Criterion Collection - Online Cinematheque

Despite all the hype (or maybe because of it), it wasn’t that hard to get into the films I wanted to see. Standing on the last minute wait line worked for me every time, although that might say something for my film preferences. All the “bigger” films tend to sell out, but as many of them are going to come out in theaters at some point, I try to concentrate on the “smaller” films. So while a waitlist of forty people were turned away from an afternoon screening of The Ten (think Kieslowski’s Decalogue made by the guys from The State) I saw a lovely documentary/tone poem/travelogue called Acidente about twenty towns in Minas Gerais, Brazil, all with evocative names like Caldas (Juices), Olhos d’Agua (Watery Eyes), and Entre Folhas (Between Leaves).

Despite the new Sundance motto, “Focus on Film” (on buttons everywhere, which I couldn’t see without picturing Robert Redford glaring at attendees until they put down their martinis and dutifully marched back into the theater), the reason most people go, me included, is to socialize and catch up with other people in the industry. There are arranged lunches; parties that start at 4 pm, at 6 pm, at 9 pm, at midnight; and the bar scene, if you can get in.

The social aspect of the festival feels just like summer camp, particularly if you are into skiing. There are scores of people that I only manage to see at film festivals, and the more often you attend various festivals the more likely you are to bump into the same people again and again. Same level of exhaustion too. I don’t think I have been this tired since I attended “Night Owls” Girl Scout sleep-away camp, where they forced us to stay up until 2 am every night, so that we could learn about the wonders of the forest in the dark. But at least I’m not a counselor.  

If we adapt the language of horse breeders to the genealogy of films, one might write Yojimbo, by Shane out of Scarface.

But while this odd coupling does suggest the most obvious hereditary traits of Kurosawa’s black comedy, it fails to capture the joy with which he demolishes the clichés of the venerable genres he has appropriated.

A decade of achievement precedes this sport. After Rashomon had shocked both East and West by its triumph at the 1950 Venice Film Festival and became the first Japanese film ever seen by millions in the West, Kurosawa directed eight more films in the 1950s. Each was original in style, technically brilliant and visually arresting—films often suffused with moral purpose and social significance. They were exotic for the Westerners, but alive with characters who continually impress us with their humanity. Half of these films have been hailed as masterpieces: Ikiru, Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, The Lower Depths. And surely our feeling of shared humanity with Kurosawa’s characters helped erase our cultural stereotypes about the Japanese created by World War II propaganda.  

Yojimbo

Akira Kurosawa

1961

110 min

Black and White

2.35:1

In the Kurosawa movie family tree, Sanjuro (1962) is the sassy kid brother to Yojimbo, and like many light-hearted younger siblings, it’s underrated. After Yojimbo achieved blockbuster status in 1961, Kurosawa took a story he’d already developed about a semi-strong but wily swordsman and turned it into another vehicle for Toshiro Mifune’s shrewd, grungy, and superbly-skilled warrior. In both movies, Mifune says that he’s called Sanjuro, which means “30 years old,” and quips, “going on 40.” He also tacks on a name inspired by whatever vegetation is nearest: In Yojimbo, he’s Sanjuro “Kuwabatake” (“mulberry field”); in Sanjuro, he’s Sanjuro “Tsubaki” (“camellia”).

Of course, Mifune writes his true signature in blood. Indeed, Sanjuro has a final spurt that tops anything in the original for gut-wrenching shock. Why, then, is this film so much sunnier? Partly because Sanjuro, a classical work, sees its antihero from the outside, as a one-of-a-kind figure combining contemporary disillusionment and mythic prowess, while Yojimbo (ultimately the more daring movie) takes us inside the sadomasochistic psychology of a man of action. And in one crucial way, Sanjuro plays like a frolicsome prequel. Here, feudalism isn’t dead and its followers have some virtues—unlike the gamblers, merchants, and ex-cons of Yojimbo. If Sanjuro lacks the savage intensity of Yojimbo—and if, to borrow MAD magazine’s old slogan, it doesn’t have quite the degree of “humor in a jugular vein”—it does possess compelling sweep, a gutteral charm, and an encompassing irony that transforms the swordsman’s bluster into a form of domestic comedy. In Yojimbo, he’s the perfect man to clean up a town filled with homicidal grotesques (by killing off just about everyone). In Sanjuro, he’s a Japanese bull in a china shop.  

Sanjuro

Akira Kurosawa

1962

96 min

Black and White

2.35:1

Spencer Gordon Bennet’s The Atomic Submarine has always been a guilty pleasure of mine. It is easy enough to dismiss the film as kiddie matinee fare but, really, what science fiction–adventure movie from the 1950s wasn’t intended, at some level, to reach that audience? And, indeed, that was exactly how it made its money back in 1959 and 1960, creeping out preteens, to their delight. Still, as such movies go, it’s about as good as they get, occupying that substratum of the sci-fi genre below those rare bigger-budgeted, major studio productions—such as MGM’s Forbidden Planet, Universal’s This Island Earth, and The Incredible Shrinking Man—but more complex and ambitious than such minuscule-budgeted, one-idea (albeit sometimes a neat idea) works as Roger Corman’s Attack of the Crab Monsters and Not of This Earth.

The fact that it’s still of interest more than forty years later is a tribute to its odd mix of elements, beyond the standard fare: a not-bad mystery story involving extraterrestrials operating underwater; a script and plot that include serious, topical political debate; a cast that draws equally on old western stars and horror film veterans of the early 1940s, with a couple of serious younger dramatic leads; and grisly special effects spiking an array of tacky yet eerie undersea sequences—plus a final segment, a third act if you will, lifted from classical mythology. It’s a movie that straddles several subgenres of science fiction and adventure films, so unsure of itself, on the one hand, that its narrator, Pat Michaels, is given ridiculous hyperbole with which to regale us (“it was foolish, it was insane, it was fantastic”) but, on the other, sure enough to try to bundle a serious patriotic message within its retelling of a chunk of the Odysseus myth. And then there’s that weird-ass score by Alexander Laszlo.  

The Atomic Submarine

Spencer G. Bennet

1959

72 min

Black and White

1.33:1

Looking back fondly on First Man into Space, I’m forced to acknowledge that time has been slightly less than merciful to us both—and I’ve been around seven years longer than it has.

First Man into Space (1959) emerged at a very odd moment in human history—post-Sputnik but pre–Gagarin, Shepard, Glenn, and all of that. From our lofty vantage point in an era that regards the Apollo moon missions as ancient history, it might be tough to believe in an age when a title like First Man into Space could evoke great passion among young, expectant filmgoers, but these were the matinees we lived for. Each and every Saturday afternoon we’d venture far from home (six blocks in my case), recalcitrant sibling or two in tow, eager to see the future laid out before us, sometimes awash in glorious Technicolor. The ideas underlying thoughtful genre offerings like The Day the Earth Stood Still made their way into our evolving worldviews, while grand, hugely enjoyable epics like Destination Moon, Conquest of Space, Forbidden Planet, and This Island Earth were promoted as Significant Events. We paid each its due reverence, but on some gut level it was the B pictures like First Man into Space that really delivered the goods week in and week out. (In those days, a double feature at the Glendale Theater in Toronto set you back a quarter, plus popcorn. Science-fiction actioners were usually paired with monster flicks, though quite frequently—as with First Man into Space—you’d be lucky enough to get both in the same movie.)  

First Man into Space

Robert Day

1959

77 min

Black and White

1.33:1

This week, Border Radio was released on DVD. The film is the post-UCLA film school project of first-time directors Allison Anders, Kurt Voss, and Dean Lent. Yesterday, we got a note from a fan who wrote a really thoughtful, personal piece about the film and its place in his cinematic adolescence. He talks about growing up at his dad’s video store, which specialized in hard-to-find, not-so-mainstream films. Reading this made me very nostalgic for my own time growing up and working in the local mom-and-pop stores (four of them!) and for what a great, eye-opening cinematic experience it was for me. Ultimately, it led me to Criterion.

Jon’s experience growing up watching movies on 16mm in his attic is a world away from my discovery of films. The choices were few and far between for a teenager raised in Colorado in the 1980s. Firstly, my mom and I didn’t have cable or even a VCR, so we had to rent a machine from the local Albertson’s that came with its own convenient handle. No big deal not having cable; the only thing I felt I was missing was Night Flight on USA . . . So I’d have movie binges that mostly revolved around renting cult films. Repo Man, Liquid Sky, Quadrophenia, The Hunger, and any Monty Python were all on heavy rotation on the somewhat sketchy videocassette recorders I rented. But it shaped me into one of those kids who knew every line from Repo Man, which I’m sure still irritates people to this day—after all, the more you drive, the less intelligent you are.

So, I became a film nerd in training. Then I landed a few jobs at record stores and began down the path of music geekdom, which served me well until I went to college in Boulder. Where could I work nights and weekends to make money for bills and pitchers of 3.2 Miller Genuine Draft at the local new-wave bar? Luckily, CU Boulder’s film faculty (which consisted of Stan Brakhage, Bruce Kawin, Marian Keane, Jerry Aronson, and others) and their incredible yearly International Film Series guaranteed a vibrant film fetish in the community, and there were plenty of video stores in those days, and I worked at most of them. But the Holy Grail was a store called The Video Station. Everyone wanted to work there. The staff was cool, friendly, and most of all, knew their shit. You could go in and ask for the most obscure title, or even describe something (“It has that blonde woman in it that was in that sixties spy movie, but it was in black and white and had little dialogue—do you know what it is?”), and they would find the right employee who would know it immediately. Remember, there was no internet in the early nineties, and we would refer to the bible of movies, the Videolog, a paperbound notebook that was updated monthly, for all our info. Wow! I want to work there! I can watch everything for free, all the Alex Cox, Cocteau, Twilight Zone episodes, Bruce Conner, Paul Morrissey, Hitchcock, Buñuel . . . anything!!  

“You can’t expect other people to create drama for your life—they’re too busy creating it for themselves,” a punk groupie says at the conclusion of Border Radio. And the four reckless characters at the center of the film certainly manage to create plenty of drama for themselves. In the process, they paint a compelling picture of the Los Angeles punk-rock scene of the 1980s: what it was like on the inside—and what it was like inside the musicians’ heads.

Border Radio (1987) was the first feature by three UCLA film students: Allison Anders, Kurt Voss, and Dean Lent. The subsequent work of both Anders and Voss would resonate with echoes from Border Radio and its musical milieu. Anders’s Gas Food Lodging (1992), Mi vida loca (1993), Grace of My Heart (1996), Sugar Town (1999), and Things Behind the Sun (2001) all draw to some degree from music and pop culture. (She quotes her mentor Wim Wenders’s remark about making The Scarlet Letter: “There were no jukeboxes. I lost interest.”) Voss, who co-wrote and codirected Sugar Town, also wrote and directed Down & Out with the Dolls (2001), a fictional feature about an all-girl band; and in 2006, he was completing Ghost on the Highway, a documentary about Jeffrey Lee Pierce, the late vocalist for the key L.A. punk group the Gun Club.  

Border Radio

Allison Anders, Dean Lent and Kurt Voss

1987

83 min

Black and White

1.33:1

I just got back from an around-the-world trip to Minnesota, India, and Paris, and I did it all in about seven days. I’m not proud to admit that all of that traveling was actually done from the shabby couch in my Brooklyn apartment, while staring at a 27-inch TV screen. The “vacation in your living room!” approach may be a cliché at this point, but it’s also a rather fitting introduction to a body of work that did indeed transport me: Louis Malle’s documentaries, which we’ll be releasing as the second Eclipse series this Spring, and which have been somewhat under the radar over the past forty-odd years, certainly in comparison to his fiction films. So there was a great sense of discovery for me, as there will undoubtedly be for many—both for these underseen films, and for the places they capture.

And having consumed almost the entirety of Malle’s documentaries (which range from 1962 to 1987) in such a short period of time, I can’t help but notice the unity of spirit between them, of just plopping down a camera and seeing what will come of it (Malle often said he began each documentary without a set agenda). The films he shot in India are gorgeous, huge, maddening, and exhilarating, and the French docs from the early seventies, which survey the lives of everyday working-class people waylaid on street-corners or caught in mid-weld in an auto factory, are fascinating signs of the times—yet is it too obvious that I’m most drawn to Malle’s foray into the American Midwest, God’s Country, which meanders eloquently around the people in the farming community of Glencoe, Minnesota?  

God’s Country

Louis Malle

1985

89 min

Color

1.33:1

We have always been a Mac shop. For us, it hasn't just been a technological choice. It's a state of mind. There is something about Apple that feels like home. Our companies were founded at the same time, and in a sense they both grow out of the same early efforts to explore what technology could mean for content and expression. Bob Stein, one of Criterion's founders, began introducing Macintosh computers to laserdisc players in the mid-1980s, developing Apple HyperCard-based databases that allowed viewers random access to the complete works of the Louvre, for example. For a long time, we published CD-ROMs and expanded books for the Macintosh, and when I started at what was then called Voyager, the big crisis was bridging the chasm between Mac and Windows, the search for the "cross-platform tool," something that would heal the divide and allow us to make wonderful things on our Macs and still sell them to people who used PCs.

So when Apple has a good day, it makes us all happy, and Apple had about as good a day today as any company could want. If you didn't hear about the iPhone they introduced at Macworld, you should just go to the Apple site and download the presentation. It looks amazing, transformative. This is a company that is not following anyone. They are asking really basic questions and not assuming that all the good answers have already been found. They are making things that are beautiful because they make sense. I can't think of another company that is so true to its mission, and in the end, that's what makes them so good.

As we get back from vacation, the e-mail boxes are full. Kim, several of the other producers, and I have been doing our best to get to it all, but it’s beginning to pile up. We’ve been pretty good about getting to mail regarding damaged discs, missing inserts, and Rohmer box replacements, but if we’ve missed yours, please let us know. If it’s a title suggestion or inquiry about when a title will be released, we’re reading it, but I can’t promise when we’ll get back to you.

I really enjoyed the wonderful HBO series From the Earth to the Moon. Al Reinert, who directed For All Mankind and who became a good friend of mine, wrote a couple of episodes. The series is the best document of that magical time when, despite all else that was happening, we were able to do what was in many ways unthinkable. The second episode deals with the Apollo 1 fire. When the Frank Borman character is asked why the astronauts were killed, he answers, “The lack of imagination. No one imagined that something would happen on the ground.” That has stayed with me ever since. It’s the same answer for every disaster. September 11: no one imagined that people would fly airplanes into buildings. The Titanic: no one could imagine an iceberg striking the ship in such a way as to damage more than two watertight compartments. On the other hand, it is because of very fertile imaginations that we dreamed of going to the moon, explore what’s over the next hill, or seek out the answer to the next question. As we enter this New Year, here’s to imagining all the possibilities.

Well, only a few people asked me about my New Year’s resolutions, and it’s not something I give too much thought to. Anything worth doing in January was probably worth starting last November or August or May. You get the idea. I love new ideas and thoughts—it’s what Peter and I spend most of our time chatting about in the office. And there will be some exciting new things at Criterion (in addition to Eclipse) happening over the coming year. Speaking of Peter, he’s away for a couple of days with lists and lists of movies. I have no doubt there will be the foundation of exciting Criterion and Eclipse schedules for the next couple of years when he gets home.