It was available in the US on DVD, but from the looks of it it’s out of print. But used ones should be floating around. Unfortunately all the torrents looks like their dead. Once Demonoid went under years back, and their backlist of torrents vanished, the major venue for tracking that sort of shit down went with it. And nothing replaced it. There’s just a lot of stuff like this that just hasn’t made it to digital platforms and with discs out of print there’s no regular way to view them.
So haunt Ebay? Or if you’re near one of the few cities with an artsy fartsy video store left I’d head there. I’ve seen repertory showings advertised as part of film festivals.
Short guy tosses his sword from hand to hand a number of times in the middle of parrying his opponent’s blade. Is that a thing in sword fighting? The tiniest error in a real fight would be your last.
There are some questionable things that happen in that duel, but a lot of it is surprisingly OK for Polish cross-cutting saber. And remember, at some point the short guy is toying with the increasingly desperate prisoner.
And martial validity isn’t everything in an on-screen duel. There’s a ton of martially absurd stuff that happens in Westley vs. Inigo, but it’s still one of the best on-screen duels ever.
You could also check with your public library system. If they don’t have it they could probably do an inter library loan.
Apparently the reason why a lot of this sort of art house material is in and out of print, particularly since the DVD market cratered when video stores died. Is because the major sales vector was archival. University and public library systems and film archives. They’d release a DVD, every library system would buy 10 copies, every film school or media studies program would buy 3. The rest would go to art house rental places and video stores or collectors. Problem with that is once a library system has enough copies, they have enough copies. So you wouldn’t see another release/printing until that market needed them. And with consumer DVD sales shrinking… you don’t have the backup plan.
So if you don’t want to buy it. The library should be able to get it for you.
Worldcat suggests the availability is pretty grim if you’re not in Europe (or for that matter Poland). Looks like IU Bloomington might have a copy and there are a couple copies in Canada. ILL is tricky with DVDs, too. Anyway, at the current exchange rates I’m not going to turn my nose up at paying 10GBP for a copy.
Yeah a lot of those film school archives are only open to academics and students. And I would imagine that’s where these discs are to be found.
I think our screening back in the day was on 16mm, or a DVD transfer from our schools 16mm copy. There’s a surprising number of really important films that just aren’t available. And a lot of my screenings and survey classes at school were built around bootlegs or VHS tapes that had been traded around by professors, film buffs and grad students for years. Dub of a dub of a dub.
It’s heartbreaking that each new medium has promised to be more time-resistant than the last, and it’s always a lie. Celluloid? Vinegar syndrome. Tape? Ha. DVDs? Mylar rots in 10-20 years. Pure digital media? If hard drive crashes don’t get you, then DRM or the loss of file format knowledge will.
Pure digital has significantly simplified the archival problem for a lot of this stuff. Back ups can be backed up, things can be regularly copied over to avoid bit rot, copies are effectively free to distribute. Distribution online effectively means it lives persistently in the cloud. So long as some one remains interested in hosting or seeding. So new copies can effectively be pulled as needed at low cost. If something stops being online it can be put back up by anyone with a copy. DRM can be and has almost always been defeated. Digital copies don’t lose fidelity as copies are made or through use, so a copy is a copy is always a copy. A lot of that operates in legal gray areas.
But nothing is forever. Physical books rot, vinyl gets brittle and wears down, stone buildings fall down. Proliferation is really the only thing that’s preserved information in the really long term. And digital media has just made proliferation cheap and easy, and significantly reduces costs for preservation.
And as a result a lot of stuff is just out there now where as it used to be rumored and hard to find. To see something like Bambi vs Godzilla you used to have to know a guy who got a tape off a guy who knew the creator, or copy a tape from a professor or some one at a convention. Now its on YouTube. Todd Haynes Superstar used to be impossible to find. I first saw it as a 6 gen beta copy a professor bought in a sex shop in Berlin not long after it came out. If you wanted to see it again you had to copy his tape. Now its on YouTube.
Its the gray market aspects of this that have stalled it out. Like what i was talking about with Denonoid. The fact that it was a key venue for the release of pirated recent media is what got it repeatedly nuked over the last decade. But the core of that site was a deep database of active torrents for some really, really hard to find shit. Orphaned works, out of print material, content for dead platforms.
When the people stopped seeding that, and then the site relaunched after years of down time without it. Demonoid was pretty much dead. Cause unexpectedly that was its major attraction, and a fair bit of its purpose. And a lot of stuff that could only be found there still hasn’t filtered back online after all these years.
Yes but can anything be more “best worst” than Lynch’s Dune? The shear quality of execution on that batshit garbage rolls it right back around to legitimately amazing.
Sergius: You have deceived me. You are my rival. I brook no rivals. At six o’clock I shall be in the drilling-ground on the Klissoura road, alone, on horseback, with my sabre. Do you understand?
Bluntschli [staring, but sitting quite at his ease]: Oh, thank you: that’s a cavalry man’s proposal. I’m in the artillery; and I have the choice of weapons. If I go, I shall take a machine gun. And there shall be no mistake about the cartridges this time.
