@Kinoman-USA
Not at all.
Additional info by Michel Brooke:
Cytuj:
Just to expand on my earlier answer now I'm back in front of a proper keyboard, there is in fact lots of background info in the booklet, whose word count is currently 22,000 and rising. There's also plenty in the wonderful 82-minute Still Alive doc, whose director Maria Zmarz-Koczanowicz (a former Kieślowski pupil at Łódź) has interviewed a huge number of friends and colleagues ranging over his entire career.
But we will certainly be including original Arrow-produced extras as well.
I'm very pleased this is going down so well - we knew that Criterion had got hold of the Short Films about Killing and Love and that we couldn't compete with that, but we thought there was a very strong case for turning the spotlight onto Kieślowski's television output, if only because (bar Dekalog) it's been so neglected in comparison with his cinema features and documentaries. And there's no especially good reason for it - in the mid-Seventies, he shot three features more or less back to back, Personnel, The Scar and The Calm, and I don't think it's remotely a minority opinion to assert that The Scar is the weakest of the three and The Calm is by some distance the strongest. (Kieślowski would firmly agree with this assessment himself.) And yet The Scar is deemed more "important" because it was made for the cinema.
It's not quite a complete TV survey, but the three exceptions, Checking the King (Szach królowi, 1972), Two for the Seesaw ([ Pozwolenie na odstrzał, 1976) and The Card Index (Kartoteka, 1979), don't count as proper films d'auteur - they're all theatrical pieces restaged in the TV studio for the Polish Television Theatre series, and Kieślowski doesn't seem to have regarded them as any more than rent-paying chores, a bit like his early industrial documentary The Principles of Safety and Hygiene in a Copper Mine (1972).
Incidentally, I'm very happy to confirm that Pedestrian Subway and Short Working Day will be in 1080p HD. And after much investigation and debate, we're opting for 1080i/50 presentations, which will effectively be a carrier for a progressive 25fps image. Everything in this set originated in 25fps - including Dekalog (and we checked episodes five and six against the soundtrack CD in case they were exceptions) - so that seemed like the most sensible presentation option. Granted, this will exclude some non-European purchasers, but they have the Criterion as an alternative option - I'm assuming that will be 24fps throughout for unavoidable technical reasons.