I got a look at this last night, and it is stunning, as promised. Three little quibbles, however. For whatever reason, the shot of Orlok popping up erect* in his coffin in the ship's hold is framed so that the very top of his head is cut off (his eyes are in frame).

Then, as the vampire cannot endure the rays of the sun, the tinting during the next scene, in which he stalks the doomed ship's captain, needed to be darker.

Now, the big one. This is a double set - but the English-titled, restored film and all the extras are on the first disc. The second disc has the film with German intertitles.

So, couldn't this have been a single-disc for sale item, or do they have to sell it as a double to make up for the cost of the restoration?

In any case, a must-have!

*"Heh, heh! He said 'erect!'" - Homer J. Simpson.

Has there ever been a version where this *hasn't* occurred?

Yeah, I think so, but as I'm not home with my beloved collection (sniff, sniff!), I can't tell you with any authority if it was the last Kino, or the R2 with the Bernard score.

"Or," as Steve Sondheim wrote, "am I losing my miiiiiiiind?"

Did he write that after stating publicly that Helena Bonham Carter could sing?

Ha!

I guess he didn't say "With pitch correction technolopgy, ANYONE can sing!"

Hell, without it, Shania Twain would have no career!

That's the problem with you gay guys - ya got no *eyes*, man! :P

Jeffrey, in the R2 version with the Bernard score, the Count's head is not cut off at all.

Though according to the grabs at DVD Beaver, the new Kino shouldn't cut off Orlok's head, either. Could be an overscan problem with my 4x3 set (damn, I miss my Toshiba player with "ZOOM OUT").

(Glad to be back with youse after 3 days at home with a stomach virus.)

No, I did my little trick with the "zoom in" and moving the frame view, and the top of the new Kino very definitely chops off Orlok in that shot just aboove the eyebrows. I'll live.

Maybe you were looking at grabs of the older Kino release? That one and the R2 with the Bernard score show his whole head. The new Kino and the R2 Masters of Cinema disc trim a bit off the top (although not as much as all the others).

Hmm - maybe. I looked at the R2 itself, but I'll bet you're right about the old Kino. Thanks.

Well I checked out the new UK release and it's pretty stunning but I am a little concerned about the trend towards digitization as a form of archiving. The restoration team were involved in the previous upgrade of METROPOLIS and they made much of their attention to detail and reverence for the source material in some accompanying featurettes on that set. NOSFERATU seems to have been given the same care and attention but there does seem to be some compression artifacting consistent with Digital Cleanup. In the scene where Hutter bunks down for the night when he first arrives at the village, the dark walls in the cramped room seem alive with shimmering. Of course some of this is the result of scratch repair but as he sits on the bed, you can see some kind of drawing on the wall beside him and it seems to dissolve away between frames. I wonder if it's a result of automatic noise reduction but the aforementioned METROPOLIS featurettes make it clear that they are aware of the phenomena and actively avoid it. The feature occupies over 6Gb of disc space too so it shouldn't be a DVD compression issue.

Also, on the subject of this scene, what's with the accidental appearance of crew equipment in the bottom left of the frame? The fleeting intrusion isn't mentioned in the commentary although I vaguely recall the problem being parodied in the forgettable SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE movie. Would anyone have minded if it was digitally fixed when the movie was restored or would people agree that you open a giant can of worms once you start trying to fix such technical errors in old movies.

Victor