Lyrical Nitrate & The Forbidden Quest |  | Director: Peter Delpeut
Actors: Lyda Borelli, Henny Porten, Anni Timm, Joseph O'Conor, Roy Ward
Studio: Zeitgeist Films
Category: DVD
List Price: $19.99
Buy New: $14.99
as of 11/23/2009 03:06 CST details
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New (8) Used (5) from $11.87
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Rating:  3 reviews
Format: Black & White, Color, DVD, NTSC, Silent
Languages: Dutch (Original Language), English (Original Language)
Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Region: 1
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Number Of Discs: 1
Running Time: 121 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.1 x 5.4 x 0.6
MPN: DZ1049D
UPC: 795975104937
EAN: 0795975104937
Release Date: March 30, 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
A pair of landmark films by found-footage maestro Peter Delpeut that showcase the inimitable beauty and fragility of the cinematic medium. Comprised of deteriorating turn-of-the-20th-century clips recovered from the attic of an Amsterdam movie house, LYRICAL NITRATE is a moving tribute to the birth of film art. THE FORBIDDEN QUEST reconstructs found footage for a more dramatic purpose, albeit one that is just as inventive: to tell a Shackleton-esque adventure story in the tradition of Joseph Conrad and Jack London.
LYRICAL NITRATE: 1990 - 50 minutes - Netherlands
Color and B&W - Silent with Dutch and English intertitles - 1.33:1 aspect ratio - Not Rated
THE FORBIDDEN QUEST: 1993 - 71 minutes - Netherlands - B&W and Color - In English - 1.33:1 aspect ratio - Not Rated
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| Customer Reviews:
Ancient images November 13, 2006
Steven Hellerstedt
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
A pair of films from Dutch director Peter Delpeut. LYRICAL NITRATE (1991) is a 50-minute compilation of old (1905-1915) silent films, not quite a documentary, not quite a coherent narrative, with a soundtrack comprised of songs recorded during the same period. The film contains short scenes and shots from feature films and documentaries from that period. According to the dvd jacket information, the movie was compiled with "nitrate films found deteriorating in the attic of an Amsterdam cinema." Like all found art this will knock some peoples' sock off, leave others completely cold, and moderately interest the rest of us. I'm one of the moderately interested ones. Much of what we see is too short to make much sense of - children smiling for the camera, traveling shots of Amsterdam - or some European city - taken from a boat or a car. There are some longer scenes - a color-tinted Passion Play, a deteriorating sequence featuring Adam and Eve, a four-or-five minute mini-movie about a man and a woman castaway on a deserted island - but for the most part there isn't much story here.
FORBIDDEN QUEST (1993) is a little more ambitious. It's a fictionalized account of a doomed voyage to the South Pole, recounted in 1941 by an Irish ship-carpenter who is still haunted by the event. Irish character actor Joseph O'Conor plays the now old man with the bad memories. The movie is build like one of those head-on interviews with an off-camera interviewer. The gag here is that the old man's narrative is framed by period (circa 1910) documentary film of Eskimos and polar bears and tall-masted ships stuck in ice. For the most part FORBIDDEN QUEST works a lot better than the other film on this disk. The plot is an adventure story in the style of Jack London, Joseph Conrad and Jules Verne. The ending's a little confusing, and there's disturbing footage of a polar bear hunt, and the momentous puzzlers (human's living on the South Pole, polar bears in the Antartic) don't quite come off as they should. O'Conor is quite good as the old carpenter, though. Had me convinced, anyway.
Both LYRICAL NITRATE and FORBIDDEN QUEST were more interesting than entertaining. The `found' footage in each is pretty mundane, for the most part, and Delpeut probably dresses it up as much as anyone might. Much more entertaining are the "Treasures" and "More Treasures from the American Archives" boxed sets of complete movies from this era.
 A big nothing July 10, 2006
Jmark2001 (Florida)
3 out of 13 found this review helpful
I love silent films, so I was looking forward to this supposedly artful arrangement of early nitrate fragments. Real silver nitrate film has a blazingly clear and sharp appearance - think of the photos of Ansel Adams (whose prints were on silver). We usually see silent films in non-digital versions so that much of this clarity is lost.
This film underwhelms. For one thing, none of the fragments appear to have been digitally transferred. One would never know that these were filmed on silver stock. Except for a fragment of a film about two shipwrecked lovers, none of these films are of any interest unless you like looking at streetcars and film of children posing. This was a pointless film. The fragments from the Christ film are actually from a film that survives in a complete copy so that the inclusion of fragments here seems more a matter of ignorance on the part of the compiler than anything else. This one made me use the fast forward button on my remote a great deal. The use of early opera records adds nothing to this. A waste of time and DVD space.
 Real Ghosts April 4, 2006
R. Epstein (USA)
12 out of 12 found this review helpful
I'm giving this a perfect score because of the amount of imagination and creativity that went into making both beautiful art and thrilling storytelling, simply from bits of films that are nearly a hundred years old. Lyrical Nitrate is the 'art' film; a mental collage of the people and landscapes of our past. I say 'mental collage' because as the title suggests, some of the nitrate of these antique filmstrips have melted away, leaving us ghostly images that at times seem to look like ectoplasm, forcing us to imagine what is now unseen. That with the incredible music (mostly scratchy 78 recordings of Caruso and the like) give us that eerie feeling like we are not so much looking at history, but at ghostly images of our ancestors. Most of the imagery is so stunning that - especially with the slow-motion effects - we feel we are looking at impressionist paintings that are literally breathing. This stuff is INCREDIBLY beautiful! Not all of it is fascinating, but it leaves as deep an impression in one's mind as any dream
"Forbidden Quest" is the 'thrilling storytelling' film. Once again we have bits of real footage, but director Peter Delpeut has integrated them with a story that is told by J.C. Sullivan (really an actor playing Sullivan), the only survivor of a tragic expedition to the South Pole. His story is sort of a mixture of the real-life trials of the Shackleton expedition, Jules Verne's "Journey to the Center of the Earth" and TS Eliot's "The Wasteland". Joseph O'Conor (Sullivan) is a brilliant storyteller in fact, at times I wanted to close my eyes and imagine I was listening to a radio play, but of course then I would be missing the amazing real images! I was all welled up with emotion by the time this thing was over because it was done with so much care and imagination: like a novel come to life. I was also done in because this DVD has probably only been seen by a proverbial handful of people. Permit yourself to take up the quest to try something you've never seen in cinema: a mixture of the real and the imagined married to a haunting score and meticulous attention to detail.
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