Reviews of silent film releases on home video. Copyright © 1999-2024 by Carl Bennett and the Silent Era Company. All Rights Reserved.

Vanity Fair (1911)

This three-reel Vitagraph adaptation of the Thackeray novel stars Helen Gardner and Alec B. Francis.

This DVD-R edition has been mastered from a 16mm reduction print. The slightly windowboxed video transfer has been scanned at high-resolution and digitally cleaned utilizing custom video software. The digital processing has stabilized the picture within the frame, which is in itself not bad, and some frame-specific digital work has been performed to remove the worst of print flaws such as scratches.

Some dust remains in the video master, as do some digital artifacts in the form of briefly-frozen areas of pixels at the fringes of people moving within the frame and slow-moving figures in the background. This jerkiness appears to be partially caused by the low-frame rate of the original film. While the background is stable, the moving figures in the picture sometimes briefly fluctuate at a slightly different exposure than the background.

This kind of digital ‘restoration’ has been a topic of hot debate between software developers and film purists. Purists want a representation of every frame completely in a home video product, which leaves the staunchest critic objecting to even the best DVDs that have ever been mastered, with their selective picture element compression. We are in favor of digital clean-up of video transfers, but only when such work is not visible in the final presentation. Here, the digital artifacts are perhaps more distracting than the flaws in the original video transfer may have been. Perhaps a faster frame rate in the progressive averaging of moving picture elements would have resulted in smoother movement within the frame. We prefer the look of other Harpodeon releases that don’t utilize digital clean-up techniques, print flaws and all.

The film is presented with two user-selectable, custom music scores.

While not ideal, this is currently the only home video edition of Vanity Fair (1911) on DVD.

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD-R edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
This Region 0 NTSC DVD-R disc is also available directly from HARPODEON.