In an effort to go green this summer, the Criterion offices were declared a “paper-cup-free zone.” Coffee is now dispensed exclusively into “real” coffee cups (which number roughly in the hundreds), and a lovely array of Janus 50th Anniversary mugs have taken up residence next to the coffee carafe. The watercoolers have been stripped of their paper-cup dispensers, and instead we have a handsome set of drinking glasses in the front and also back in the kitchen. If more offices would make these simple changes it would make such a huge impact on the environment, but I suspect we’ll have to wait for a designer to come up with a fifty-dollar drinking glass reading “This is not a paper cup” for a trend to start.


Assuming we’re all well hydrated and caffeinated, how many Criterion employees does it take to change a lightbulb? Just one, as long as she’s wearing flats. This one was a little skeptical at the sight of a dozen new energy-efficient models lined up on the counter, ready to replace the old, familiar energy-suckers in our entryway and reception area. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for keeping as much unnecessary carbon from the atmosphere as possible, but at first the new bulbs, with their thin white tubes, looked so cold—like typical, joyless fluorescent office lighting. Happily, the glow they give off is actually quite warm, and while looking at the giant L’eclisse poster that faces me across the room I was pleased to discover that Alain Delon (who doesn’t need any special lighting, believe me) looks more attractive than ever.

I set out on my first trip to the Toronto Film Festival ready to feast on films and spend relaxed, indulgent, quality time with writers I work with, or hope to work with, as the editorial director here at Criterion. And I wasn’t disappointed on either front. As I had been told, Toronto is the great convergence space for all people film in North America and even farther afield. And with screenings stretching from 8:45 in the morning to 11:30 at night, often ten or twelve at a time, over ten days (almost 350 films in all), I’d say it’s more of an orgy than a feast. I’d been told I’d literally be tripping over friends and colleagues as I dashed from screening to screening (sometimes five a day), and that was certainly, delightfully, true. In fact, unplanned, I almost immediately ran into my Janus associates Sarah Finklea and Brian Belovarac, as well as Film Comment friends Gavin Smith and Nicole Armour, hometown BAMcinématek’s Florence Almozini and Adrienne Mancia, and Criterion contributors Jonathan Rosenbaum (L’eclisse, F for Fake, Kicking and Screaming, WR, Breathless) and Peter Brunette (The Children Are Watching Us, The Flowers of St. Francis, Amarcord), and shared some films with them. There’s something magical, transformative, about being in this kind of environment even with people you know well already: a stress-free openness, desire to share ideas, and travelers’ fellow feeling takes over.

Actually planning a meeting is a bit of an art form, however, one I had to become accustomed to but that I was practicing fairly confidently by the end (if I do say so myself!). What people did before cell phones I don’t know, but I’ve never text messaged so much in my life, and I tapped into levels of flexibility and multitasking I didn’t know I had. I’m especially proud of one bravura quadruple play wherein I met with the Dialogues series programmer before his Ellen Burstyn–introduced screening of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and then was unexpectedly able to watch the whole film (a real treat) while rearranging lunch with the very busy Dennis Lim (Clean, Shaven; Mala Noche), who met me outside the theater minutes after it ended. We spent the next hour or so together before he went off to an interview and I, with only minutes to spare, to a screening of Jonathan Demme’s very moving Jimmy Carter doc Man from Plains. Then I firmed up plans for the next day with James Quandt, senior programmer at the Cinematheque Ontario and recently a prolific Criterion contributor (Pickpocket, Au hasard Balthazar, Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara), checked in with work at home, and ran to catch Alexander Sokurov’s devastating Alexandra, a dreamy, allegorical tale of a Russian grandmother (played by the formidable Galina Vishnevskaya, widow of conductor Mstislav Rostropovich) who visits her beloved grandson on a military base in Chechnya, where he is a stationed officer. (And then there were two more films—and a dinner!)

There’s only so much planning you can do, though, and pure serendipity often comes into play, as when I found myself sitting next to Elle’s Karen Durbin in the Varsity Theater’s lounge and shared a Paranoid Park screening with her. Or when the lights went on after Hou Hsiao-hsien’s exquisite Flight of the Red Balloon and I was surrounded by a bevy of equally enchanted film programmers from around the country whom I had met earlier in the festival at a dinner planned by Janus’s Sarah Finklea, including Eastman House’s Jim Healy and Tom Vick from the Smithsonian Institution’s Freer and Sackler galleries. A mad dash in the rain and a very lively meal followed (thanks again for the umbrella, Jim!).

Speaking of Sarah’s dinner, for me one of the nicest discoveries of the festival was the surprising symbiosis between our work spheres. The Nepalese dinner we shared with a dozen programmers she works with was not just extremely enjoyable but also horizon broadening for me, as I had conversation after conversation about writers we’ve all worked with, scholars in areas they’re programming in, upcoming retrospectives and the people involved. That dinner was early in the week, and these encounters continued throughout the festival. (Note to self: need to touch base with Sarah and Brian more!)

Then, of course, there were the movies themselves. Among my favorites: the Hou and Sokurov; Christophe Honoré’s very charming Paris musical Les chansons d’amour; Ken Loach’s It’s a Free World and Ulrich Seidl’s Import Export, two films that couldn’t be more different in terms of their styles and sensibilities but that, strangely, happened to share as a subject the exploitation of Ukrainian workers, in England and Austria, respectively (a leitmotif that continued, again in a very different mode, through David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises as well); the modest but deeply affecting Israeli The Band’s Visit and American Chop Shop; Catherine Breillat’s (and Asia Argento’s) naughty Une vieille maîtresse (check out Breillat’s essay in our upcoming release of Sawdust and Tinsel)—and, perhaps topping them all, Guy Maddin’s loopy, brilliant, kind-of-autobiographical “docu-fantasia” My Winnipeg. I’ve been a fan of Maddin’s for a long time, both of his films and his cinephilic writing, and was well aware of his particular attraction to Hollywood B and genre films when I asked him to contribute to our recent Ace in the Hole release (he chose to write on Kirk Douglas and his character Chuck Tatum, the model for the “chest-thumping Americaner” in The Saddest Movie in the World, he says). Noir is a favorite subject, and pastime, of mine too, and I was surprised and thrilled to find Detour’s Ann Savage, “playing” his mother, in My Winnipeg. At the screening in the beautiful Wintergarden theater, Maddin explained the coup. He was talking with a friend in Los Angeles when he was planning the project, he recounted, and offhandedly said that he wished Ann Savage were alive to reenact his mother. Why, she is in fact alive, and well, and was just at my wedding, his friend said. And thus was an eighty-six-year-old noir goddess resurrected by a loving fan. My Winnipeg just got picked up in the U.S. Don’t miss it!

Some people have seen an impossible number of movies, and the most astonishing part is that they actually remember them all. Pierre Rissient, who is very much on our minds these days, is one of those. Producer, director, distributor, talent spotter, selector of films for festivals, uncredited advisor to top directors, and éminence grise of world cinema, Rissient alternately cajoles you and bowls you over with his seemingly endless film knowledge, which he lays out as if every word were indisputably true and obvious, and you were lucky to be invited to agree with him. Todd McCarthy has been showing a feature-length doc about him at festivals, starting with Cannes, where Pierre has been a kingmaker for decades. I saw it in Telluride and picked up a lot of history, hearing the tales of his life among filmmakers: immersing himself in cinema alongside Godard and Truffaut at Langlois’ Cinémathèque française, taking Fritz Lang to see Deep Throat, trying to keep John Ford sober and awake on a press junket to Paris. He has been relentless in promoting the filmmakers he believes in, from Abbas Kiarostami to Clint Eastwood to Hou Hsiao-hsien, and, for their part, they credit him with opening the door to the recognition they deserved.

His erstwhile business partner, perennial sparring partner, and fellow champion of cinema since the sixties has been Bertrand Tavernier, director of Coup de torchon, Round Midnight, and more than twenty other films. He is another one of those people who can recite, shot for shot, more movies than I will ever see. He just finished principle photography in Louisiana on a film with Tommy Lee Jones, and all through the shooting he was asking us to send DVDs down to him to show to his actors or his crew or the novelist James Lee Burke, whose novel Tavernier is adapting for the screen. Overlord, Casque d’or, My Man Godfrey, Tanner ’88. Today he forwarded me a comment about Raymond Bernard that someone posted to his DVDBlog. Even if you can’t read French, just scanning down the page, past all the boldface titles, gives you an idea of how many films Tavernier can take in—even when he’s shooting a movie himself. And if you do read French, you’ll be rewarded with a little nugget about Orson Welles’s Mr. Arkadin. Tavernier scolds us gently for taking Welles too much at his word when he disowned Confidential Report, the version of the film that was originally released in Europe. According to Tavernier, and Rissient, the version released by Louis Dolivet was okay with Welles when originally released, and it wasn’t until many years later that Welles began to cultivate the idea that there was a vision of the film he’d never been allowed to achieve. As with everything Welles, this could be yet another layer of mystification, but Rissient and Tavernier are so plugged in to the arcana of world cinema history that if we hadn’t just been scolded for it, I’d be inclined to take them at their word. . .

Here’s a Criterion discussion that won’t die. It has to do with Berlin Alexanderplatz, and it came up again this week, thanks to a couple of customers writing in. We were standing there in a clump outside our production manager’s door—the disc producer, the head of audio, and a few more of us—running through the same arguments one more time and ending up, once again, at the same conclusion. It all starts when Rainer Werner Fassbinder chooses to shoot Berlin Alexanderplatz , his epic masterpiece, at 25 frames per second (fps). It makes sense, since in Europe television runs at 25 fps, and the film was being shot for European television. But what happens when you need to make a 24 fps HD master? Or a print that will be projected in theaters at 24 fps? Either you do what we’ve done, let the film run naturally at 24 fps—which means the running time will be 4 percent longer and the pitch of the audio will drop down slightly—or you could try to solve the problem with digital processing and pitch correction, crushing 25 frames worth of information into 24 frames.

If the film weren’t fifteen hours long, we probably wouldn’t even be having this discussion. The actual differences in timing and pitch are mostly perceptible in a side-by-side comparison, and on an episode by episode basis we’re really only talking about a couple of minutes—an hour-long episode would run a little over sixty-two minutes. By sacrificing actual clock time we preserve the integrity of the picture, ensure natural movement between frames, and avoid introducing digital artifacts. Subjecting the master to massive signal processing based on the ugly math it takes to display 25 frames worth of data each second, but using only 24 frames, would result in a huge amount of interpolated picture information that doesn’t actually exist on celluloid. Instead of a frame-accurate picture of the film, you get an image of what the frames would look like if we start from the assumption that frames 1, 2, 3, and 25 are actually .96, 1.92, 2.88, and 24. Clearly there is no 2.88th frame, so the signal processor has to derive one. Here’s an example of what that would look like:




Changing the running time also causes a 4 percent change in the pitch of the audio. Just as with a record player, when the sound gets played back more slowly, the pitch drops. The only way to correct the pitch would be to change the actual sample values, which would mean introducing a whole new series of interpolations as we replaced the entire soundtrack with a derivative soundtrack based on math. In order to avoid creating artifacts and distortion, we chose to present a frame-accurate rendering of the image and sound and put up with the 4 percent time and pitch difference. This is the same compromise (in reverse) as the one that is made when a 24 fps theatrical film is mastered at 25 fps for a PAL broadcast or DVD release.

Still, because Berlin Alexanderplatz is almost fifteen hours long, the 4 percent difference adds about thirty-five minutes. Surely that must change things. That’s a half hour more of my life dedicated to this already epic movie. If I start watching this film at the same moment as my colleague Robert Fischer in Germany, he will meet Barbara Sukowa’s character, Mieze, something like fifteen minutes before I will. It means that what took a minute of real time on Fassbinder’s set will take 1.04 minutes on a theatrical print or on our DVD. I know it’s the right way to handle it, but I’m still having a hard time accepting it. Isn’t that a form of distortion too? I know that the alternative, the processed image, looks terrible—jumpy, distracting, and unacceptable on every level. But theoretically speaking, does audiovisual fidelity necessarily outweigh the obligation to replicate the experience the director intended us to be having over a certain interval in clock time? Would Fassbinder have cut the film differently if he looked at the total running time as fifteen and a half hours instead of fifteen? These are not merely technical questions; they are artistic ones, and unfortunately there is no good answer, just a best one, and that’s why we keep having the conversation. Yesterday I promised that we’d be having the conversation for the last time, so I just thought I’d take a moment and get the whole thing out of my system once and for all. Isn’t that what blogs are for?

I’m on a flight back from the Telluride Film Festival and two and a half great days in the mountains. Telluride has been an important festival for Criterion and Janus for years. It’s a great opportunity to mingle with filmmakers and others who work with us to release our discs, and a great chance to see a lot of films. For our editorial group, headed by Peter, Kim, and Fumiko, it’s truly a nonstop working weekend. Their days are filled with screenings—mostly of films that have not yet been picked up for distribution—to find films and talent that will soon become part of the upcoming schedule. This year, Kim created the festival’s twenty-minute documentary tribute introducing the Medallion-awarded composer Michel Legrand. We were instrumental in obtaining a print of Dillinger to show at the urging of this year’s guest curator Edith Kramer. I’m sure Peter will post his thoughts on Telluride shortly, but for me the experience of Telluride is very much not what I generally do, and I really enjoy the chance to immerse myself in the movies every once a while. So here goes . . .

Friday dinner is the “feed,” and it’s just as advertised. The major street in town is closed, and everyone gathers with plates and cups in hand, sharing a dinner. Many who come to Telluride do so year after year (this was my third festival), and it becomes home very quickly. My festival was pretty much made right then, when I saw Sean Penn and Robin Wright Penn on the corner. He was there for his film Into the Wild, and I’ve been a big fan of hers from Princess Buttercup days. At Telluride, there are about seven venues where films screen simultaneously—starting on Friday night at 7:00, and on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday from 9:00 a.m. to midnight—and you have to pick and choose which films you want to go see where and when. Because of this, rarely are two people’s Telluride experiences identical. For my first film, I saw The Counterfeiters. Werner Herzog introduced the film and its filmmaker, Stefan Ruzowitzky. It’s the story of a Jewish man who is arrested by the Nazis so that they can take advantage of his counterfeiting skills. He is imprisoned in a concentration camp, and the story is about the difficult balance between cooperating and living, and not. It was very tough and graphic, but I enjoyed it. Having gotten up at 3:00 a.m. to catch my flight, I called it a night without a double feature.

Saturday I was up early to see The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a true story about a man totally paralyzed and only able to communicate by blinking one eye. A very powerful film, Diving Bell was introduced by its director, Julian Schnabel, who talked about making the movie as a way to make amends for his inability to comfort his father during the end of his life. I didn’t expect to like it, but I was mesmerized. From there it was on to the Opera House to see a tribute to Norman Lloyd. The tribute itself was entertaining, but to hear Mr. Lloyd talk about tennis with Charlie Chaplin and parties with Alfred Hitchcock, Hal Roach, Harold Lloyd (no relation), and Buster Keaton was one of the highlights of the festival for me. Saturday afternoon I spent some time enjoying the wonderful outdoors of Telluride. The Saturday-night outdoor screening of a restored print of Help! , with a remixed 5.1 Beatles soundtrack playing loudly, was a treat. The night ended with a company dinner and exhaustion. I missed the text message that said “rwp @ 221” (a local bar), or I would probably have dragged myself out of bed.

Sunday started appropriately with People on Sunday, a 1929 silent film shown with a live orchestra performing the score. It was fascinating to see Berlin between the wars, and it’s a beautifully shot film that Criterion will be releasing next year. From there I went to the Vitaphone presentation and saw some very early Al Jolson films from 1926—before The Jazz Singer. Leonard Maltin introduced it, and I was happy to see Leonard receive his Silver Medallion. Congratulations to him. Leonard has always been a good friend of Criterion and Janus, and he sported a Criterion hat as he wandered town. From there it was on to The Band’s Visit. It’s an Israeli film about an Egyptian band getting lost and spending the night in Israel. It was much lighter than most of what was playing, and I was very taken by it. My last film was Juno, which was a sneak peak and therefore not on the original schedule. It was fun, extremely well written, and made me laugh—a lot. The director, Jason Reitman, and screenwriter, Diablo Cody, held a Q&A afterward. It was a great film to finish on. Sunday night was a party. I got to pass along personal congratulations to Leonard Maltin and mingle with the stars a bit before taking off for Montrose and the trek back home.

I saw nine shows in my two and a half days. It was a lot, and all were pretty good. Probably only one will end up in the Criterion Collection. It was only a fraction of the forty or so films and tributes that played over the weekend. The rest of the Criterion crew saw more and were focused more on our nuts and bolts, but for me, it was a great time. So that’s my lighter side of Telluride. Now back to the office, a new website, and a new store. All very exciting . . .