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S E A R C H    D V D B e a v e r

(aka "Until the End of the World (UK) (USA)" or "Jusqu'au bout du monde (France)")

 

directed by Wim Wenders
Germany / France / Australia 1991

 

Conceived as the ultimate road movie, this decades-in-the-making science-fiction epic from Wim Wenders follows the restless Claire Tourneur (Solveig Dommartin) across continents as she pursues a mysterious stranger (William Hurt) in possession of a device that can make the blind see and bring dream images to waking life. With an eclectic soundtrack that gathers a host of the director’s favorite musicians, along with gorgeous cinematography by Robby Müller, this breathless adventure in the shadow of Armageddon takes its heroes to the ends of the earth and into the oneiric depths of their own souls. Presented here in its triumphant 287-minute director’s cut, Until the End of the World assumes its rightful place as Wenders’ magnum opus, a cosmic ode to the pleasures and perils of the image and a prescient meditation on cinema’s digital future.

***

Wim Wenders's sprawling cyberpunk noir epic -- shot in no less than nine different countries -- is set in 1999 and stars Solveig Dommartin as Claire, a young Frenchwoman who comes into contact with a large sum of money stolen during a bank heist; in her travels she picks up a mysterious American hitchhiker (William Hurt), who himself steals some of the money before parting from her company. Upon discovering the theft, Claire sets out on his trail, with both a Hammett-styled German private eye (Rudiger Vogler) as well as her former lover, a novelist portrayed by Sam Neill, in tow. The hitchhiker is really Sam Farber, the son of an underground scientist (Max Von Sydow), and his mission is to travel the globe in order to acquire the funding necessary to develop the technology which will allow his blind mother (Jeanne Moreau) to "see" visual recordings of her family members; the second half of the film takes place largely in the Farbers' compound in the Australian Outback, where Sam, Claire and the others take refuge while attempting to bring the sight project to its fruition, in the meantime pondering earth's future in the wake of a nuclear disaster in outer space. Wenders' most ambitious film, budgeted at $23 million, Until the End Of the World ran into serious issues given its whopping length. The original cut ran 20 hours. Realizing that this would make theatrical screenings impossible, Wenders heavily edited the picture and wound up with a 5-hour cut with which he is reportedly satisfied (known as the 'Director's Cut'). Warners wouldn't go for this either, however, and whittled it down to 2 1/2. That version - which premiered theatrically in the U.S. on Christmas Day 1991- makes little sense ,with a disjointed narrative that doesn't shift gears so much as grind them as the action moves from country to country. Unsurprisingly, it confounded critics and lay viewers and infuriated its director, who all but disowned it. (Echoes of Once Upon a Time in America!) As with the Leone film, though, the Director's Cut of World did evetually see the light of day. It's now widely available in a multi-disc collector's set throughout Europe, and the public response to that version has been far more favorable.

Excerpt from B+N located HERE

Posters

Theatrical Release: September 12th, 1991 (Germany)

Reviews                                                                                                       More Reviews                                                                                       DVD Reviews

 

Comparison:

Ripley's Home Video (RHV) (4 Disc Italian Edition) - Region 2 - PAL vs. Criterion - Region 'A' - Blu-ray

Thanks to  Gregg Ferencz  for the DVD screen captures!

Box Cover

Distribution Ripley's Home Video (RHV) (4 Disc Italian Edition) - Region 2 - PAL Criterion - Region 'A' - Blu-ray
Runtime 3:49:24 (4% PAL speedup     2:11:27.963  + 2:36:30.255
Video

1.78:1 Aspect Ratio

16X9 enhanced
Average Bitrate: 6.17 mb/s
PAL 720x576 25.00 f/s
 

1.66:1 1080P Dual-layered Blu-ray

Disc Size: 49,612,641,244 bytes

Feature: 37,048,786,944 bytes

Video Bitrate: 32.13 Mbps

Codec: MPEG-4 AVC Video

 

Disc Size: 48,971,178,691 bytes

Feature: 40,075,548,672 bytes

Video Bitrate: 28.75 Mbps

Codec: MPEG-4 AVC Video

NOTE: The Vertical axis represents the bits transferred per second. The Horizontal is the time in minutes.

Bitrate:

Bitrate Blu-ray 1:

Bitrate Blu-ray 2:

Audio Dolby Digital 5.1, Dolby 2.0 (English)

DTS-HD Master Audio English 3523 kbps 5.1 / 48 kHz / 3523 kbps / 24-bit (DTS Core: 5.1 / 48 kHz / 1509 kbps / 24-bit)

Subtitles Italian, Italian for the Hearing Impaired, None English for non-English dialogue, English (SDH) for all dialogue, None
Features Release Information:
Studio: Ripley's Home Video (RHV)

Aspect Ratio:
Widescreen anamorphic - 1.78:1

Edition Details:
• Film on three DVD's , Extras on fourth disc
• Extras:
• 10 minute monologue by Wim Wenders as he is driven around in Australia
• 40-minute interview on the making of the Director's Cut
• 30-minute montage of cut scenes and out-takes
• photo gallery
• trailer
• fold-out booklet (in Italian)

DVD Release Date: February 2004
3 Keepcases in a Box

Chapters 42

Release Information:
Studio:
Criterion

 

1.66:1 1080P Dual-layered Blu-ray

Disc Size: 49,612,641,244 bytes

Feature: 37,048,786,944 bytes

Video Bitrate: 32.13 Mbps

Codec: MPEG-4 AVC Video

 

Disc Size: 48,971,178,691 bytes

Feature: 40,075,548,672 bytes

Video Bitrate: 28.75 Mbps

Codec: MPEG-4 AVC Video

 

Edition Details:

Blu-ray One

New introduction by Wenders (13:54)
The Song, a 1991 short film by Uli M Schueppel detailing the recording of “(I’ll Love You) Till the End of the World” by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (18:10)
Deleted scenes (31:13)
New interview with Wenders about the film’s soundtrack (15:31)
New conversation between Wenders and musician David Byrne (8:18)
 

Blu-ray 2
Japanese behind-the-scenes program detailing the creation of the film’s high-definition sequences (1:02:15)
Interview with Wenders from 2001 (30:48)
Up-Down Under Roma, a 1993 interview with Wenders on his experiences in Australia (6:32)
Trailer (2:30)
PLUS: Essays by critics Bilge Ebiri and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky on the film and its soundtrack


Blu-ray Release Date:
December 10th, 2019
Transparent Blu-ray Case

Chapters 13 + 16

 

 

Comments:

NOTE: The below Blu-ray captures were taken directly from the Blu-ray disc.

ADDITION: Criterion Blu-ray (November 2019): Criterion have transferred Wim Wenders' Until the End of the World to Blu-ray. It is cited as a "New 4K digital restoration, commissioned by the Wim Wenders Foundation and supervised by director Wim Wenders". The 1080P presentation starts with the following text screens:

"Filming for UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD lasted from April 1990 to the beginning of 1991. A relatively small core team, working in 9 countries across 4 continents, was supported by large local crews in each new country.

The film was released in theaters in the fall of 1991, in a cut of just under 3 hours which, according to Wim Wenders, reduced the epic proportions of the undertaking to some sort of "Reader's Digest". For this reason, he presented in 1994 his Director's Cut of almost 5 hours that you are about to see, which represents for him the only valid form of this "ultimate road movie".

With a budget of well over 20 million dollars, the film was unusually expensive for an auteur film and certainly Wenders' most costly production by far. While the soundtrack achieved considerable success, the shortened version of the film performed far below commercial expectations.

UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD was shot on Super 35 mm Eastman color negative film. The digital restoration was done in 2014. For this purpose, the original negative was scanned, retouched and color-corrected in a resolution of 4K. The original negative had collected dirt, shrunk slightly over the years, and also exhibited flawed splices and light scratching on the emulsion and base sides.

All work was carried out at ARRI Film & TV Services Berlin, with the generous support of the CNC."

 

Here is a quote from the director:

 

"The Reader's Digest version I was forced to release at the time would have broken my heart if I had left it at that. I knew that. And I felt I owed it to my actors, to my crew and to the musicians who had worked on that fabulous score, to finish the real work we had done. It had epic proportions, that was for sure. Together with my editor, Peter Przygodda, we added another full year after the delivery of the commercial version at the time, at our own expense, and finished what I considered "the real film." Of five hours. Which exists since then and which hopefully will see not only the light of day in the form of DVD releases, but also a few theatrical screenings here or there. I have shown it four or five times already, and EVERYBODY who saw it had the same reaction. "Wow! Now we get it. That's a whole different ballgame!" At the time we had to condense the film so much that all the fun had gone out of it. The "message" had become very heavy, if not to say heavy-handed. The very narrator had become more or less a side character, for instance."

Wim Wender

So Criterion have transferred the, almost 5 hour film, on to two dual-layered Blu-rays with high bitrates (about 5X that of the DVDs). It looks stunning at times - especially the Australian Outback vistas, although there are beautiful sequences from Moscow, Russia to Paris, France to San Francisco to Tokyo, Japan. The image is darker than the, brightened, DVD and has none of its digitization and compression failings. The image has some blue-leaning but overall a fabulously impressive presentation in-motion. 

On their Blu-ray, Criterion use a robust DTS-HD Master 5,1 surround track (24-bit) in the original English language with some French, Italian, Japanese, German etc. There are some instances that the surround some into play and it has some keen separation with impressive bass. Until the End of the World is famous of the musical soundtrack of the film - score-wise credited to Graeme Revell (Out of Time, Street Kings, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, Assault on Precinct 13, The Crow) but there is also Talking Heads, Neneh Cherry, Lou Reed, R.E.M., Elvis Costello, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Depeche Mode, Jane Siberry with k.d. lang, Robbie Robertson etc. - all sounding rich and deep in the lossless. Wonderful. Criterion offer optional English (SDH) subtitles for the entire presentation or a secondary option of just English for the non-English dialogue on their Region 'A' Blu-ray package.

Extras on the first Blu-ray start withy a new 14-minute introduction by Wim Wenders and the supplements include The Song, an 18-minute, 1991 documentary by Uli M Schueppel following the recording process over three days and nights of "(I'll Love You) Till the End of the World" by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. There are thirty minutes of deleted scenes and alternate takes from Until the End of the World, assembled by director Wim Wenders as well as a new 1/4 hour interview with Wenders in which the director revisits Until the End of the World's soundtrack album, plus another 8-minutes with Wenders and musician David Byrne. On the second Blu-ray we get the 1990 Japanese that film follows director Wim Wenders and Sean Naughton, the high-definition-video designer on Until the End of the World, in Tokyo, and details the creation of the film's groundbreaking high-definition sequences. It runs over an hour. There is also a 1/2 hour interview with director Wim Wenders was conducted by journalist Roger Willemsen in 2001, Up-Down Under Roma, a 6.5-minute interview from 1993 with director Wim Wenders recounting his experiences visiting and working in Australia. Lastly, is a trailer but the package has a liner notes booklet with essays by critics Bilge Ebiri and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky on the film and its soundtrack.

Until the End of the World is many fans favorite Wim Wenders' film - it's travelogue qualities, realism, great performances and incredible scope make it extremely memorable. We all wanted this version on Blu-ray  and now we have it in a brilliant Criterion package. It's a must-own film for many and we give it our highest recommendation! 

Gary Tooze

ON THE DVD: The Director's Cut is presented as a trilogy. It is spread out over on three single layered DVD's, each part with its own opening credit sequence. Wenders claims that that he used the original Super-35mm negative for this version and that the theatrical cut was actually struck from a dupe of the original. As you can see from the stills the image looks very, very good. But, since each disc only holds around an hour and a half of material it is a shame coming from such a high quality source that the transfer's bitrate isn't higher.

Since the transfer is from a 1.33:1 Super-35 source not used for the theatrical release, it is not entirely inappropriate that the anamorphic image is presented at a full screen ratio of 1.78:1 instead of the theatrical ratio of 1.85:1.

I have only scanned through the supplements but I found the 40 minute interview with the director to be concise and highly informative. This is obviously the version Wim Wenders is most attached to. For fans of the original release it is a must-have. out of

 - Gregg Ferencz

 


Ripley's Home Video (RHV) (4 Disc Italian Edition) - Region 2 - PAL

 

Criterion - Region 'A' - Blu-ray 1

Criterion - Region 'A' - Blu-ray 2


CLICK EACH BLU-RAY CAPTURE TO SEE ALL IMAGES IN FULL 1920X1080 RESOLUTION

 

1) Ripley's Home Video (RHV) (4 Disc Italian Edition) - Region 2 - PAL  TOP

2) Criterion - Region 'A' - Blu-ray BOTTOM

 

 

Secondary Subtitles for only Non-English dialogue - Criterion - Region 'A' - Blu-ray

 


1) Ripley's Home Video (RHV) (4 Disc Italian Edition) - Region 2 - PAL  TOP

2) Criterion - Region 'A' - Blu-ray BOTTOM

 

 


1) Ripley's Home Video (RHV) (4 Disc Italian Edition) - Region 2 - PAL  TOP

2) Criterion - Region 'A' - Blu-ray BOTTOM

 

 


1) Ripley's Home Video (RHV) (4 Disc Italian Edition) - Region 2 - PAL  TOP

2) Criterion - Region 'A' - Blu-ray BOTTOM

 

 


1) Ripley's Home Video (RHV) (4 Disc Italian Edition) - Region 2 - PAL  TOP

2) Criterion - Region 'A' - Blu-ray BOTTOM

 

 


1) Ripley's Home Video (RHV) (4 Disc Italian Edition) - Region 2 - PAL  TOP

2) Criterion - Region 'A' - Blu-ray BOTTOM

 

 


More Blu-ray Captures
 

 


 

 


 

 


 

 


 

 


 

 


 

 


 

 


 

 


 

 


 

 


 

 


 

 


 

 


 

 


 


 
Box Cover

Distribution Ripley's Home Video (RHV) (4 Disc Italian Edition) - Region 2 - PAL Criterion - Region 'A' - Blu-ray


 


 

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Gary Tooze

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