The picture on this release has been cropped from the OAR of 2.35:1. I would have stopped at the previous sentence, was it not for an e-mail Petr Soukup - the curator of Zóna.bloudil.cz - forwarded to me. In this e-mail, one of the readers of Zóna - Marek B. - pointed out that the picture on Řitka's disc was not cropped, it was in fact vertically stretched! Marek had a chance to compare this DVD with the US release by Facets Video, which - according to him - has got an AR of 2.17:1 (measured on a TV screen), and he confirmed that they both contained more-or-less the same amount of picture information. He then explained the 2.17:1 AR by the fact that none of the releases utilises the full 2.35:1 frame; they're both slightly cropped on the sides, which can be seen on the incomplete on-screen writings that appear in the film.

I've had the above text ready since May 7, but never got around to publishing it. In the mean time, I managed to get my hands on a couple of screenshots from the Facets' release, and now, having enough "evidence," I can confirm Marek was right. A picture is worth a thousand words, so here are a few examples showing a frame from the Řitka's DVD at its default size (the AR is 1.94:1) / the same frame vertically squeezed to match the height of the Facets' frame (2.24:1) / the reference Facets' frame (2.22:1):

As you can see, Řitka shows even more picture information on the left side than the Facets version! And although the print occasionally displays severe damage (see below), Řitka could have easily beaten the usual interlace-ridden-with-subtitles- burnt-in abomination from Facets, if only the AR was correct. :-P