:56 am

I have a feeling Matt (Basstruc) saw this in Paris and wrote a review either for here or on Hostboard - do a seearch through the archives and you might find it - I think he said it was pretty grainy unfortunately.

Scot

Post by **Patrick** » Sun Sep 28, 2003 4:59 am

Setori, was this second film that you speak of shot entirely on super 8?

Post by **setori** » Sun Sep 28, 2003 11:23 am

As far as i can remember, yes, all the Nadjari's movie have been shot on Super8. But when you say that to me, i have a kind of doubt...
Setori

Post by **astralpictures** » Sun Sep 28, 2003 11:37 am

Nadjari is shooting his next movie on HD.

Post by **al77** » Sun Sep 28, 2003 12:27 pm

The dvd seems to be available from amazon in france:

http://www.amazon.fr/exec/obidos/ASIN/B ... 76-1681837

Post by **avortex** » Sun Sep 28, 2003 4:30 pm

I bought the movie on DVD some months ago and...

...well, I didn't liked it very much, and for picture quality is absolutely crap. Grainy as hell and shooted like a "home movie". Anyway, that was the look the director was looking for and it is right for the movie, but if you want to see the full potential of super8, better look for films like "Jet Benny" or (I hope) the next release on DVD of Scott's movie "In my image". Both were filmed on K40.

Just my opinion...

Santo · Post by **Santo** » Sun Sep 28, 2003 5:30 pm

I like film grain. I like it a lot better than headache producing DV scan bars on a big screen. Which is why I've chosen super 8 over DV for filming anything I'd like to blow up to a larger gauge.

Nadjari played it smart. Any stories I'm going to try and tell with a super 8 camera will use the grittiness of the gauge to work for me. Battling against the format you're shooting in doesn't make any sense. Just pick a more suitable format.

Hey, anybody know of any super 8 K40 features blown up to 35mm with a theatrical release? It's been around for nearly 40 years, but I can't find any that ever were. Was JET BENNY? Or was that a video release only? Subject matter wise, that film sounds like it would have been well suited for the retro-look of k40's colours.

Post by **mattias** » Sun Sep 28, 2003 5:53 pm

Santo wrote:I like film grain. I like it a lot better than headache producing DV scan bars on a big screen.

you've either seen a bad blowup or used a bad video projector. a good blowup has no scanlines and even super8 originated material will have scan lines on a low quality projector.

/matt

Post by **MovieStuff** » Sun Sep 28, 2003 6:33 pm

Santo wrote: was JET BENNY? Or was that a video release only?

Well, Jet Benny is hardly the benchmark for what super 8 K40 can look like for the very simple reason that we sort of strived to make it look funky and cheap. However, some shots were quite nice but, at the time we did the video transfer, we couldn't find anyone that would do a Rank in super 8. So we had Interformat blow the super 8 K40 original up to 16mm negative and then had that transfered on a Rank. The end results looks pretty good but the registration is kind of "floaty", IMHO. Some scenes that were contrasty suffer due to the 16mm blow up but, in generally it looks okay for what it was supposed to be.

Roger

Santo · Post by **Santo** » Sun Sep 28, 2003 6:40 pm

thanks Roger. I was curious about that.

Matt-

I was talking about all the DV originated features I saw at the Toronto International Film Festival last year. I had an industry pass and saw about half a dozen blown up to 35.

The worst was Kiarostami's "10". Any of those delusional clowns running around with dad's miniDV thinking they could blow up their film to 35mm should be forced to sit through a theatrical showing of that one! Bring a bottle of aspirins.

Of course that was shot on a pretty low-res consumer camera, but even the "higher-end" DV features where they did everything they could to try and hide the lines, they were unsuccessful in hiding their video origins. 800 lines is 800 lines. On a big screen you're gonna see 'em. It's better just to use them as a part of the story you're trying to tell so they work for you than trying to convince people they don't exist.

Optical blow-ups or blow-ups originating on film using an HD intermediate don't have scan lines.

And with HD becoming so feasable for small budget films now, we aren't going to be seeing many DV features anymore. If any.

The most annoying part of the soon to be history "DV feature revolution" is that so many of these films when they come to video (in north america anyway) is that they transfered from the 35mm print for the DVD release! So the image looks really awful with all the scan lines accentuated and less than stellar colours -- when if they had just used a DV edit for the DVD transfer, it would have looked pretty damn good on TV!

Of course I'm not talking about films where it's supposed to look "DV rough" (like we talked about in an earlier thread) and serves the project in some way.

But if it's supposed to look rough or raw, I'd choose some film grain over a DV image any day. But that's up to the film's creator.

I didn't think much of SPUN as a film, but it was very grainy (overexposed 16mm, I think), and it had a very cool look on the big screen.

Post by **Patrick** » Sun Sep 28, 2003 8:05 pm

I am assuming that the Attack of the Clones DVD was transferred directly from it's HD original or master copy? I would damn well hope so!