The Draughtsman's Contract

[MichaelB]

Full specs announced:

THE DRAUGHTSMAN’S CONTRACT
A film by Peter Greenaway
Anthony Higgins, Janet Suzman, Anne Louise Lambert,
Neil Cunningham, Hugh Fraser
Music by Michael Nyman

BFI Blu-ray & BFI Player release on 14 November 2022

See the new trailer here

Peter Greenaway became a director of international status with this witty, stylised and erotic English country house murder mystery. Originally funded by the BFI and released in 1982, it has been beautifully remastered in 4K by the BFI National Archive for its 40th Anniversary. The new remaster premiered in the Venice Classics strand at the recent Venice International Film Festival, is re-released in cinemas UK-wide by the BFI on 11 November 2022 and then comes to Blu-ray in a two-disc set on 14 November 2022.

In an apparently idyllic 17th-century Wiltshire, an ambitious draughtsman is commissioned by the wife of an aristocrat to produce 12 drawings depicting her husband’s estate, in return for which he will receive payment, board and bed – hers. Extravagant costumes, a twisting plot, elegantly barbed dialogue and a score by Michael Nyman make the film a treat for ear, eye and mind.

The release of THE DRAUGHTSMAN’S CONTRACT is a highlight of a two and a half month retrospective season as the BFI celebrates Peter Greenaway at 80 at BFI Southbank and on BFI Player. FRAMES OF MIND: THE FILMS OF PETER GREENAWAY which opened on Tuesday 18 October runs to 30 December 2022.

A daring and stimulating innovator, Peter Greenaway is one of Britain’s most unique and esoteric visual artists working today. An accomplished filmmaker, writer, artist and painter with a visual style that is unsurpassed, and an occasional appetite for the taboo, BFI Southbank’s season reflects on a career that has embraced short film, television, pioneering technology and some of the most enthralling and challenging feature films ever made, including A ZED & TWO NOUGHTS (1985), THE BELLY OF AN ARCHITECT (1987), THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE & HER LOVER (1989), PROSPERO’S BOOKS (1991) and THE PILLOW BOOK (1996).

Special features
• Presented in High Definition
• Audio commentary by Peter Greenaway (2003)
• Introduction by Peter Greenaway (2003, 10 mins): the director discusses the genesis of The Draughtsman’s Contract, his creative choices and the film’s central themes
• Visions: A Film Comment by Angela Carter (1982, 21 mins): the novelist’s contemporary TV review of The Draughtsman’s Contract
• The Guardian Interview: Michael Nyman (2002, audio only, 7 mins): the composer discusses his work on The Draughtsman’s Contract
• The Greenaway Alphabet (2017, 60 mins): Saskia Boddeke’s deeply personal portrait of her husband Peter Greenaway, his art and his relationship with his daughter
• H is For House (1976, 9 mins): an early short film by Peter Greenaway
• A Walk Through H (1978, 42 mins): Greenaway’s short depicting the symbolic journey of an ornithologist through a mysterious bird-filled country
• Insight: Zandra Rhodes (1981, 15 mins): Greenaway’s profile of the fashion designer
• Interviews with Janet Suzman, Peter Greenaway and Anthony Higgins (1981, 5 mins)
• Behind the scenes footage (1981, 5 mins)
• Deleted scenes and outtakes (1981, 11 mins total)
• Original theatrical trailer
• Restoration trailer (2022)
• Image gallery
• ***First pressing only*** Illustrated booklet with a new Director’s Statement and a 2004 essay by Peter Greenaway; essays by Simon Barker, Robert Brown (from Sight and Sound, Winter 81/82) and Charlie Bridgen; notes on the special features and credits

Product details
RRP: £24.99 / Cat. no. BFIB1475 / 15
UK / 1982 / colour / 108 minutes / English language, with optional subtitles for the Deaf and partial hearing, plus audio description; optional German language dub, with optional German language subtitles / original aspect ratio 1.66:1 // 2 x BD50: 1080p, 24fps, PCM 2.0 mono audio (48kHz/24-bit)

[DeprongMori]

A quick question: The BFI DVD of Draughtsman’s Contract contained a couple of Easter Eggs — one for the Press Book for the film, and the other for a 31-page BFI catalog for an exhibition of Peter Greenaway’s works, entitled Plans and Conceits… of Dubious Authenticity.

From DVDcompare:

Easter eggs:1. From the main menu, enter the Special Features menu, select Introduction to the Film by Peter Greenaway, press Up to highlight the press book text and press Enter to see the Press Book gallery (33 Stills).
2. From the main menu, enter the Special Features menu, then enter the Behind the Scenes menu, select The Pomegranate Scene and press Enter to watch it. When returned to the Behind the Scenes menu, reselect The Pomegranate Scene, press Right to highlight the Plans and Conceits text and press Enter to see the Plans and Conceits gallery (95 Stills).
Special thanks to Rewind user Robert Sharp for providing these specifications.

I have not been able to locate these on the new BFI Blu-ray. I was really hoping to retire my DVD with this new release. Does anyone know if they are tucked away somewhere as Easter Eggs I haven’t found, or whether they are available elsewhere?

[DeprongMori]

Warning: Be aware that you will not be able to play the majority of this 2022 release of The Draughtsman’s Contract on a Panasonic UB820, and probably not on a UB420. The player chokes on 720x576/50i content on Blu-ray discs — it only outputs audio and no picture, and more than half of the supplements on this release are PAL. (The player does correctly output 720x576 from a PAL DVD, it just chokes if that content is contained on a Blu-ray. So, if you are in this situation, you probably want to keep your old BFI DVD around for the supplements.) Note also that while A Walk Through H and Insight: Zandra Rhodes are 1080p, H Is For House is 720x576/50i, so you’ll need to keep your DVD copy of BFI’s The Early Films of Peter Greenaway as well. If you keep your old DVDs around as backup, you only miss out on the new PAL supplement of Visions: Angela Carter on The Draughtsman’s Contract.

It’s a shame as the picture quality on the feature itself is superb, and the limited edition is packed with excellent supplements. It’s just that you won’t be able to access most of them on a Panasonic 4K UHD player. (I am on a modded version of the current official firmware rev.)

I’m in the US, with a modded player, so if anyone with the same (but unmodded) model in the UK *is* able to play the PAL content, please let me know. I’ve been trying to determine exactly where the breakdown is, to hopefully get it resolved.

[MichaelB]

I hope this helps:

1080p/24fps

• Main feature
• A Walk Through H (1978)
• Insight: Zandra Rhodes (1981)
• The Greenaway Alphabet (2017)
• 2022 restoration trailer
• Stills gallery

576i/25fps

• Peter Greenaway introduction
• H is for House (1976)
• Visions: Angela Carter on The Draughtsman's Contract
• The Guardian Interview: Michael Nyman
• Behind-the-scenes footage
• 1982 interview compilation (Peter Greenaway, Anthony Higgins, Janet Suzman)
• Deleted scenes and outtakes
• Original 1982 trailer

Barring branding/housekeeping stuff like the BFI logo, Region B warning, menu pics, etc., that's the totality of the video files on both discs, so it looks as though the Easter Eggs weren't ported across from the DVD.

[MichaelB]

The question of whether to convert from PAL to something more internationally friendly is a tricky one, as you can't do it without compromising somewhere along the way. Pretty much every scrap of video that I've personally overseen has been encoded at the NTSC framerates of 23.976fps or 29.97fps and usually upscaled, but if the original source was PAL that means that I have to choose between slowing it down or adding phantom frames that won't be present in the original. (I usually take the "slowing it down" option, but that's not always practical with an interlaced source - and when slowing it down, although I make sure that the audio pitch is correct, the longer running time is always a dead giveaway.)

Indicator's One for the Road was a particularly challenging recent project as all the source video bar the retrospective doc was 25fps, but it came in various flavours from progressive to interlaced and from uncompressed Digibeta to compressed MP4 (the only surviving copy of one of the shorts). And in this case presenting them at 25fps wasn't an option as it was a dual UK/US release.

I suspect the BFI, which of course isn't directly catering for the US market anyway, has a conscious policy of being more technically purist, even if this sometimes means that the main features (I'm thinking especially of the Alan Clarke, Ken Russell and Peter Watkins TV packages, where 25fps was their native framerate) won't play on unmodified equipment outside Europe.

[DeprongMori]

Thanks, Michael. It seems this issue is due to a particular idiosyncrasy of the Panasonic 4K UHD player line, as my old modded LG Blu-ray player had no such issues with playback of PAL content on Blu-ray disc. Hence, my hope that someone with the same Panasonic 4K UHD player (UB820, or even UB420) in the UK can log the problem to the Panasonic engineers to get the problem fixed in firmware. That will eliminate many headaches all around.

In the dual-format days, PAL content could be separated out to a separate DVD, but there is currently little market or cost incentive to to that now, and technical trade-offs to format conversion, as you note. Mostly, it was just an unfortunate discovery for me regarding a long-awaited release.

[ikms]

I have the Panasonic UB45 (Japan), and to show you how weird it gets with their output protocols: keeping in mind that Japan shares DVD region 2 with Europe the player still refuses to play PAL DVDs! However if you remux those same 720x576 MPEG-2 files straight to MKV and burn them to a blank disc, suddenly the player has no issue at all (did this with the Thomas the Tank engine releases to fix the chapter marks to start the episodes past the intro music). 1080/50i (25p) HD region free BDs also work, but there seems to be some cadence stuttering I don't notice with 50i SD content on mkv remuxes. Completely arbitrary. I wonder what the results would be if I ever came across 50p content on a 4K disc? As a brand Sony also doesn't play nice with PAL on their Japan models, but everyone else I own (LG, Pioneer, Toshiba) is no problem at all (both on Region 2 DVDs and 50i content on region-free BD).

[Adam X]

A quick question: The BFI DVD of Draughtsman’s Contract contained a couple of Easter Eggs — one for the Press Book for the film, and the other for a 31-page BFI catalog for an exhibition of Peter Greenaway’s works, entitled Plans and Conceits… of Dubious Authenticity.
[...] I have not been able to locate these on the new BFI Blu-ray. I was really hoping to retire my DVD with this new release. Does anyone know if they are tucked away somewhere as Easter Eggs I haven’t found, or whether they are available elsewhere?

Are they possibly included within the still gallery this time round?

[therewillbeblus]

After being turned off by nearly all of his films on an initial run-through roughly ten years back, I'm trying to revisit Greenaway's 'Greatest Hits' and this film is absolutely hilarious. I'll be interested to dig into supplements to see if anything here was meant to be taken seriously (I'm waiting for an eventual 4K release, which must be imminent given France's UHD, before purchasing a physical disc) but whatever sincere existential meditations are occurring under the surface, this film (more than most of his earlier works, i.e. A Zed & Two Noughts; Drowning By Numbers) seems to be playfully diminishing these concerns by having a ton of fun in acidic social folly. Perhaps the temporal distance to an archaic historical period helps either Greenaway or the viewer gravitate towards a purer tone, because I recall his more 'modern'-set works containing a more complex mixture of objective irony and humanistic compassion for people being caught in these cycles of attempting tangible achievements - that are fruitless at affecting a larger fate or meaning when zooming out, but validated as a necessary engagement when zoomed in. Instead, this film remains very complex but its busy aims are in pulling a lot of humor from a variety of aspects of the medium, including mores and aesthetics and communication patterns from the period itself, as filtered through a modern imagination

[senseabove]

(I'm waiting for an eventual 4K release, which must be imminent given France's UHD, before purchasing a physical disc)

The Kino rep would mock you for even suggesting it and given Ben Stoddart's reaction to Severin's Drowning by Numbers UHD announcement, safe to BFI won't be doing it either, so I expect the French release will be your only UHD option.

[therewillbeblus]

(I'm waiting for an eventual 4K release, which must be imminent given France's UHD, before purchasing a physical disc)

The Kino rep would mock you for even suggesting it and given Ben Stoddart's reaction to Severin's Drowning by Numbers UHD announcement, safe to BFI won't be doing it either, so I expect the French release will be your only UHD option.

I don't have Twitter so I can't read into the comments. Could you or someone enlighten me to the joke here? If it ain't gonna happen for insightful rationales related to the source, I'll happily buy the recent blu-rays

[swo17]

Sounds like he's just saying there's not enough of a market for a UK label to do Greenaway on UHD

[Finch]

Stoddart said: "Only in the US could you release Drowning By Numbers on UHD. Unfortunately, a lot of people in the UK don’t understand why that is" and when someone challenged him that "it was British", he replied "I don’t think that increases the size of the UK Blu-ray market"

[senseabove]

"challenge" is a bit strong—the "someone" is Justin LaLiberty of VinSyn/OCN Distribution, i.e. someone not unfamiliar with market demands, and I read his reply as facetious.

[yoloswegmaster]

"challenge" is a bit strong—the "someone" is Justin LaLiberty of VinSyn/OCN Distribution, i.e. someone not unfamiliar with market demands, and I read his reply as facetious.

I'm honestly not too sure about that. Maybe this tweet can be construed as being facetious but I've seen other tweets from him where he complains about certain titles not being released on 4K despite it being obvious that said title wouldn't have sold well. I would try and find some examples but I don't have a Twitter account and I'm not sure how to find relevant tweets on that site.

[senseabove]

I mean, sure—I think, like many of us, he wishes everything that could get a UHD would get a UHD (justice for Summertime!)—but later in that very thread someone jokes that they're waiting for a UHD of The Falls and he dismisses the financial feasibility of such a thing. Furthermore—to get neck deep in the weeds of the Home Video Distribution corner of Film Twitter—Stoddart has been pretty public regarding the BFI's reservations about UHD and the British market for it. So let's just say I think it's safe to assume JLL is aware of that, and is therefore making a joke, not actually trying to tell the business manager for the BFI home video label whose opinions on format viability are relatively well known what to release.