Welfare (1975) 720p.10bit.WEBRip.x265-budgetbits

Welfare (1975) 720p.10bit.WEBRip.x265-budgetbits

Links
Official website - Link
Docuwiki - Link
Wikipedia - Link
Review at The Guardian - Link

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GENERAL INFO

Genre
Documentary

Plot
WELFARE shows the nature and complexity of the welfare system in sequences illustrating the staggering diversity of problems that constitute welfare: housing, unemployment, divorce, medical and psychiatric problems, abandoned and abused children, and the elderly. These issues are presented in a context where welfare workers as well as clients struggle to cope with and interpret the laws and regulations that govern their work and life.

For over 30 years Frederick Wiseman has trained his camera on American life and institutions, having no obvious polemical stance but merely observing, sometimes in minute detail, what he finds. He shoots for many hours, so that his subjects begin to ignore the camera, and edits the collected material for much longer. The surprise is that what he finds is often nothing like what we, or even he, might expect. Welfare was filmed at New York City's obviously overburdened Waverly Welfare Center in lower Manhattan. Shot over four-week period in February and March of 1973 and released in 1975, the ironically titled Welfare presents a series of encounters between welfare workers and applicants and clients. The film views the welfare system as an overloaded bureaucratic nightmare in which genuine need is sometimes indistinguishable from freeloading. This was Wiseman's lengthiest film to date, and its running time of 167 minutes is itself an expression of the Kafkaesque bureaucracy through which welfare applicants must navigate. Significantly, after we enter the Center at the beginning of the film, Wiseman includes no further exterior shots in his trademark transitional montages; instead the camera remains indoors, emphasizing the engulfing nature of the welfare process. It is not coincidental that, chronologically, Welfare comes between Primate (1974) and Meat (1976), Wiseman's darkest films, both in which depict a determinist worldview that is consistent with the treatment of some of the welfare clients. The film is careful to show clients from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds, and racial tensions and class difference, two aspects of American society explored in varying degree throughout Wiseman's oeuvre, emerge here as consistent themes.


Encoding info
Encoded from WEB-DL (Welfare.1975.1080p.KNPY.WEB-DL.AAC2.0.H264-PTP.mkv), with HandBrake 1.5.1: HEVC x265 10 bit, tweaked slower preset, non anamorphic CRF 28, nlmeans strong, 720p, aq-mode 1, sao/strong-intra-smoothing/rect disabled.

Subtitles (normal and SDH) from source

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POSTER


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SCREENSHOTS
(Click to enlarge)



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MEDIAINFO
General
Filename = Welfare (1975) 720p.10bit.WEBRip.x265-budgetbits.mkv
Title = Welfare (1975)
Duration = 2 h 47 min
Size = 780 MiB
Overall bit rate = 653 kb/s

Video #0
Format = HEVC x265 - 3.5+1-f0c1022b6:[Linux][GCC 8.5.0][64 bit] 10bit
Resolution = 962x720
Aspect ratio = 4:3 (1.336)
Bit rate = 584 kb/s
Frame rate = 29.970 (30000/1001) FPS

Audio #0
Title = Stereo
Format = Opus
Channels = 2 channels
Bit rate = 63.8 kb/s
Sampling rate = 48.0 kHz
Language = English

Subtitles = ASS English

Subtitles = ASS English SDH