The Criterion Collection

Cineaste has unveiled its summer 2010 issue on its website, and it looks like a provocative one. Editor in chief Gary Crowdus has tackled the ongoing debate about what constitutes valid contemporary movie watching in a “special focus on the digital video disc.” Needless to say, the question of how much home video differs from or how closely it approximates the experience of movie-theater-going is one that’s close to our hearts. To tackle it, Crowdus has rounded up a group of always-incisive writers, including David Sterritt (“New Lives on DVD for Nontheatrical Films”), Douglas Pratt (“The Best DVD Audio Commentaries”), and Jennifer A. Wood (“Make Way for Blu-Ray”). Jonathan Rosenbaum’s centerpiece article “DVDs: A New Form of Collective Cinephilia” is the only one available to read online, and it’s a good encapsulation of the disagreements between film-projection purists and digital connoisseurs (Rosenbaum has proudly counted himself among the latter for some time, as evidenced by his “Global Discoveries on DVD” column for Cinema Scope). Oh, and the article contains some nice shout-outs for the Criterion editions of Day of Wrath and Ivan the Terrible.