Christian Petzold’s excellent Barbara was a riveting MovieNight experience. I say riveting, but there is one caveat (by the way, is there ever more than one caveat?). As you might know, Barbara is currently playing at Angelica and, as you might also know, we love to be able to bring you great current movies when we can get our hands on an imported DVD. When we previewed the PAL disc, there was noticeable and distracting “combing” (when the edges of an object onscreen seem to get fragmented into horizontal lines, rather like the teeth of two combs interacting). Our workaround was to rip the disc and show it with a computer using the excellent video player application VLC. The image looked really beautiful, as the film-maker had intended… a bleak world portrayed in vivid color. The caveat? We were unable to figure out how to keep the subtitles loaded when each new segment began. So every twenty minutes or so, I had to pause the movie and turn the subtitles on. Annoying, yes, but our lovely guests seemed un-preturbed. Indeed, there was a round of applause for Barbara. Yay!

I’ll have to ask Igor for some VLC advice. I’m guessing he’ll know.

More about this film on IMDb