Screenshots From New Leopard Blu-ray Show Off Colorworks / Scorsese Restoration

Earlier this year, Criterion released their Blu-ray edition of Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard, after teasing it in January’s “Cryptic New Years Drawing”. This was met with a great deal of anticipation and excitement from us on the podcast, as well as general fans of the film. One aspect that Rudie continuously commented on, in his excitement of the Blu-ray was the fact that the new cover was so much brighter than the previous DVD edition, leading us to anticipate an incredible new transfer.

Then at Cannes (2010), Colorworks unveiled their new restoration of the film, done in conjunction with Gucci, the Film Foundation, and Martin Scorsese (who has also recently led the charge on the Red Shoes restoration). We wrote about this back in April, a month after Criterion announced their Blu-ray edition. We all speculated on the next podcast, whether this would influence Criterion’s decision to use the new transfer. According to the a comment on the Studio Daily website, this is Criterion’s response to the new transfer (taken from Criterion’s Facebook page):

Our master is made from the original negative and from a Blu-ray perspective, we couldn’t ask for a more beautiful piece of film. The color correction was supervised by Giuseppe Rotunno, the cinematographer, and the result is spectacular. The Gucci-sponsored Film Foundation restoration shown at Cannes used our master as a color reference, but it had a different goal ‘” to create newly restored film elements that could yield new theatrical prints and so on.

The folks at Pathé, along with Fox (France) have just released their new Blu-ray with the new transfer, and BluBrew.com has several incredible screen comparisons to show off the differences. I’m including a few examples below, but I’d highly recommend heading to their posts on the new release, to see many more examples. They’ve done an excellent job capturing the same frames from the BFI / Criterion transfer, as well as the new Colorworks transfer, to give their readers a good sense as to how they differ.

One thing you’ll notice right off the bat is that the new transfer has a wider aspect ratio, and often a cooler color palette.   You can click on the images below to open their full size, to really see all of the details.

From the sound of the quote from Criterion, it doesn’t sound like they’ll be using this new transfer for a third edition of the Leopard anytime soon. I also haven’t come across any mentions of a release of this Blu-ray here in the states. The French disc is apparently region free, but according to BluBrew, the “French subtitles are forced on the Italian track.” I’d say that unless you’re a completist, wait until a US release is announced before you plan on purchasing this new transfer of the film.

I really can’t wait to see what happens with this as a home release here in the States, as well as the possibility that they may tour this print theatrically. Who knows, maybe this print could show up at Butt-Numb-A-Thon 12 in a couple weeks down in Austin.

What do you think of these images below? Are you going to import this new Blu-ray of the Leopard? Should Criterion release an updated version? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

A big thanks to DVDTalk‘s Tyler Foster, for leading me to this story last night on Twitter.