Criterion Collection - Online Cinematheque

Having studied everything but film in college, I never would have imagined that landing a job in the DVD industry would help me get more out of fashion magazines. But sitting in the front office at Criterion, seeing every person and package that comes and goes, I’ve had a lot of exposure to people, stories, and films that probably would have remained largely unknown to me otherwise. I’d have to be absolutely insensate not to learn something new every day.

Flipping through the pages of W, Harper’s Bazaar, and Vogue each month, I notice more and more “Criterion people”: a comparison to Edie Beale’s style, a reference to Martha Graham, a one-page bio of Jeanne Moreau, or an in-depth article on Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s influence on fashion. Three years ago, if you had shown me the article I just finished reading, I would have said, “Fass-who?” Now he’s one of my favorite directors. I remember just last year when Abbey went to interview Jeanne Moreau for Elevator to the Gallows, and the only film I knew her from was La femme Nikita.

One of my most cherished Criterion releases, The Man Who Fell to Earth (it brings together science fiction, David Bowie, and a full-length novel—what’s not to love?), was recently featured in the Fashion Rocks supplement included with all the Condé Nast September issues. As my eyes automatically jumped to the Criterion DVD mentions and the quote from Bowie’s commentary, I briefly wondered if I was inadvertently becoming a film geek. But then I just have to see my co-workers’ reactions when I earnestly say that I can’t decide if Rush Hour 3 or Superbad was the best film of 2007 to know that I’ve still got a long way to go.  

In 1987, nothing else looked or sounded quite like House of Games. David Mamet’s debut film was a welcome throwback to the primacy of character and careful story construction, at a time when narrative intricacy was in short supply on American movie screens. On the one hand, we were seeing an abundance of films in which style and storytelling were less intertwined than running side by side, if not neck and neck. On the other hand, we were well into the cookie-cutter stage of American moviemaking, now pervasive, with its preponderance of last-minute saves and therapeutic epiphanies.

Yet even if you were familiar with his stage triumphs American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross, Mamet’s lessons in the art of the con and his finely honed interchanges between poker-souled men in quiet, artfully darkened rooms (courtesy of cinematographer Juan Ruiz Anchía) still felt bracingly, winningly different. House of Games was at once arcane and unprecedented in its obsessive commitment to a dingy, threadbare poetry—of wooden doors opening and closing, poker chips stacked and spread, notebook pages turned and smoothed. Mamet seemed to be looking past Robert Rossen’s The Hustler (1961), with its existentially shaded rhythms, and back to the most beautifully crafted B movies of the forties (such as William Castle’s When Strangers Marry or Val Lewton’s RKO horror output), in which much was made from little and every basic element of film grammar (pace, rhythm, visual scale) counted. Moreover, few filmmakers in the eighties had gone so deep into the thrilling textures of spoken language. This was before the Coen brothers hit their verbal stride with Miller’s Crossing (1990), before the torrents of obscene poetry in Full Metal Jacket (1987) and Goodfellas (1990) impacted film culture. Mamet’s film was (and is) excitingly language centered. “Ooh, you’re a bad pony. I’m not gonna bet on you!” This was not nostalgic arcana. It was language as fine craftsmanship, every sentence mentally worked and polished by the speaker. It was, as always with Mamet, the sparkling lingua franca of a particular, and particularly tough, moral universe. The rhythms and cadences are recognizably those of their creator, but Mamet offers us more than just a novel verbal flavor. In his plays and films, to speak is not merely to act but to defend one’s self.  

House of Games

David Mamet

1987

102 min

Color

1.78:1

In the mid-sixties, Luis Buñuel became fascinated by the youth rebellion that culminated with the events of May 1968 in Paris and also manifested itself in music, fashion, opposition to institutions, family, and state. Buñuel felt that the forces of his own youth were moving again. As a young man, he had turned his back on the traditional values of his Spanish origins—religion and patriotism—and joined the French surrealists in their search for “the point where all contradictions are resolved,” privileging dreams, the unconscious, and the revolutionary. What Buñuel brought to surrealism was a deep Spanish tradition of anarchism in an authoritarian society, blended with a sense of creative revolt, heroic madness, and comedic disrespect. Don Quixote and the confusion of truth and dream. Goya and the privilege of dreams and nightmares set against the critique of power and mores.

Buñuel was different from his French surrealist friends. They translated revolt into ideas. Buñuel preferred images as the most powerful incentive to rebellion. But images themselves could be conventional, comforting, orthodox. Buñuel’s cinema became both a critique and an affirmation of the power of sight. The first image of his first picture, Un chien andalou, has Buñuel himself slicing a woman’s eye as a shadow bisects the moon. In film after film, the blind are mocked, chastised, or sanctified. But it is in The Milky Way that they culminate a film by first being miraculously restored to sight by the hands of Christ and then, as they follow the Savior, proving unable to cross a ditch without the help of their blind-man’s canes. Miracles, said Don Quixote to Sancho Panza, are things that seldom occur.  

The Milky Way

Luis Buñuel

1969

101 min

Color

1.66:1

From the moment Luis Buñuel released his iconic Un chien andalou in 1929, ushering avant-garde cinema out of its infancy with the slice of an eyeball, it was clear how much he relished shocking his audiences. But audiences had changed by the time of The Milky Way, four decades later. The aggressiveness of Un chien andalou and L’âge d’or (1930) had been well assimilated by generations of filmgoers (even if L’âge d’or could still not legally be exhibited in France), and what seems most shocking about The Milky Way today—in the context of the freethinking, free-loving Paris of post–May ’68, with its surrealist graffiti and its trinity of Althusser, Barthes, and Lacan—is that Buñuel should have taken on so seemingly irrelevant a topic as Christianity.

And not just Christianity but one of its most cherished shibboleths: the pilgrimage to the town of Santiago de Compostela, in northwestern Spain. For more than a millennium, the Camino de Santiago has drawn hundreds of thousands of travelers annually, their final destination the cathedral in which the remains of the apostle Saint James are said to be preserved (another name for the Milky Way is the Way of Saint James). Although many travelers make the trip as tourists rather than as pilgrims, there is no doubt that the scent of incense hovers thick over the road to Santiago. What was Buñuel doing making a film about that?  

The Milky Way

Luis Buñuel

1969

101 min

Color

1.66:1

When I found out last year that we’d be working on Days of Heaven, I got goose bumps. It’s always been one of my favorite films, and I had wished it could be in the Criterion Collection ever since I started here twelve years ago—that and Sixteen Candles (I’m very diverse). Paramount titles were always off-limits to us, until last year, and when we put it on our wish list to them, I thought they’d never say yes. But they did.

Fast-forward to a year later, and I began work on Days by evaluating Paramount’s existing film and video materials. The transfer used to make the previous DVD was good, but it was almost ten years old and could stand to be improved. The studio had two interpositives (the second-generation film element made from the original negative, and the film most often used for a transfer, since it’s a protection of the original and has timing lights), but after a critical evaluation of them, we noticed they had some problems. The original IP was gorgeous, but it had these chemical stains on the left side of the frame that would creep into the picture as the film reels advanced. It was incredibly distracting in an otherwise perfect image. The second IP, made in the nineties, was awful; it had no life in it, and was soft and muddy.  

Days of Heaven

Terrence Malick

1978

94 min

Color

1.77:1

Cría cuervos . . . , Carlos Saura’s political and psychological masterpiece, was shot in the summer of 1975, as Spanish dictator Francisco Franco lay dying, and premiered in Madrid’s Conde Duque Theatre, on January 26, 1976, forty years after the civil war began. Saura could thus hardly have chosen a more momentous time for his meditation on history and memory. The film is flanked by two decisive events: the assassination of Franco’s nominated successor, Carrero Blanco, in 1973, and the first democratic elections, in 1978.

Born to a bourgeois family, but one that had been on the losing side in the war, and trained in the regime’s official film school, Saura had made ten features and attained a unique position by the time of Cría cuervos’s release. Acclaimed by Spanish critics as the only filmmaker in their country ever to have achieved a fully fledged career, he had already created the most sustained, independent, and consistent oeuvre in a national cinema plagued by exile and unfulfilled promise. Saura’s films up until then had been implicit critiques of the Francoist regime, often focusing on men and violence, such as in The Hunt (1965), where a bloody hunting party stood in for the civil war. Unsurprisingly, therefore, Saura had had bitter conflicts with state censors from the beginning. As late as 1973, successive versions of the script for Ana and the Wolves were simply turned down. Cría cuervos was the first film over which Saura exercised complete artistic control, taking a triple credit for story, script, and direction.  

Cría cuervos . . .

Carlos Saura

1976

109 min

Color

1.66:1

Instead of calling “Action!” Samuel Fuller discharged a Colt .45 in the air. It was the first scene he had ever directed, on the set of I Shot Jesse James (1949), and he knew the importance of a good opening—“If a story doesn’t give you a hard-on in the first couple of scenes, throw it in the goddamn garbage,” he would later say. Ever the performer, Fuller was already constructing his own warrior-director legend.

Fuller knew how to handle a gun from his army days, and this experience colored all of his filmmaking, which he began at the age of thirty-six. He had dropped out of high school at seventeen, to become a crime reporter for the New York Evening Graphic, then wandered Depression-era America as a freelance reporter, wrote pulp novels, and was working as a screenwriter when World War II called him away. Once he was a civilian again, Fuller returned to his screenwriting and was shopping scripts around Hollywood when he was contacted by independent producer Robert L. Lippert, who had admired Fuller’s novel The Dark Page and hired him as a writer-director.  

The Baron of Arizona

Samuel Fuller

1950

97 min

Black and White

1.33:1

I Shot Jesse James

Samuel Fuller

1949

81 min

Color

1.33:1

The Steel Helmet

Samuel Fuller

1951

84 min

Black and White

1.33:1

Two towering figures of cinema died this week, and while we can all be grateful that they lived such long and fruitful lives, their departures were nevertheless profoundly saddening, and shocking in their coincidence. Look to your right at our news column, at the pictures of these two giants in their prime: I get a jolt every time I see them linked this way, in their leaving us.

First the news of Ingmar Bergman, perhaps the most well-known, and revered, film director of all time, and one we here at Criterion and Janus Films have an especially close connection to. (Just when we thought we knew it all about him, though, we got the opportunity to work on his overlooked early films recently; a revelation all around.) Then, mind-reelingly, the very next day, word came of the great Michelangelo Antonioni’s death. The two practically defined art-house cinema in its heyday of the sixties, a topic I became very well acquainted with last year when working on the Janus fiftieth-anniversary box set, particularly Peter Cowie’s history of Janus.