Our three least favorite initials: OOP. Since we launched the Criterion Collection more than twenty-five years ago, we’ve endeavored to keep everything we’ve published in print. But despite our efforts to renew rights, we are losing a large group of titles from StudioCanal at the end of March, and we wanted to give you advance notice that our editions will be going out of print. Until we’re out of stock, we will be offering these titles at an additional $5 off on our website. The titles are going to Lionsgate, and we don’t know when they may be rereleased.As ever, we will continue to try to relicense the films so that they can rejoin the collection sometime in the future.
It is with great sadness that we note the passing of Robin Wood, a true lion of film criticism and a dear friend. How does one begin to describe the impact this writer and thinker had on his field? For more than four decades, from his hugely influential Hitchcock’s Films (1965) and Howard Hawks (1968) to his collection Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan (1986) and what he told me was his favorite work, Sexual Politics & Narrative Film (1998), Robin’s voice resounded through (and helped define) the discipline of cinema studies. His writing was erudite yet inviting, lucid, incredibly engaging, sometimes provocative and personal, always thoughtful, and, of course, enormously intelligent and politically committed. There was no one else like him.
My first encounter with his writing was his book Hitchcock’s Films Revisited (1989), a revision of the earlier work and a volume that changed the way I think about film and inspired me in many ways beyond that. I was honored to be able to meet and work with him in my years here at Criterion.
Last Friday, Fumiko, Issa, and I went up to Rochester, New York, to the Eastman House. We have been talking to them about accessing their archive on a more regular basis, starting with the three von Sternberg films that are coming up. It’s really an interesting place, and we got to see some pretty cool things that we thought we’d share with you . . . —Lee Kline
The vaults are pretty endless, but incredibly well organized. Fumiko stands next to one of the hundreds of very long rows of 35 mm prints that the archive contains.
We were amazed at how many e-mails we received from people saying they already had twenty of the titles included in the new box set AK 100: 25 Films by Akira Kurosawa. A big thank-you to all who contacted us about this. It’s never our aim to make you buy the same title over again. If we do rerelease a title, it’s because we feel it merits a new edition: a new transfer or new supplements, frequently both. We thought (and still think) of AK 100 as a great way to introduce your friends to Kurosawa—it’s really a magnificent present.
With fifty-six terrific entries and more than six hours of content, it was difficult to pick a winner of the Jeanne Dielman–Criterion Collection Cooking Video Contest, but we finally came to a decision. Selected by Criterion staff members and Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles director Chantal Akerman, first place goes to Jon Pivko’s methodical, menacing meat loaf movie, Cindy Griffith, 42 Carlton Road, Hopewell, NJ. Pivko will receive a new PlayStation 3, Criterion’s reference Blu-ray player. You can see his film below, and then be sure to watch the five honorable mentions. Thanks to everyone who participated and made the contest such a great success, including our Audience Award winner and runners-up.
The announcement of the Grand Prize winner in our Jeanne Dielman–Criterion Collection Cooking Video contest on YouTube has been delayed until next week to accommodate the schedule of our esteemed juror, director Chantal Akerman. But in the Audience Award category, your votes are in, the numbers have been crunched, and the winner of a $100 gift certificate is . . .
Some of you might have seen the news item on our website regarding the Jacques Tati “centennial-plus” and the exhibits around Paris paying homage to the inventive filmmaker. I had the good fortune to be in the City of Lights on official Criterion business last week and made a couple of excursions to check it all out.
The first was to Le104, an impressive art space in the nineteenth arrondissement, a district I seldom go to. I took the metro there and got off one station too early by mistake, which made for a lovely walk through this ethnically diverse neighborhood. Nothing could have prepared me for Le104’s massiveness, much less for the re-creation of Tati’s Villa Arpels from Mon oncle. It was much more impressive than I had imagined: the squares of colorful gravel seemingly splashing off the sides of the modern white villa as the fish-sculpture centerpiece spouted water just like in the film. I stood there awestruck for a while, seeing this amazing ahead-of-its-time invention life-size before me, and then walked around it. You weren’t allowed to go in, but the many windows let you see that every little detail of the interior had been meticulously reproduced, from the (post)modern appliances in the kitchen to the seemingly uncomfortable furniture of the living room.
