I recently got my hands on restored versions of two Powell and Pressburger opera films. The first is a film of Bartók’s Herzog Blaubarts Burg broadcast on Süddeutscher Rundfunk in 1963. It’s directed by Powell alone I think. The current version was restored by the BFI from an original Eastmancolor negative in their archives and a sound master on magnetic tape from SDR under the supervision of Martin Scorsese and Powell’s widow Thelma Schoonmaker. It was subsequently released on Blu-ray by BFI in 2023 but currently seems very hard to find! It doesn’t help that the BFI on-line shop is currently off-line!
It’s sung in German of course. This is a TV broadcast from an era when pretty much all opera in Germany was sung in German and, as it happens, the German version of the work was more common in non-German speaking countries than the original Hungarian. There are English subtitles and even a sung English translation but that sounded so weird I quickly switched to German.
The style of the film is a sort of cross between expressionism and 1960s sci-fi/fantasy. There were points where it reminded me a bit of Barbarella; Queen of the Galaxy or even Logan’s Run. But really it’s unique and it’s very beautiful. The various rooms get strangely abstract designs and the lighting adds strange colours; often blood red unsurprisingly but also greens and yellows. Both characters’ costumes change frequently too and Judith gets jewellery in the same sort of spiky abstract as much of the sets.
Musically and dramatically it’s excellent. Unusually for the period the singers are also the actors. Blaubart is a menacing looking Norman Foster; a notable bass-baritone of the period, and Judith is played by the excellent and very sexy (in a feral kind of way) Uruguayan mezzo Ana Raquel Satre. The orchestra is the Zagreb Philharmonic with Milan Horvath conducting. The orchestral playing is very detailed but not as dramatic as one might expect. I think that’s partly a function of the recording technology but also because the voices are balanced well forward, which is what one might expect in a film, but it does tend to background the orchestra a bit.
The restoration is astonishing. The picture is really good (it’s 4:3 aspect ratio of course) and there is very decent stereo sound and crisp subtitles.
If you can find a copy of this it’s well worth seeing whether you are a Michael Powell fan or just interested in a different take on the opera.
Catalogue information: At present a mystery!
operaramblings 
i heard Thelma Shoonmaker talk about Bluebeard’s Castle when she visited Manchester to give a lengthy public interview (with film clips) about Michael Powell’s work. It was probably a couple of years ago, as I think she referred to the release of the Blu-ray. It sounded fascinating, so I hoped a DVD might follow, but that doesn’t appear to have happened, and it’s disappointing to hear that even the Blu-ray seems to have disappeared. This happens a lot with films or series I wait a long time for; maybe they underestimate interest, or maybe most people just want streaming now, which I’m too old to understand.
I think Blu-ray has become the norm for high end video disks like BFI and the Criterion Collection (and quite a few of those releases are in 4K). DVD is still around but with Blu-ray players so cheap and pretty much all TVs supporting HD or, more often, UHD I can see DVD disappearing.
A friend bought a Blu-ray player simply so that we could watch the latest re-release of Blake’s Seven. But as I can do that at her house it doesn’t seem worth acquiring yet more technology when I don’t get round to watching half the DVDs I’ve bought. I’m very bad at finding time for these things. But I’d probably find time for that one, simply because I’ve never seen it.
I have a Sony disk player that I bought on sale because they had just introduced a new model. It plays Blu-ray, 4K UHD Blu-ray, DVD, SACD and CD and just about any kind of video or audio file I throw at it either over the wireless network or on a thumb drive. So one, very modest sized box, is the only input I have to my home theatre set up and it can play any source I can (currently) imagine.