A Few Words About A few words about...™ Hester Street -- in Blu-ray (1 Viewer)

Joan Micklin Silver's 1975, Hester Street.  is a beautiful film, for which Carol Kane was nominated for Best Actress.

Unfortunately, this isn't a presentation you're going to want to watch.

Kino Lorber's packaging is incorrect in stating that the film is in color.  It's black & white, and has always been something I've considered a pretty picture.  That's not a problem.

But problems abound.

My mind began to look for a rationale from frame one, as to why the image looked as it did.  Was my memory incorrect?  Was it the filmmakers' wish to create something that looked as if it were shot with Lumiere's gear?

The imagery would be generally fine, but here it's too sharp, the grain too involved for what appears to be a film run through an Epson flatbed scanner, and then stabilized via some mom and pop software.

The image is good.  It's a bit dirty, but I can live with that.  Large bits of fuzz are printed in from the negative to the transfer element.

Trying to find a resolution is difficult.  If the general image quality wasn't there, I could believe that it was a 16mm print run through a cheap broadcast telecine toward a release on VHS.

But this is a Blu-ray, and the image continuously -- for its entire 90 minutes whirls and jitters around the screen, with no stability in sight.  It is headache inducing, and basically unwatchable.

Audio also needs a good digital cleaning.  I'm all for leaving a bit of air at the top end, but Hester Street is 90 minutes of tape hiss.

Which is a great pity, as this is a terrific film.

It needs a new image harvest and a good re-recording.

Image - 1

Audio - 1.5

Pass / Fail - Fail

Pity.  This is a film worth both your time to view, as well as it is worth fixing and re-issuing.

RAH