Judging from many of the reactions we get from viewers, there’s a gratifying sense of discovery that accompanies each new Eclipse release. That comes as little surprise to us, since that same feeling is as alive and well here in the Criterion offices. One of the most pleasurable things about embarking on each new Eclipse series is the excitement of delving into a chapter of film history that’s been cobwebbed by years of neglect. Though throughout our first ten releases there have been a number of known quantities (Kurosawa, Bergman, Ozu), there have also been as many true revelations, some from filmmakers of whom we only had cursory prior knowledge, if even that. When the name Raymond Bernard was first uttered “on five,” all we could offer were blank or quizzical stares; yet when those screeners of Wooden Crosses and Les misérables started making the rounds, you could almost hear the collective exclamations of “Aha!” billowing about the halls. The sheer enjoyment of the latter was especially a relief for those of us who had screeners for future Criterion and Eclipse projects piling up in our homes and didn’t necessarily have five hours to spare—fleet, rich, and rewarding, Les misérables was, for me, one of 2007’s sweetest retro surprises (along with other movies, Criterion-related or otherwise, like Cría cuervos . . ., Antonio Gaudí, Bonjour tristesse, J’entends plus la guitare, and Black Christmas, all of which make going to the multiplex seem a fruitless chore).

Despite veritable eureka moments scattered about all the following sets (for Carlos Saura’s Blood Wedding, or Lubitsch’s The Smiling Lieutenant, especially for Miriam Hopkins and Claudette Colbert’s feature-length smack-down game of Sassy and Sassier), my next true revelation came when encountering the films in series nine, The Delirious Fictions of William Klein. Only generally knowing of Klein as a famed abstract New York photographer of the fifties and sixties (and even then only having seen a sampling of his work in online forums), and as a maker of documentaries (his subjects ranged from Muhammad Ali to Paris fashion), I had no idea what to expect from his fiction films, all made after he permanently relocated to Paris. That they turned out to be as boldly experimental and in-your-face subversive as his photography, and as politically charged and visually daring as primo 1960s-era Godard, made researching and writing about these films a pleasure, the process as exuberant and fascinating as the set’s eventual title would suggest.

Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?’s mix of insidery, faux-vérité fashion satire and through-the-looking-glass surreality may be marvelous, and The Model Couple’s charmingly chintzy fascist future world often insightfully warped in its targets, but out of the three Klein films, it was the hilarious Mr. Freedom that made the biggest impression on me. Bounding teeth-first into farce rather than assuming a stance of smirking satire, Klein dolls up his film in outlandish sets and costumes (color bursts of primary putrescence spangle nearly every setup; the art direction is at once bargain-basement and mammoth in its ambitions), and personifies American jingoism in one rowdy Southwestern lunkhead obsessed with spreading capital-F Freedom throughout the world (yes, this was made in 1969, not 2003); instead, this reverse King Midas ends up destroying nearly everything he touches.

Hopefully this Eclipse release, coming in May, will get the ball rolling on recouping the once lambasted Mr. Freedom as a valuable piece of sixties radical cinema; it was far too prescient to ever be appreciated in its time, so now will have to do. Mr. Freedom is the kind of discovery that will make younger cinephiles marvel at the fact of its very existence (in other words, “You mean this movie was made nearly forty years ago, and all this time I’ve been watching frickin’ Patton?!”). With so many cinematic depths left to plumb for Eclipse, I can only imagine what other surprises are in store. Already we’re getting ready for a set of films by the truly eclipsed Russian master filmmaker Larisa Shepitko, whose rapturous The Ascent, which I’ve now seen twice on the lovely big screen at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater, certainly counts as one of my filmgoing revelations in recent years. And with some late Rossellini history films on the way, I’m looking forward to more cinematic avenues opening up for me in the very near future.

As a generation of artists passes, the deaths often seem to come eerily close together, amplifying their individual achievements. In the past couple of weeks, we’ve lost The Naked City screenwriter Malvin Wald, then the incomparable Richard Widmark, and now hear the incredibly sad news of Jules Dassin’s death. Somehow it feels wrong to learn of such events via e-mail—effectively flattening our communication such that the message of a great director’s passing sits side by side with “Lunch?”

Interviewing Dassin remains one of the highlights of my life, and I got to do it twice (both times with the help and contribution of the inimitable Bruce Goldstein). What still strikes me a few years later is how gracious he was. As a person, he belied the “great director as tyrant” stereotype—there was something elegant, sophisticated, and almost gentle about him. For one thing, as much as we tried to get him to talk about the blacklist, he was extremely reticent to do so. He refused to “name names,” which I suppose would have been out of character. He would only specifically mention people who had gone out of their way to combat the hysteria—especially pointing out Gene Kelly. But Dassin refused to talk about the people who had taken the easy way out. The one person whom he reserved the right to speak ill of was Roy “I Can Tell in Five Minutes If a Person Is a Communist” Brewer.

I think another reason that Dassin didn’t want to talk about the blacklist was to avoid being defined by it. He recognized, exile or no, that he did get to make quite a few movies and that they were damn good. Every now and then I have found someone of the opinion that Dassin is perhaps overrepresented in the Criterion Collection. I find this attitude completely befuddling. There are certainly directors I would love us to add to the collection, but not at the expense of the lapidary precision of Rififi or the almost unwatchably harrowing masterpiece that is Night and the City.

I look at Thieves’ Highway, a “minor,” neglected film, and wonder why it is not considered the achievement that it is. It’s my favorite Dassin, because the human relationships are drawn so exactingly, so tellingly, and so tragically. Even Lee J. Cobb’s villain is nuanced and complex, understandable as a product of the system every bit as much as Richard Conte. Some criticize the occasional flourish from Dassin, such as Hume Cronyn’s sadistic torture scene to the sounds of Wagner in Brute Force. I think rather that these are the moments where Dassin shows his hand. In transcending the taut realism for which he was known, he takes the audience somewhere else—ancient Greek tragedy, perhaps. I write this knowing he would have scoffed at such a comparison.

If consistently great performances from actors are a measure of a great director, then on this score I think Dassin is simply in a class by himself. Think of Cronyn in Brute Force, or of Valentina Cortese in Thieves’ Highway, Jean Servais in Rififi, Peter Ustinov in Topkapi, or again of the incredible Richard Widmark in Night and the City. One great performance can be attributed to good casting and luck, but Dassin filmed a number of performances over his career that were extraordinary, in some cases by actors who never really did much else.

Another thing that came through in meeting him was how much he loved and missed his wife, Melina Mercouri. I’m a little sad to learn that he passed in a hospital, rather than in his home on Melina Mercouri Street in Athens, which would have been fitting. I hope she’s waiting for you with an ouzo, Jules.